Sing for Your Life

by Daniel Bergner

  The rest of Ryan’s Met guides had resolved that he was a bass-baritone, but he felt a constant dim fear that their certainty would loosen, or that his own would falter, doubts that joined his louder worries, worries that he heard and absorbed from just about everyone around him and that Zeger shared as he and I sat at the piano:

  “Ryan and I have spoken about this, that his lower and middle registers tend to be a bit opaque, a bit cloudy.” Listening within the tight confines of Mark Oswald’s studio, Zeger said, I wouldn’t notice the trouble, because there, he explained, “to a layman’s ear, it’s just a big, warm, beautiful sound, a blanket of sound.” But even within a small space, someone like Oswald, with a career of teaching built upon his decade of singing at the Met, would recognize the cloudiness that would pose unmistakable problems in an opera house. In the 3,800-seat house at the Met, the sheer size of Ryan’s voice wouldn’t be so omnipotent, and the audience would hear that an element was missing. They would sense a lack of luster. They would long for a shimmer atop the fathomless vocal depths. The less educated listeners wouldn’t be able to specify what was absent, but just the same, they would know that the singing wasn’t quite as beautiful as it should be.

  The solution was to borrow from his upper layers of sound, from the brighter segments of his spectrum, and to brush a suggestion of brilliance into even his most somber notes. “A teacher like Mark Oswald will know how to pinpoint those harmonics no matter how dark the music becomes. Mark will try to build those overtones permanently into Ryan’s singing.”

  If Oswald couldn’t teach this, if Ryan couldn’t learn it, the trouble would be worse than a missing sheen. Orchestras would devour him, leaving him intermittently inaudible, despite his natural volume. Hard as it was for a soprano to be heard over so many musicians, it could be harder for a bass or a bass-baritone, though the soprano’s anatomy, her lungs and throat and overall heft, were dwarfed by a body like Ryan’s. A soprano’s main frequencies flew above the orchestra’s. A bass-baritone’s sound waves were slower, lower; they could get lost amid the mass of instruments. The singer with the low voice needed to add the right harmonics, on each note, to form a sound that would “cut through the texture of the orchestra,” Zeger said as he struck a series of keys on the piano so I could hear how these overtones might marshal themselves together. For Ryan, the upper harmonics were not only for luster. They were not only aesthetic. They were functional. Without them, on some measures, he would be muffled. He would be mute.

  * * *

  “One way to think about Ryan’s voice,” Zeger went on, “is that he was born with a trombone. He has to work on making his trombone a little more of a trumpet.” This was the riddle Ryan needed to solve. And the almost infinite intricacy of the riddle was that it had to be approached linguistically as well as musically. The two were intertwined. When Ryan was hounded about his pronunciation, it was not simply because butchered Italian or German or French might render his portrayal of a character ridiculous, the same way, Zeger said, that an actor playing Happy in Death of a Salesman would seem absurd if he had a heavy Latino accent and no one else in Willy’s family did. “You might even feel that it was impossible to watch the play.” Not everyone in a Met audience would wince at Ryan’s botched syllables, it was true, but plenty would, and European audiences would rebel, and most crucially, the people in charge of casting at the Met and across Europe wouldn’t consider hiring him. Or if someone from an important house did persuade himself that Ryan’s pronunciation could be amended quickly during rehearsals and hired him with that hope, Ryan would be fired when he kept mangling the libretto. If Zeger had any doubts about his judgment, he received confirmation from a scout who visited the program and heard Ryan sing in Italian. She told Zeger, “I couldn’t possibly put that” in front of her conductor.

  Yet pronunciation mattered for more than the libretto; it mattered to the music; it was a key to combining trumpet with trombone; it was essential to the melding of harmonics. A vowel pronounced one way would help to produce a different chiaroscuro, a different blend of brilliance and shadow, than the same vowel pronounced with a slightly different shape. An ah would be brighter than an ah with some aw added in; the position of the lips and jaw and tongue, and the arrangement of a dozen other anatomical parts, affected the music of the voice. A singer had choices to make: decisions that could transform the artistry of a note, decisions that sometimes determined whether he could hit and sustain a note at all—and whether he would come to it with confidence or trepidation—for the shape of a vowel could render a difficult note easier or more daunting to generate. He couldn’t make these subtle choices, though, if he didn’t understand how the language was supposed to sound in the first place. He couldn’t alter vowels if he didn’t know the boundaries beyond which adjusting a syllable garbled a word. With scant rudimentary knowledge, he couldn’t include nuance. Or he could—but at the cost of creating a mess.

  “But nobody responds to any singer purely aurally,” Zeger said. “There’s always a visual component. And this discussion raises questions about how we see one another, about race. About how race affects how we hear. Can we talk about Ryan without talking about that? Can we talk about race without stating that every American conversation about the subject has a charge to it? It’s very vexed. I think about race a lot. About the goal of color-blind casting. About how we’re perceiving race always. I think we’re unconsciously surprised, in the theater, when an Asian actor is sexy, because we expect him to be reserved. I think we’re surprised when a Latino actor is intellectual—I bet if Raul Julia came back to life he would have some stories. How many black actresses will have Cate Blanchett’s career?

  “I find some of my colleagues in opera appallingly unaware of their reactions. I can’t tell you how often people will compare a young minority singer with another singer of the same race who’s come before. It’s extremely limiting. And then the questions: Is this singer not well educated? Will there be an issue of professionalism? No one would ask that about a bespectacled Jewish kid, about a singer with a last name like yours or mine. No one would ask, is he serious enough? Is he smart enough, quick enough mentally, refined enough intellectually? People wonder about Ryan in a way they never would if he wasn’t black. When he makes a mistake, if he wasn’t black, they would just think he’d been misinformed and that he would get the problem fixed.”

  It was all tangled—the preconceptions were real, but so, it seemed, were Ryan’s shortcomings. A further entanglement was the possibility that some of the cloudiness in his vowels was due to physical attributes found more frequently in African American singers, pockets of resonance whose geometry enhanced warmth and richness but worked against gleam and precision. Zeger wondered about this, guessing that the theory might be right. But he emphasized that his thinking was based on his own listening, that there was no substantial science to support the idea. Oswald spoke along similar lines. Yvette Wyatt had said much the same: that the racial distinctiveness she heard in the young black singers she taught—in most of them, though not in the girl who’d refused to follow Wyatt’s advice that she model herself on Denyce Graves rather than Alicia Keys—was a matter of nature at least as much as nurture.

  Yet always there was the issue of expectation. To what extent did we hear—in African American and white singers—what we expected to hear?

  I asked Dr. Paul Kwak about the roles of nature and nurture. He was the accompanist and ENT specialist who’d talked with me about the mystery of why big voices like Ryan’s take longer to mature. About race and the physiology of tone, he said, “You can’t do that study.” Political objections would rain down on any researcher who tried to compare the vocal anatomy of blacks and whites. He surmised that nurture—the influence of black popular vocalists and church singers—played the heavier role, but that inborn aspects of the pharynx, the region running from the back of the throat to the back of the nasal cavity, might well have an effect. “Part of it has to be what you’re born w
ith, but we don’t have the data, and then singing is so multifactorial that it would be extremely difficult to isolate causes.”

  Zeger, at the piano in the Juilliard rehearsal room, turned to another topic. He played a chord in three-beat clusters. The measures were from Banquo’s aria, a piece that Ryan continued to practice. He planned to use it when the time came for auditions. The chord was menacing, the rhythm disturbing, and Zeger played it to illustrate something more that Ryan needed to work on. His rhythm was “flabby.” The clusters of three were from the orchestral accompaniment; they formed an unsettled heartbeat, a fearful pulse, and Ryan’s cadence as he sang, though not intended to be matched with the throb of the music, should align with it in a relationship that would add to the emotion of the aria. He wasn’t getting this right. It was about more than following the notations in the score. He should be listening more acutely, “contextualizing the vocal line, responding to and using everything around him in the music.”

  The list of Ryan’s weaknesses seemed limitless. Zeger mentioned something basic: Ryan too rarely sang less than forte, less than loud. He boomed without regard for a composer’s modulations, for the fact that Verdi’s markings for Banquo dropped as soft as triple piano. Then Zeger returned to things more sophisticated and elusive, to “harmonic listening,” to “internalizing everything that’s happening in the orchestra as part of the psychology of the character.”

  * * *

  “You’re frustrated with me, aren’t you?”

  In a Met studio belowground it was sometimes Hemdi Kfir who awaited him. She had an angular face and an Israeli accent.

  “No,” Ryan said, “I’m not frustrated.”

  She had once trained as a singer. She had been told that she had a lovely voice for Renaissance and early Baroque music, the type of repertoire that was sung in recitals in cozy venues with ensembles of period instruments. It was another way of saying that her voice was small. And meanwhile, her parents let her know that small wasn’t good enough. She had abandoned the ambition to perform.

  “Madamina.” She spoke the first word of the aria.

  He uttered the word back to her, the sixteenth or twentieth time they’d gone back and forth on these four syllables in this session, as she tried to make his vowels more purely Italian and suffuse brightness into his singing. His attempt, she told him again, was a disaster.

  Lots of Americans, she knew, tended to take unstressed vowels and turn them into some version of uh. “Ab-suh-lutely.” “Terr-uh-tory.” Ryan couldn’t seem to tear himself free of the habit: “Mad-uh-min-uh.” The uhs wrecked the word and darkened his voice.

  “‘Maaah-daaah-meen-aaah,’” she exaggerated. “You’re not too frustrated?”

  “No. No way.”

  “‘Maaah-daaah…’” she demonstrated yet again.

  At last, he confessed that he could no longer hear the distinction between the vowel sound she wanted and his own failed efforts. They’d been concentrating on this single word for a quarter hour, and he felt he was going deaf—or crazy. But no, he assured her, they shouldn’t stop.

  When she said that she was satisfied, not pleased but satisfied, they continued on to the next word, in which he encountered a c and a t. She told him he was aspirating too much on both.

  He admitted that he didn’t know what she meant. He’d vowed to himself, when he started the Lindemann Program, that he wouldn’t fake comprehension and lose out on learning; he was going to ask questions. “People might think I’m stupid,” he told me, “but the only thing that’s stupid is not to ask what I don’t know.”

  She defined “aspirating” and pronounced the consonants, adding and subtracting air, mispronouncing and pronouncing properly, directing him toward the desired delicacy, the ideal Italian smoothness, the sensation, as the singer glided past the consonants and lingered on the vowels, of riding up and down gentle hills, of legato.

  But excess air kept hopping from his mouth in microeruptions. “Maybe I’m not made for Italian.” He smiled apologetically. “Maybe my mouth’s not a lover. Maybe it’s more of a fighter.”

  He struggled to replicate what she did, struggled until he felt like his teeth and tongue and hard palate were turning to stew.

  * * *

  “Our job,” Oswald reminded Ryan one afternoon in his studio, “is to figure out how to sing thirty pitches on approximately twenty vowels, so six hundred combinations.”

  The thirty pitches referred to the notes in the two and a half octaves Ryan was capable of spanning. The number of vowels referred to the International Phonetic Alphabet and its coded system of vowel sounds, from æ to ʊ. It was a system covering the building blocks of more or less every language whose pronunciation a successful singer needed to master, from French to Russian, though the twenty sounds Oswald spoke about were just a start, a subset that wouldn’t take him into Russian territory. The six hundred combinations were an accounting of the vocal adjustments a singer needed to make—many of them instinctual but many of them learned—in order to hit every pitch while producing the æ’s and ʊ’s, ɛ̃’s and ɔ’s and ∅’s.

  “And let’s not forget the various dynamic levels,” Oswald said. Some of the combinations required a shift in technique, depending on whether the score called for forte or pianissimo. He smiled, laughing for a second at the scope of the task. He relished the specificity of the work. He also liked to keep things upbeat. “That’s it, in a nutshell,” he summed up. “That’s all there is to it.”

  “In a nutshell.” Ryan laughed for a second, too.

  The move to teaching had felt natural, Oswald had told me. “Singing always took such a toll. In teaching, the highs aren’t as high, but I get to feel the highs almost every day.”

  They began studying a Verdi aria that was new for Ryan, the cry of an elderly aristocrat betrayed by his young fiancée.

  Ah, perché l’etade in seno

  giovin core m’ha serbato

  Mi dovevan gli anni almeno

  far di gelo ancora il cor

  Oh, why has age kept my heart

  youthful in my breast

  The years should have turned

  my heart to ice

  Ryan sang, halting on an early note. “That was not good.”

  Oswald didn’t disagree but didn’t dwell on what had gone wrong. He moved swiftly onward: how to get the note right? “More reverse megaphone,” he said, and instructed his student to lift one hand to the side of his head and bring the other close to his nose and mouth. He told Ryan to try the note again in this stance, a way to broaden the chamber back by the uvula while still manufacturing enough of his sound near his face—against the facial bones and in the cavities just behind them.

  Oswald judged some of the advice Ryan was receiving at the Met to be misguided: Ryan was being bombarded with too much talk about pushing his voice forward. Not only might this steal the richness from his voice; it would also fail to provide the very gleam that the Met wanted. The correct method for adding luster, Oswald believed, could be paradoxical in some singers. Placing the voice forward, placing it “in the mask,” was supposed to infuse brightness and clarity, but to his ears as he listened to Ryan, too much mask had an inexplicable result; it had an inverse effect; cloudiness returned. The key was to augment both front and back, both trumpet and trombone.

  This wasn’t the only split between the instruction Ryan got in Oswald’s studio and at the opera house down the street. To cure his mispronunciations, Oswald insisted that he should concentrate mainly on the suppleness of his legato, in Italian or any other language, that this would be a panacea. Oswald didn’t want him obsessing over each separate letter and syllable. In the subbasement rooms of the Met, the coaches told him that he’d better obsess.

  Ryan didn’t feel in any position to balance the points of view. The only solution seemed to be to divide himself, to work one way in this studio and a different way in others.

  He sang the tricky note with his hands next to his head and face,
Oswald applauded him, and they paused to talk about how gestures affected singing: half consciously, by suggestion.

  “Like Sam Ramey’s claw,” Ryan said, naming a well-known bass. Sometimes the gestures were only for practicing, as with Ryan’s two raised hands; sometimes, as with Ramey’s covertly crimped fingers, they were encrypted prompts, and singers took them onstage and hoped that no one caught on.

  “Certain artists are doing this or that with the hands, always,” Oswald said. “They need to have a hand in a particular spot for a particular note, but they will never tell anyone what they’re doing.”

  Teacher and student went back to the aria. “Up the middle of your head,” Oswald said. “Verticality. Dome.” He elevated a palm above his scalp, and Ryan did the same. “Superdome. Think Superdome.” They were both football fans; the Superdome was the New Orleans stadium, and Oswald was searching for images of the shape that he wanted Ryan to picture, the shape that might aid him in vaulting the soft palate—the rear of the roof of the mouth—by a fraction of a millimeter and making better use of the anatomy nearby. This bordered on shamanism; these were involuntary or semivoluntary areas. Yet singers swore by these methods.