* * *
Ryan’s second Met role, given to him as a Lindemann trainee, was in Wagner’s Parsifal, and rehearsals were under way at the time of his father’s funeral. The Met asked if he wanted to be released from his part, because of all he was going through. He did not. His father’s death only made him more determined.
The role was like nothing else he’d done; it was neither comic nor dramatic; Wagner had probed psychology through myth. Parsifal drew from a legend of King Arthur, and Ryan was cast as an unnamed knight who reported briefly to Amfortas, the king. “I have the biggest part of the small parts,” he told me. “I move the plot forward.” He studied his few lines and found artistic reasons to sing them with great emphasis and flourish. There was, as well, something familiar about Wagner’s world, a place of superheroes, like the Schwarzenegger figures he and his brother had stolen and cherished as kids. When he addressed the king, he was going to make the moment his own, singing with grandeur.
During their coaching sessions, Noda chided him for his mispronunciations of Wagner’s libretto and for the wavering aspect of brightness in his voice: “We will do this over and over.…That note is way too dark.…I don’t care if we don’t get any further today.…Please apply yourself, please, because you know I don’t have endless patience.” But his patience did seem almost endless. He was growing ever more fond of Ryan, and he liked his stylistic choices for the knight, his demonstrative singing. Ryan was also making sudden strides technically. To Noda’s ears, the flaws were diminishing. As he coached Ryan for the role, he pumped him up even more than Ryan was pumped up on his own, reminding him that this was Wagner at the Met, and that this production of the opera was new—new sets, new staging, new directorial interpretation—meaning that it would get even more attention than Wagner usually would, and always Wagner was an event. There were Wagner junkies who traveled the globe for his operas. Noda told him that he had a chance to make an impression, and Ryan hatched a fantasy that edged toward an expectation. Someone involved in casting at Bayreuth—the house Wagner himself had helped to design in Germany in the eighteen seventies, so that his operas would look and sound just as he imagined them—would be in the Met audience, would be struck by Ryan’s singing, and would think, We need to grab this kid. On the Met stage, Ryan would be exchanging lines with two of the best singers on the planet, René Pape, who was playing Gurnemanz, and Peter Mattei, who was singing Amfortas. “It’s huge. When Amfortas enters, I’m the one who changes his mood to anger. I change his emotional direction.”
“No, no, no, no,” the conductor, turning his thoughts to Ryan during a rehearsal late in the process, said. The musicians silenced themselves. The conductor told Ryan that he was a lowly knight, that he was singing to a king, that he must not be so loud or expressive; his manner must be more deferential. The musicians played their instruments again, and Ryan resumed. Again the conductor interrupted. He looked at Ryan, lifted one hand with two fingers dangling downward, and moved his fingers across the air in a quick stepping motion. His message was plain. Though the score gave Ryan some leeway in his pacing because of the way several measures were written, he should pick up his cadence. He was keeping the focus too much on himself.
“It was definitely a chip, or more like a chop, off what I thought of my role,” Ryan said after the rehearsal. “But he made a good point. I’m a subcharacter. Anyway, being told that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It just means I have to be more special with less.”
* * *
To be certain he was ready, Ryan asked Oswald to make time for an extra session on the day of opening night. Because Ryan was going straight to the Met afterward, he wore his Brooks Brothers tuxedo, wore it with his own touches, a purple cummerbund, a black shirt. He walked into the studio, a trickle of sweat already creeping toward his jaw, shut the door behind him, and muttered, “My mother.”
Outside the studio, in Oswald’s cramped vestibule, Valerie sat on a wooden bench. She kept her black wool coat on. Her face was expressionless. She’d taken time off from a job she’d gotten as a dispatcher with the Navy and flown up from Norfolk at dawn; she’d hardly slept the night before. And now she’d been trailing Ryan through his day. I asked if she was worried about staying awake through the five-hour opera. “I’ll be all right,” she said. “It’ll keep my interest.” To this understatement, this declaration of pride in her son, she added the faintest smile.
In the studio, after his two words, Ryan rolled his neck, stuck out and stretched his tongue, and emitted a note of anguish. The neck and tongue were part of his normal warming up, the note wasn’t. Having his mother in tow was taking its toll. He’d had misgivings about having her here; he hadn’t mentioned Parsifal to her until just recently. He’d known it would be taxing to have her close.
It was more than taxing. Her presence felt both dominant and horribly weak. “She is my past. So much of who I was and what I’m moving away from is all mixed up with her, growing up with her. She’s still the person who can push my buttons. Twist me up. She doesn’t even have to say anything. All she has to do is stand there.”
Yet at the same time, he felt that she was deteriorating. This weakness was new, or at least he hadn’t noticed it before. It took him by surprise. She was short of breath as they walked together on the street. She was fifty and called herself old. She complained about her legs and her heart. He felt he was losing his sanity; he couldn’t fit the feebleness together with the power she held, and, too, the feebleness itself unsteadied him. Though he maintained his guard, though he’d spoken with her only occasionally by phone since moving to New York, he told me, “I love her. I get upset at myself for being so cold. But I have to be. I try, I really try to be better about her. But it’s really hard. One thing about always pushing myself forward is that it makes me very distant from her. And then her being so run-down, I don’t know what to feel. Walking with her huffing and puffing, I thought, I know you—you’re the woman who faced down the dealers when I was about to get jumped. You’re the woman who made sure she got her community college degree. Her being weak, I could never imagine it. But she’s not the same.”
As his mother sat on the other side of the door, he ran through arpeggios with Oswald and, after warming up, ran through the knight’s lines. Ryan placed a finger against the flesh between his nose and upper lip to make sure there was enough vibration in that area, a sign that his sound wasn’t too far back, that he was creating enough luster.
“That’s not too loud, is it?”
“You’re allowed to be confident,” Oswald said.
“Remember, the maestro wants it soft,” Ryan said. “And what the maestro wants the maestro gets. Even if there is an exclamation point there in the score, and even if an exclamation point equals exclamatory. But the good thing is, when I respond to Gurnemanz, they told me I can make a gesture to let everyone know I’m about to sing, something not too much.” He asked Oswald for a suggestion, and they resolved on a restrained movement of his right arm.
“Now if it were up to me,” Oswald said protectively as the session ended, “you wouldn’t do any vocalizing at all between when you leave here and when you’re onstage. I know your schedule at the Met. You’ve done enough singing today. Hopefully no one will come into your dressing room asking you to run your lines.”
Valerie was still in her wool coat when Ryan emerged. She stood slowly. His face, usually so open, calcified instantly and closed off. They walked through the lobby and outside, wordless.
* * *
Soon it was time to get into his costume, a white shirt and gray pants for this stark, postapocalyptic production. He shared a dressing room with another singer from the program, a Korean American tenor a foot shorter than Ryan. He was cast as a sentry. Between the red couch and the black upright, they buttoned their shirts while a humidifier gurgled and sent steam into the air. “Did you bring Uno cards?” Ryan joked nervously. The remaining hour till the curtain’s rise seemed insufferably long.
&nbs
p; “I might play Star Crash.” The sentry named an online game.
“Toi toi!” people called in the hallway. It was an opera singer’s equivalent of “break a leg.” No one was sure what it meant or what its origins were; maybe it was a distortion of the German word for devil. “Toi toi toi!” rang up and down the corridor, and two of the top people at the Met, who kept tabs on the progress of the trainees, leaned in to wish “toi toi” to Ryan and the sentry.
A tall woman with blond hair tapped on the open door and walked in. “Do you want to run that line for me?” It wasn’t a question. In one of the final rehearsals he’d forgotten his words. Ryan stood face-to-face with her and sang the phrases. She nodded and was gone.
“Thirty minutes” came the announcement over the intercom. “Thirty minutes.”
In half an hour, the overture’s first notes—delicate, wounded—filled the house, and twenty-five minutes after that Ryan went down on one knee, kept his shoulders and head lowered, sang to the king for twenty-five seconds, and made his way offstage. Except for one later line, this brought his performance to an end.
Valerie and I shared a snack at intermission. She descended the red-carpeted stairs doggedly, cautiously, in black pants and a formal blouse, and we stood at a high round table. I mentioned a trip that Ryan might take to Berlin during the coming August, with the Met paying the bill, to help him absorb the sounds of German. She said that she knew nothing about it. “Ryan does not speak to his mother.”
Her voice was flat and her words were clipped, not sharp but tight, partly because of fatigue and partly, perhaps, because an extreme reserve had replaced the volatility that had crouched close to the surface in an earlier time. “If you let him tell it, he got everything good from his father. That’s his belief now.”
* * *
Der Mensch liegt in größter Not
Der Mensch liegt in größter Pein.…
Der liebe Gott…wird leuchten mir bis in das ewig selig Leben
Man lies in great need
Man lies in great pain.…
The good Lord…will light the way to an eternally blissful life
“Jessye Norman sang this,” Noda said, telling Ryan to find a recording of Norman, the African American diva of the nineteen seventies and eighties, performing this piece by Mahler. He’d chosen it for Ryan’s upcoming recital, to be held in a small auditorium around the corner from the Met. Annually, each singer in the program gave a recital along with one or two other trainees, an exercise enacted in the hope, however slender, that someday the public would flock to hear them both in concert and on the opera stage. The recitals were also a chance, beyond the minor roles in operas, for the singers to be heard in formal performance by Lindemann and Met staff. This concert was scheduled for the week after Parsifal’s closing night. Noda had picked the Mahler song as a way for Ryan to honor his father and help himself to heal.
“I’m going to play it for you,” Noda said, and for two or three minutes he compressed all of his talent as a soloist into this basement performance for his student, so that Ryan could hear, as Noda heard, all the emotion, all the compositional genius, that had gone into Mahler’s music. For Noda, the instrument under his fingers was unfriendly, unalive; he rued the years of learning the piano to fulfill his mother’s dreams. But these feelings were impossible to detect in the sounds he produced in the underground room. It was as if his regret and pain about the instrument were transposed into the artistry of his playing. On the first measures, he allowed each chord to fade almost yet not fully into oblivion before he struck the next. Those measures alone were enough to open any listener’s rib cage and leave him exposed, aching.
“I think it’s the most beautiful piece of music on earth,” Noda said when he was done.
Ryan agreed without speaking.
Noda read aloud Mahler’s notation above the first line, “Sehr feierlich, aber schlicht,” and translated it: “Solemn and ceremonial, but plain and simple.” He instructed Ryan to look up more translations that evening—he wanted to be sure that Ryan understood everything that was embedded in the music. Noda led him onward into the song’s passages of crystalline suffering, and into the music’s frantic quest for rescue, and toward the quiescence, the redemption, of the end.
Ryan brought the piece to Oswald the next time they met. “Ken chose it because of my father. So I could sing it for my father.” He handed the pages across the piano. “And Jessye Norman sang it.” He’d listened to Norman’s recordings of the song, fallen into the folds of despair in her voice—“feelings,” he said, “way beyond language.”
With Oswald, he was anxious to begin. “But I definitely need your help warming up today.”
“How late were you up last night?”
“There’s nothing I can do. I’m onstage in the third act,” he said about Parsifal, “so I think I got to sleep by three in the morning.” He was feeling hints of a cold, maybe a sinus infection, maybe the flu. He plucked a tissue from the box on the piano and blew his nose in the staccato way he had; it made a half squeak, half honk that seemed to come from an aquatic mammal. “If I start seeing yellow crap, it’s two or three weeks.”
They discussed singing through sickness, when it was possible and when a lack of rest could risk disaster. A bad cough could be a nightmare—as you expelled mucus from the lungs, the pressure of air shooting through the larynx caused the vocal cords to slam and slam and slam against each other. They traded thoughts about steroid medication. “Steroids bring the inflammation down,” Oswald advised, “but then you’ll re-swell to a worse state. And steroids can dry the membranes.”
They talked about getting vacuumed and how hideous that process could be. Ryan had gone through this a few times with Dr. Youngnan Cho, an ENT specialist whose practice was full of Met singers. She’d pried open his nostrils with her speculum, probed his sinuses with tubing, and switched on a suction machine, and he’d watched globs of mucus and blood, mustard-colored, green, dark brown, spurt and slide from within him, out his nose, and through the tubing for ten minutes at a stretch.
“Slowly, then.” Oswald cut off the conversation and laid one hand on the keys. Gradually they worked their way into Mahler. “Go for more dome. That note sat too low. That’s why the grit came into the voice.”
Da kam ein Engelein und wollt mich abweisen
Ach nein! Ich ließ mich nicht abweisen
“That vowel—you want it to be bright but not overly bright. You want it roundedly bright.”
Ich bin von Gott und will wieder zu Gott
“Good. The legato is getting better.”
I am God’s creation and want to return to my Lord
On the subway ride home he recited the piece in his mind, and in the room off his kitchen he stood at the keyboard and tapped out the measures with one finger, singing syllable by syllable, note by note, penciling reminders into his score and scolding himself in a heated mumble.
“No.”
“That’s the A-flat.”
“No, shit no.”
“It’s your passaggio.”
“Cover.”
“Go a little higher.”
“Oh, shit.”
“Roundedly bright, roundedly bright.”
Weeks later, with the recital only days away, Oswald said, “That’s masterful,” about the song’s closing phrases. He praised the intermingling of tones, of throat and mask, dark and light.
“Gorgeous,” Noda exulted that same week, raising one hand, thumb pressed to fingertips in a sign of tribute. “I think Parsifal was a great experience for you—being around those great singers. Now please, I want you to practice every schwa. But it’s incredible hearing you. It’s like hearing Jessye as a man.”
A diffuse light reflected off the pale wood of the recital stage.
“This piece is dedicated to my father,” Ryan said in front of the audience of Met insiders and fellow trainees and donors to the program. He lifted his hands to the level of his rib cage. His palms, partia
lly upturned, floated in the air, as if he was gathering something in.
* * *
Parsifal, the recital, a concert of scenes performed by the trainees—these were all steps in the sudden progress that Ryan was making, to ears like Noda’s and Oswald’s, in the aftermath of his father’s death. It was as though the distance made permanent by his dying was an expanse he could cross only with his voice and only if he mustered more and more artistic strength.
Like other trainees, Ryan, during his second year in the program, was offered a spot in the company of a summer festival, with dates coming in June and July. In the smaller of its two theaters, the festival, outside Washington, DC, staged a little-known opera by Rossini—composer of The Barber of Seville—with a cast of young singers. The opera was a romp about a group of European grandees who converge at a spa before attending the coronation of the new French king. And Ryan, playing a scholar tagging along with the nobles, had an aria that mocked each character in turn.
He prepared for months before arriving at the festival. His aria contained an abundance of patter, line after line of high-velocity libretto with bursts of repeating staccato notes that tended to toss him off pitch. And there were leaps into falsetto and plunges down the staff. But the worst problem was that the patter put an emphasis on language, and the language was Italian, and while Ryan’s Italian pronunciation had been improving, the improvement had been at a crawl.
Hemdi Kfir was no longer his Italian coach; he felt that he was always failing her, that his mouth turned to mush during every session. He switched to her mentor, Bob Cowart, who’d been with the program for thirty years and who taught in a cell even more monastic than the Met’s other underground vaults: the lighting was dim, the piano unpolished, and the unadorned cinder block walls especially close. Cowart looked like he might live there, like he never sought out the sun and seldom bothered to straighten his clothes or comb his tufted gray hair.
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