Sing for Your Life
Page 25
* * *
The tones of Aida’s overture were fragile, spectral, mournful. Then, sitting on a throne and wearing robes of white brocade that spilled over his knees like a waterfall, Ryan sang the role of the Egyptian king awaiting attack by the Ethiopians. He entreated the gods to grant courage and protection—
Unto death deliver our enemy
Egypt they never shall enslave
—and welcomed the war that would spur the story of doomed love into hurtling motion. The grave music of his voice unfurled throughout the house, echoing in militant counterpoint to the helpless, radiant sounds that would rise from the lovers in the final scene.
The early scorn of the critics faded away. Now, and as Ryan performed through the rest of the season, they called his singing “impeccable” and his voice “voluminous and filled with beautiful colors” and his talent “a true win for the Vienna State Opera.” As the Commendatore in Don Giovanni, Ryan sang to restore order to the world. He sang as the embodiment of morality in Mozart’s battle between the forces of impulse and the forces of the spirit, between the forces of dissolution and the forces of transcendence, between the agents of harm and those of healing. He sang the climactic scene in the opera that Flaubert had rated as one of “the three finest things God ever made”—the other two being Hamlet and the sea—sang in confrontation with Giovanni, whose voice was a gorgeous celebration of anarchy; sang over and over to Giovanni, “Answer me, you must answer me.” Ryan sang with an untiring, unswayable, urgent need to wring repentance from chaos itself, to control and quell harm itself, sang so that “answer me” seemed to replace the very oxygen in the theater.
* * *
The bass-baritone who’d been cast as the priest in Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk fell ill. The singer who was supposed to step in was lured away by a much bigger role in another city. A key person at the company stopped Ryan in a back hall of the opera house and asked if he could learn the part. It was less than a week before opening night.
“I’ve never sung in Russian,” Ryan protested.
“Never?”
“Never in my life.”
A coach spoke Ryan’s forty lines into a recorder, enunciating syllable by syllable, and he went home to Irene with the tape and a copy of the score in Cyrillic script. The score had a hand-scrawled transliteration, but the coach warned him that it was flawed. Ryan begged Irene to help him, and she begged him not to ask.
“Baby, I have no idea how to learn this.”
“I have no idea how to teach you.” She spoke Russian well but couldn’t read in Cyrillic, was confounded by the sketchy transliteration, and was stumped by the antiquated liturgical language used by the priest.
“Dress rehearsal is on Friday!”
In his panic, he convinced her. She set about teaching him to half swallow certain letters, to retract and contort the base of his tongue in a way that led to a sound akin to a bullfrog’s call, to string together alien syllables: “yayvope” and then “chyayvope” and then “ssss” and then “ssssch” and then “sssschyayvope” and then “sssschyayvope yaymoo.” Between hours-long sessions with Irene and hours-long sessions with the coach and hours spent working alone, and by employing the International Phonetic Alphabet and his own invented alphabetical notations, Ryan made painstaking progress. Before the dress rehearsal, he called Irene’s mother in Germany and sang to her on the phone. She understood him perfectly, and if he garbled any of his lines on opening night, no one complained in the opera house or in the press.
Since he and Irene had found each other, they’d made a point of celebrating their “monthiversaries,” counting back to the date they’d met online. Lately he’d been composing and polishing a letter that he intended to read to Irene’s mother, Olga. She didn’t speak English, so he planned to get it translated into German and practice until he could pronounce the words easily.
I wrote a letter to read to you today, because I want to express some things to you.…Since your amazing daughter came into my life, I’ve learned what it means to truly love someone and receive the same kind of love in return. We have our ups and downs, but there is never a moment when I don’t think Irene is the perfect woman for me. I am by no means a perfect man, but she always finds a way to make me feel like I’m the most important thing to happen in her life.…I will continue to grow and look for ways to be a better man for her.…Since the day she and I expressed our love for each other, I knew I would never need another woman.…Olga Fast, will you give me the honor and joy of asking your daughter Irene Fast to be my rib, my partner in crime, my muse for life, my wife?
While he worked on the letter, he was looking into layaway plans. He had asked a friend of Irene’s about the type of ring she wished for. When he asked Irene to marry him, he wanted the diamond to be from exactly the store she dreamed about.
* * *
As a singer, his breakthroughs that year weren’t only in Vienna. The Met flew him back to New York to sing the part of a terrorist in a modern opera, The Death of Klinghoffer, a story of Israel and Palestine. The opera provoked accusations that it was too sympathetic to the Palestinians, that it was anti-Semitic. There were protests outside the theater and, inside, shouts of outrage during the opening night performance. Ryan’s pivotal role was musically raw and jagged and daunting to master, but he won approval from the New York Times and was singled out by New York magazine: “Green sang such a convincingly fierce and unhinged Rambo that I feared for his curtain call.…He got the ovations he deserved.” Even the one reviewer, in the New York Observer, who found minor fault with the way he’d sung this particular part, admired his voice and his acting: “Ryan Speedo Green lavished an almost too voluptuous bass on the vicious hijacker named Rambo, but he compensated with an uncompromising acting performance as an unrequited monster.”
Just before Klinghoffer, the Met, perceiving Ryan’s promise more and more clearly, cast him in a production of La Bohème that was two years away. A poet, a musician, a painter, a singer, a philosopher—La Bohème told the story of a set of struggling bohemians in nineteenth-century Paris and was the Met’s most popular opera. Ryan would sing the role of Colline, the philosopher. In the final act, as the group’s poverty became unbearable, as the friends could no longer afford food and as the poet’s lover lay dying of consumption, the philosopher pawned his overcoat to buy her medicine. Ryan’s aria, the penultimate song in the opera, was a surrender. It was the end of the friends’ artistic and intellectual dreams. The piece was brief but wrenching, and the Met often used the part to test the talents of singers it believed might be ready for starring roles. “That aria is notorious,” Noda said. “It has this heartbreaking, simple melody, with almost no orchestra. It has to be sung with perfect control. And it has a notorious high note that comes out of nowhere and has to be delivered softly. That note has to be drop-dead beautiful, and from that note the phrase goes down in three half steps that have to be sung with seamless legato. The success of the entire role is about those four notes. If he can break our hearts with that one phrase, his stock is going to go up.”
But artistically, the best moment of that year may have come with the same aria he’d sung in the finals of the Met competition, the same aria whose culminating note he’d aborted during the Vienna audition, an aria that he now, cast as Basilio in The Barber of Seville, sang within a full performance on the Vienna stage. Basilio was a character of comic evil, both absurd and malevolent. He sang “La calunnia” to Bartolo, who was a doctor and a fool. For the right fee, he declared, he would bring down Bartolo’s romantic rival.
Ryan began the aria by ushering Bartolo into a drawing room, by sitting civilly beside Bartolo, by crossing his legs, one knee over the other, in genteel fashion, and by placing his hands on his uppermost knee, lightly. He did all this in precise time with a musical shift by the orchestra, from the tame playing of a harpsichord to a darker swelling of strings. The mere crossing of his legs, carried out with showy aplomb and almost in slow m
otion as the violins, violas, and cellos were introduced, served as an unsung note of musical dissonance, civility displayed while the strings evoked his malice, the contrast making the comedic tension all the more taut.
A few lines into the aria, he stood, strolling away from the drawing room and singing with rapture about his own powers. The desperate Bartolo was forced to follow him, stumbling as he rushed over to hear how his rival would be dispensed with. The voluptuousness of Ryan’s voice was perfect for this seduction. He sang Bartolo into a trance and himself into a frenzy. He soared up to the E he’d had to abandon in the audition, sustained it triumphally, seized Bartolo’s hand, wrapped his other arm around Bartolo’s shoulder, and drew him into a euphoric dance. Then he bellowed out a phrase so loudly that Bartolo quaked and reeled at the edge of the stage, in danger of plummeting until Ryan caught him and set him upright, the exuberantly executed dance and slapstick calling to his father in the air of the opera house, calling him close. Ryan stepped to center stage. He spread and lifted his arms, a gesture of embrace to a mesmerized Bartolo and a charmed audience. The orchestra raced, then hushed.
Again Ryan climbed to the high, reverberating, rich, lustrous note, which he held.
Acknowledgments
This book relies on the generosity of all who provided countless hours of personal memories and musical insight. My greatest debt is to one man, Ryan Speedo Green. I am tremendously grateful to everyone who is named in the book’s pages. And I am thankful to the many others who were essential to my understanding of Ryan’s story, among them Willie Balderson, Jan Boykins, Robert Brown Sr., Adam Cavagnero, Peter Clark, Margaret Nimmo Crowe, David Fisher, Greg Green, Webster Hogeland, Matthew Horner, Vlad Iftinca, Miles Kreuger, Thomas Lausmann, Paul Lombardo (and his history of the eugenics movement in Virginia, Three Generations, No Imbeciles), Phylis Milne, Ben Moore (whose beautiful adaptation of “Ode to a Nightingale” is described in chapter fourteen), Sam Neuman, Stephen Wadsworth, the faculty at the Governor’s School for the Arts in Norfolk, and the current and former staff members and residents who spoke with me about life at the center but preferred to remain anonymous.
My extraordinary agent, Suzanne Gluck, has guided me wisely and patiently for almost three decades—my gratitude goes to her and everyone on the William Morris Endeavor team, including Scott Chaloff, Raffaella De Angelis, Tracy Fischer, Alicia Gordon, Clio Seraphim, and Elizabeth Sheinkman.
My editor, Lee Boudreaux, is a perfect master at mixing literary love with deft critique—I am so very lucky to have her on my side, along with Reagan Arthur, Olivia Aylmer, Nicole Dewey, Lisa Erickson, Heather Fain, Elizabeth Garriga, Carina Guiterman, Andy LeCount, Julianna Lee, Carrie Neill, Michael Pietsch, Mary Tondorf-Dick, Karen Torres, Betsy Uhrig, Craig Young, and everyone at Lee Boudreaux Books and Little, Brown.
Ilena Silverman, my ever-precise and forever inquisitive editor at the New York Times Magazine, gave this book its start.
Writing would be nearly impossible for me without the counsel, companionship, faith, and simple existence of my friends Paul Barrett, Julie Cohen, Peter Davidson, Samantha Gillison, John Gulla, William Hogeland, George Packer, Ayesha Pande, Laura Secor, Saul Shapiro, and Tom Watson.
My father, Lawrence Bergner, infused my growing up with both music and morality, and my brother, Robert Bergner, continues to lend his musical passion to my life.
And then there’s Georgia West, my love, whose spirit I am blessed to be near.
Ryan’s Acknowledgments
My love and gratitude go out to my mother, Valerie Henley Elloinchi, who gave me the resilience to get up again any time I fall.
I am eternally thankful for the time I got to spend with my father. He lives on in my music.
And to my wife, Irene Green: you are my rib, my muse, the center of my universe.
So many thanks to the teachers, mentors, and family who saw what was inside me even when I couldn’t: above all, to Mr. and Mrs. Hughes and to Robert Brown Jr. And heartfelt thanks to Alan Fischer and the faculty at the Governor’s School for the Arts; David Fisher; Edward Bolkovac, Joanna Levy, Gabriel Lofvall, and the faculty at the Hartt School of Music; Douglas Fisher, David Okerlund, and everyone at Florida State University’s College of Music; Ellie Caulkins, Cherity Koepke, and all at Opera Colorado; and the Love family.
The Metropolitan Opera’s National Council Auditions and the Met’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program have transformed my life. I am especially thankful to Bob Cowart, Vlad Iftinca, Hemdi Kfir, Camille LaBarre, Maestro James Levine, Gayletha Nichols, Ken Noda, Mark Oswald, Stephen Wadsworth, and Brian Zeger. I am deeply grateful to Adam Cavagnaro, Matthew Horner, and everyone at IMG Artists, and to Thomas Lausmann, Dominique Meyer, and all at the Wiener Staatsoper.
The Leonore Annenberg Fellowship Fund for the Performing and Visual Arts has been immensely generous in supporting me. Also invaluable have been the Licia Albanese-Puccini Foundation; Martina Arroyo, her foundation, and her summer program, Prelude to Performance; the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World contest; the Gerda Lissner Foundation; the George London Foundation Competition; Opera Index; the Palm Beach Opera Competition; and the Richard Tucker Foundation.
About the Author
Daniel Bergner is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and the author of a novel, Moments of Favor, and four previous books of nonfiction—What Do Women Want?, The Other Side of Desire, In the Land of Magic Soldiers, and God of the Rodeo. In the Land of Magic Soldiers received an Overseas Press Club award for international reporting and a Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage and was named a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. God of the Rodeo was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. In addition to the New York Times Magazine, Bergner’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Granta, Harper’s, Mother Jones, Talk, and the New York Times Book Review and on the op-ed page of the New York Times. His writing is also included in The Norton Reader: An Anthology of Nonfiction.
ALSO BY DANIEL BERGNER
What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire
The Other Side of Desire: Four Journeys into the Far Realms of Lust and Longing
In the Land of Magic Soldiers: A Story of White and Black in West Africa
God of the Rodeo: The Quest for Redemption in Louisiana’s Angola Prison
Moments of Favor: A Novel
Unusual stories. Unexpected voices. An immersive sense of place. Lee Boudreaux Books publishes both award-winning authors and writers making their literary debut. A carefully curated mix, these books share an underlying DNA: a mastery of language, commanding narrative momentum, and a knack for leaving us astonished, delighted, disturbed, and powerfully affected, sometimes all at once.
LEE BOUDREAUX ON SING FOR YOUR LIFE
Long before I was lucky enough to publish him, I came across Daniel Bergner’s mesmerizing writing in God of the Rodeo which chronicled his unparalleled access to the inmates of Louisiana’s infamous Angola prison. I followed up immediately with In the Land of Magic Soldiers about the horrific civil war in Sierra Leone. Never before had I read someone capable of going to such tormented places and emerging with such a profound understanding of the humanity that unites us all. In Sing for Your Life, Bergner’s empathy, insight, exquisite prose, and gift for articulating the complex and the transcendent (whether that’s a relationship scarred by violence or the ancient art of coaxing beautiful sounds from the strange physiognomy of the human head) have found a perfect subject in Ryan Speedo Green, a supernova of charisma and talent. I hope his story, one as timely as it is triumphant, will leave you on your feet, cheering for an encore.
_____________
Over the course of her career, Lee Boudreaux has published a diverse list of titles, including Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, Smith Henderson’s Fourth of July Creek, Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles, Ron Rash’s Serena, Jennifer Senior’s All Joy and No Fun, Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep, and David Wroblewski’s The Sto
ry of Edgar Sawtelle, among many others.
For more information about forthcoming books, please go to
leeboudreauxbooks.com.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Daniel Bergner
Lee Boudreaux Books
Newsletters
Copyright
* * *
This is a work of nonfiction. Names have been changed for three minor characters: Barry, Trevor, and Terrence Coleman.
* * *
Copyright © 2016 by Daniel Bergner
Cover design by Julianna Lee
Cover photographs by Shutterstock