Opera and perseverance

I’m about as non-musical as a person can be. I can’t tell Beyonce from a bass fiddle or a minor chord from a high c. I listen to very little music and like even less of it. My efforts to change that have, dare I say, fallen flat, allegrissimo. But I’ve always had a soft spot for opera.

Maybe that’s how I found myself reading Sing for Your Life, the beautifully written and unlikely story of Ryan Speedo Green, the rising young bass-baritone who has sung with the Metropolitan Opera and the Vienna State Opera.

Reading Sing for Your Life is what got me watching this extremely unusual version of The Barber of Seville. Both are examples of persistence and perseverance to an almost-mad degree. Even for total non-opera fans, there are two outstanding stories here.

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It’s hard to become a black opera star. The black people who do make it in opera tend to be from cultured backgrounds, at least middle class, and to begin training very, very early. It’s tougher when you’re Ryan Speedo Green (and yes, he was named after the athletic gear brand). Not only was his background horrific, but he was pretty horrific until, as an adolescent headed down a catastrophic path, he decided to remake himself.

At that point, remaking himself didn’t include even the thought of opera because, aside from that being a foreign realm, nobody, including he himself, had the foggiest idea he could sing. When he got into a state-run arts high school (mainly to avoid the grim alternative of the school nearest his home), the people who admitted him later admitted that he made no big impression on them. He could carry a tune, they said. But he got in only because they were required to take a certain number of students from every district and his district didn’t have much competition.

What usually comes next in the Hollywood version of a story like this is that overnight, some mentor or the greater public recognizes this awesome hidden talent and all is bright lights, contract offers, and standing ovations. But that’s not what Sing for Your Life, or Green’s life, is about.

Yes, he went on to become one of five winners of the Met’s 2011 national competition for young talents. And yes, after that the Met granted him a fellowship. But from the moment he hit that arts high school, he continued (and I’m guessing, continues) to butt his very large head against terrible obstacles. His pre-Met training was second rate. He had no solid musical knowledge. His stage presence could be wooden. His pronunciation of foreign languages was so abysmal that even when the Met was showcasing him to other opera companies, one European scout objected, “Surely you can’t expect us to book that?”

He just had this big voice and this big personality that kept taking him to the next level. But at every level, he had to fight, primarily against his own deficits.

In the Met competition, his biggest hit was “La calunnia è un venticello” (Evil gossip is a gentle breeze) from the opera buffa The Barber of Seville. But you can get an idea how much work he had ahead of him by comparing his 2011 amateur version to this brilliant performance by Robert Lloyd. (The aria, which starts about two minutes in on the Lloyd version, is sung by the conniving Don Basilio, who recommends spreading nasty rumors to destroy Our Hero Count Almaviva; the rumors, he says, begin as a tiny breath of wind and end up having the fatal impact of “un colpe di cannone” — the booming report of a cannon, which you can hear in the singer’s voice no matter what language you speak.)

Green has one of those voices that develop over time. He still has a ways to go. Amazing story, well written — and well-lived.

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And reading that reminded me that I’d always wanted to see a full performance of The Barber of Seville. Although there must be a quintillion productions of it on film, my pickins were slim. The two versions Netflix listed seemed like they might be mediocre. So it was off to the library system’s website, which showed exactly one Barber DVD, a 2009 performance from the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. Well, good enough. I’ll take it.

I had no idea I’d be looking at another study in monumental persistence against the odds.

It turned out that on opening night (not the night this was filmed) soprano Joyce DiDonato, dashing across the stage while singing her big aria “Una voce poco fa” … faceplanted. She knew immediately she’d done something awful to her leg, but didn’t learn until late that night, after hobbling through the rest of her performance with a crutch, that she’d broken it. The doctor who put on her cast ordered that under absolutely no circumstances was she to put a bit of weight on that leg. It was wheelchair time for her.

And there they were, not only with more performances ahead but a scheduled filming for Virgin Classics. And with big operas, you don’t get do-overs. Besides, this opera was packed with international superstars who might not ever be together again. What to do?

She and the rest of the cast and the crew and the directors debated. Bring in a replacement? Bring in someone to act the part while DiDonato sang offstage? Nothing seemed right. Then when she got to the theater the next day, she found that the opera house staff had provided not a standard wheelchair for her, but one made for athletes: that is agile and highly maneuverable. She realized then that she could play her role in a chair.

So on this DVD, one of the three lead parts is the spirited and angry Rosina, pacing in a wheelchair and sporting a great big old cast covered in a hot pink bandage (Rosina is totally a hot pink character). And DiDonato makes it work beautifully because Rosina is a trapped, imprisoned, angry character determined to break free, and the limitation of being confined to a wheelchair emphasizes her burning frustration.

The accomplishment is even bigger than that because of the way the performance was designed. It didn’t use the actual opera house stage, but a second stage, raised two feet high and canted toward the audience. Which she could not access, let alone act upon. Think about that: DiDonato, the female lead, couldn’t even get on the stage where the other characters performed virtually all the action. All she had was a tiny strip of the main stage just above the orchestra pit, where she faced the very real prospect of falling onto the musicians if she made a wrong turn with the chair. Not only did she have to perform this awesome feat of improvisation, but all the other singers had to change their performances to interact with her and some scenes had to be re-staged to work at all. Yet it works. All of it. (And that despite a bit too much comic mugging and weirdly modern sets.) It’s kind of neat that this “flawed” staging of The Barber is immortalized now. BTW, the singing is boffo and it’s got a glorious, rascally, macho, convivial Figaro.

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My point here is not just to applaud brilliant people who worked hard for their achievements and triumphed. Or to natter about opera, a subject on which my ignorance is deep and wide. It’s to praise persistence against the odds. I stand on the sidelines to sing (gods forbid, you wouldn’t want me to do that) write my praises because persistence is a trait I generally lack. Or had to learn very late. So I admire — and value — it all the more.

My one big regret about my life is that I bought into the silly idea that “talent is everything” and if you’re not just whiz-bang good at something from the very beginning, you should give it up rather than embarrass yourself with your mediocrity.

Of course there are plenty of people in the world who persist and persist and really, truly, totally, forever suck at whatever it is they’re trying to accomplish. I always looked at those poor examples and thought, “Oh please, spare me from being like that.” Or, if I were trying to do something great and an obstacle faceplanted in my path, I’d be, “Ohhhh, I’m doooooomed. These terrible things always happen to me, boo hoo boo hoo!” It took me a long, long, looooooong time to recognize obstacles as opportunities.

Much, much better to have thought like Ryan Speedo Green or Joyce DiDonato and friends. Awesome people, both. And I can tell you that that book and that performance of The Barber are pretty awesome, too.