“Forgetfulness of your real nature is true death; remembrance of it is rebirth.”
– Ramana Maharshi
New York City 2015
Crazy City Conversations (Part 2)
In March of last year, I’d made my retirement from singing all together official. It was my last performance in Utah Opera’s production of “Turandot” that sealed the deal. Although I was over opera after 17 years of never doing it for the love of it but for the love of proving people wrong when they said I couldn’t do it – I’d tried to force myself to keep doing it because I’d invested so much time and money in it and it didn’t feel right to let it go. My musical life in Utah was like the long-dramatic pause after a long-passionate prayer before the final, exhausted “Amen.”
Not being politically affiliated with “the church” after moving to Salt Lake City, it was harder to get real work. The best I could do outside of the Utah Opera was singing in a small non-Mormon church choir for free in exchange for using their building for the students I could never get 2008 post-market-crash. The one student I got arrived without payment. She was broke so I told her she could give me cookies and her famous recipe instead. She didn’t even give me that. I quit the church soon after and quit the opera. Unlike Michael Jordan, I had to know when to stop.
Myself in Utah Opera’s production of Puccini’s “Turandot”
When I’d made the announcement to all of my family and friends and put a big Facebook invitation out to everyone I knew for my last performance, I got a lot of emails expressing confusion, laughing with a “yea right” and “you’re just pulling a dramatic stunt for attention” kind of attitude, and even some bitter hatefulness.
My Greek friend who studied with me in Germany was one from the “confused” camp. We met up in Manhattan for coffee to chat face-to-face for the first time in 10 years. She updated me on how she was living temporarily with her mother, spending almost every paycheck on voice teachers and coaches who convinced her they were worth the price, dangling that carrot of fame and fortune in front of her. She didn’t have the luck I did with experiences (and it IS luck in this case because she is a phenomenal singer) and she was still waiting to have her chance.
And then the inevitable happened. She asked, “So… why did you quit? You seemed like you were doing so well!”
Feeling bad about her situation, I didn’t want to give her the details because I wanted to be sensitive to her struggle. A part of me felt ashamed. I knew I’d have to explain myself to a real colleague one day, I just didn’t realize that it would also be to a good friend.
After explaining that it wasn’t quitting, it was retiring (because there’s a difference), I said, “Eh, you don’t really want to hear all of that,” I said, “Just trust me, it’s what I needed to do.”
“But at least tell me… what brought it on?”
Jokingly, “It is all Renée Fleming’s fault.” (Renée Fleming is considered by many to be one of the world’s most prominent and famous Opera singers today.)
“What!?” She operatically belted and pearl-clutched in the middle of the café, “but I love her!” She stood up and punched her fists down on her Mediterranean hips. “You’d better explain yourself.”
I laughed with a haughty resonance. She joined me as she sat back down in seriousness. “Okay,” I said, “Okay, I’ll tell you.”
We ordered more cappuccinos and chocolate croissants and I started from the beginning…
I really don’t understand why it happened – and I really didn’t understand while it happened how it started; this whole, being an opera singer thing.
Marching up the stairs to the Boston Conservatory of Music, covered in 2 feet of post-blizzard snow, in a suit, carrying re-crisped sheet music that got soaked when dropped in the slushy street and refroze, I hit a wall. I didn’t care anymore. Five times auditioning for the Aspen Music Festival (the summer school for Juilliard) and this was the first time they asked me to audition in person. It wouldn’t matter now. They’re already familiar with me as the guy who won’t stop auditioning. I was also getting close to aging out. There was an age limit for auditioning for this sort of thing.
It is all Renée Fleming’s fault.
Many years ago, when I first even found out I could sing opera, I had just been accepted as the youngest member of the Chicago Symphony Chorus. Suddenly, I found myself taking myself too seriously (it happened to the best of us). I started going to the opera and symphony and studied like crazy to “know what I was talking about” – forcing my brain to age like I was a fine wine for my wealthy benefactors to invest in. (You should ask me some time about the Sicilian mafia man and his Eastern European princess wife.)
My first visit to the opera since my life had gone light speed into high classical was Verdi’s “Macbeth” starring Renée Fleming and Ben Heppner. Other than being pushed to emotion by the bombastic orchestra like an hyper-active preacher trying to pull out an Amen from a non-believer, I was fairly indifferent. I was spending the whole time memorizing the program so that I would know what I was talking about later. Ben Heppner, Otello, 500 pound Canadian in Black Face* … blablabla… Sir Andrew Davis, conductor, King’s College graduate with a poodle named “Winnie”… blabla… Renée Fleming, Desdemona, crooning soprano, Juilliard, blaa… Aspen Music Festival and School. Hmmm.
The curtains rose again. Renée had just finished some kind of argument and was getting ready for bed. She starts praying the Hail Mary, “Ave Maria, piena di grazia (Ave Maria, full of grace)…” she moves slowly to the front of the stage “prega per noi (pray for us)” where it goes dark and she is singing on the edge of the stage in front of a lit candle. “…Ness’ora della morte (…in the hour of our death).” It goes silent, the conductor holds the silent rest for a lifetime and you could hear a pin drop and feel the audience holding their breath. “A…mmmmen.” I could hear grown men blubbering and feel the goose-bumps on the woman sitting next to me. The crowd erupted in standing ovation. It was beautiful, yes. But what I was REALLY impressed with? …the power over the audience. Sucking the Amens out of a theater crammed with stuffy, unemotive, rich WASPy, unbelieving retirees. My father could barely do that, and he was a great Baptist preacher!
Google: Juilliard. (Read) Yea, right…
Google: Aspen Music Festival and School. (Read) I can do that, maybe.
That January was my first audition, the next year it was February, the next year it was April, the next two years I took hiatus in Germany (where I read in her memoire about a headhunter in New Guinea that her grandfather helped capture after he stole a nurse’s head -and take a picture of before executing him -and I wrote her about the same picture that my grandfather had -and her agent wrote me to say “how interesting” -Okay, so it was morbid -but auditions are a little bit like head-hunting), the next year I was moving, the following year it was March, and this year was January again.
Waking up early in my brother’s house, I had drunken and entire pot of coffee watching the news and listening on the radio for all of the school and road closures. While my brother shoveled out the driveway, I looked frantically for a phone number to find out if the auditions had been cancelled or not. Eventually, I didn’t care. We left anyway. Despite taking an hour to get to the school, driving 10 miles an hour down the highway, I arrived early. The sidewalk and stairs had not been cleared, still suffocating under too many blankets of snow.
When I walked through the heavy oaten doors of the conservatory, I shook the knee-high snow off my Men’s Warehouse trousers and looked around in the dark for a sign of young musicians drowning in pre-audition neurosis. Ahead, down the hallway, there was a little Korean girl sitting at a desk with a small desk light reading a piece of paper. “Excuse me,” I echoed down the hall, “are the auditions for Aspen here?”
Not looking up, “yes, they are.”
“Oh good,” a started walking toward her, “how long is the wait?”
“There is no wait,” she said, “no one else has shown up today.”
“Oh, okay.”
She showed me where to hang up my coat and warm up my voice before I went in. When I went into the audition room, which appeared to be carved out of a single piece of wood, there was no one there. I walked up to the tiny makeshift platform of a stage where the piano was and put my materials on the stand. In walks the pianist. “Would you like to do a run-through really quick,” he asked, “before the maestro get’s here?”
“The maes…? … uh… sure!”
I hand him his music and right as we were about to start, in walks Edward Berkeley, the big wig of Juilliard opera, The Metropolitan Opera, and many theaters all over the world. “Let’s get started, shall we?”
Well, shit. I give up. This just isn’t going to work.
I instantly relax in resignation. I sing through German and French Arias and polish it off with the ever eerie child-abusing ghost song from Benjamin Britten’s “Turn of the Screw” (easily the hardest thing I ever sang). Apparently the “maestro” appreciated it. He moved me on to the monologue round. (If they don’t like you, they tend to dismiss you before.)
I began, completely indifferent by this point, my lines from the now over-done “Raised in Captivity” by Nicky Silver. I was describing a childhood experience at a birthday party with a clown.
Shakes the Clown (1991)
“At three o’clock, the entertainment arrived. A clown: Mr. Giggles… He was old. His skin was the texture and non-color of white raisins.” Mr. Berkeley began judging me over the top of his glasses. I decided to spruce up the energy a bit and started moving around the stage, “Mr. Giggles thought some singing might rouse us from our collective coma. He sang ‘A Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall.’ Only we were ten, so he sang ‘A Hundred Bottles of Milk on the Wall’…” Ed wasn’t budging! “And then…I could take it no more. I just stopped. I lay down, put my head on the earth and shut my eyes. Well, Mr. Giggles ran over and knelt down and sang right at me, loud, shouting more than singing really. Screaming right at me: ‘EIGHTY-TWO BOTTLES OF MILK ON THE WALL! EIGHTY-TWO BOTTLES OF MILK!’…” Clearly, there was no impressing this man. I decided right then and there that this was the last time I was going to audition for them, because CLEARLY, this wasn’t going to happen, so I decided to have fun with it. “…Giggles flapped his arms like spastic birds and lost the count completely: ‘FIFTY-TWO BOTTLES OF MILK ON THE WALL! FORTY-EIGHT BOTTLES OF MILK!’ And then he fell over in a sad, wet, broken-pencil heap.” The maestro stopped paying attention at this point and begin writing on his sheet. We clearly had both given up. So I finished with a bang. “’He’s dead,’ I whispered. Bernadette shrieked and ran in horror from the yard…” I jumped off the stage… “and into the street, where a bread truck swerved to avoid her…” I raised my arms above my head… “and ran headlong into a mammoth oak tree, shaking from its perch our cat,…” stomping toward the auditor’s desk, “which fell to an ugly,…” stomp stomp stomp “bloody…” stomp stomp “death,…” STOMP “impaled by the truck’s antenna and…” slamming my hands on the desk in front of him “SPLATTERED on the windshield.”
I was huffing in a soaked belabored operatic breath, half sweat – half melted snow. Standing up slowly, I tugged down on my jacket to straighten the shoulders and fixed my posture back to dignity. I slowly and silently walked over to the platform where I grabbed my papers off the music stand, ever so briefly glancing at the look of horror on the accompanist’s face, and slimed out the side door. As soon as the door shut, the two real artists burst into laughter.
Fast forward three months…
“Dear Bryan, Congratulations! You have been accepted into [this year’s] opera season at the Aspen Music Festival and School.”
Well, slap my mama and call me Sally!
That summer, I was the tenor in all productions and recitals and master classes for all Benjamin Britten operas. I was on cloud nine. On my drive out there, my musical journey flashed before my eyes. Singing as the singing hymnbook, Psalty, in blue tights in 3rd grade to the youngest member of the Chicago Symphony Chorus, having Placido Domingo’s wife tell me I had a “beautiful instrument,” to singing on National television for a Ronald Regan tribute at a nascar opening ceremony (not my proudest moment- but another great story) living in Germany, and now studying with the Grammy Award winning opera diva Jane Eaglen and now singing on the stage of the Aspen Music Festival.
And then it happened.
I was sitting on a couch in the middle of a Juilliard version of a frat party. Champagne was being drunken in Dixie red cups, students snorting cocaine on the back deck overlooking the pool of the million dollar man who invented the sticker that goes on fruit. As I uncramped my face from attempting to restrain my judging face at the incredibly famous violinist next to me hitting on an obviously under-aged girl, in walks what people at “that level” referred to as “Ne-ne.”
It was Renée Fleming with a younger man. They were incredibly casual and I was instantly intimidated. This woman was the reason I was here! (Remind me to tell you how years later she, with a bizarre coincidence, mentioned my grandfather in her memoire.)
However, as the night went along and I spoke with her and observed her – the Champaign ran out and turned into cheap beer and I had sobered up. By the end of the night, I had grown to learn that she does not make nearly as much money as her image portrays her to and she isn’t remotely as happy as I thought I would be if I was in her shoes. To put it simply, she was sad.
In that moment, I finally accepted what my gut had been telling me for years. I asked myself many people do when change is triggered, “is this all there is?” This will not make me happy. This will not be what I was told it would be. I had drunken the Kool-Aid but clearly not enough of it. I had always loved music since I was a child. It had been a great relationship. In this moment, however, I realized that music had become nothing more than a misleading and manipulative lover who dangled before me fame and fortune like a diamond ring that I would never get. It was a horrible one-sided affair but a wonderful life-altering epiphany. I was done.
For the rest of that summer, I was the laziest and most procrastinating student I’d ever been, before or since. When it came time to start preparing my final opera scene of the season, I decided to have some fun with it. I had, after all, been type-casted into the big burly man playing a woman in a play within a play. The comic drag-roll of Flute/Thisbe in Benjamin Britten’s opera on Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
In conjunction with the sentiment of one of my first lines, “Nay, faith, let me not play a woman; I have a beard coming,” I decided to take revenge on the casting, nay, on my career. I prepared the roll as a flaming queen – acting just like Big Gay Al from South Park. I was half dressed as the rich kid who took one of my roles without even auditioning because his parent’s were big donors to the school (pastel sweatshirt over shoulders carrying a large glass bottle of VASA- no exaggeration) and half Maestro, the neurotic director of the program who wore short shorts and knee-high white sox with colorful running shoes to EVERY performance and master class.
When I walked out onto the stage, the audience roared with laughter and the students in the balcony gasped in horror – everyone knew what I was doing (even Antonio Banderas sitting in the 4th row). I began singing like a woman, “Ah Pyramus, my lover dear, thy Thisby dear, and La-!” My voice cracked pubescently. I was suppose to fake it. Not actually crack. Three or four more times I repeated it, each time higher and louder with a harsher crack until finally when I got it, I held it out obnoxiously long, proud that it didn’t crack. “Ah Pyramus, my lover dear, thy Thisby dear, and Lady deeeeeeeeeearrrr…” (Rolled ‘r’ and all.)
I got a huge ovation at the end, and then the maestro walked out onto the stage. This time, the audience gasped. He was nearly wearing the exact same shorts, sox, and shoes that I was. I didn’t notice for a minute or two that my hand was actually covering my mouth.
“Excuse me, ladies and gentleman,” he began speaking to the audience, deliberately and intense. “Being that this is a master class, I shall ask them to do the scene again. This time, Thisby, played by [gesturing toward me] Mr. Almond, will actually be sung like a man. [Turning toward me.] Can you do that Mr. Almond?”
Suryavanshi (1992)
In an intentionally exaggerated low voice, “Yes sir.”
The audience dying as the maestro raises an eyebrow, “Can you handle it, sir?”
I walk to the edge of the stage next to him, put my leg out to the side and my hands on my hips like his and say, hyper butch-voiced, “can you?”
Everyone cracks up, even those on stage. This time even he cracked a smile. That set me at ease and empowered me to perform the scene again as a very butch man who couldn’t play a woman to save his life. I got an even bigger ovation. I went out with a bang but I never saw the maestro again. I later heard that he was very angry at me. I burned that bridge, and most others of my career, that evening with more flaming flames than Savannah in “Gone With the Wind.” I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised. But that was okay because I was never going back.
Many years later, happily no longer singing for my bread, I still get messages from people who were there that night, me being the one thing they remember still to this day.
And it is all Renée Fleming’s fault.
It made me sad as I heard how much my friend had sacrificed (and is still sacrificing) for something that is not giving back to her. In all honesty, I was judging her. The plethora of the do-thises and do-thats that drive the mentally maladjusted opera singer engine were long-gone coveted. She asked me my “professional” opinion on her voice problems and career choices. I gave her honest and uncondescended answers as I wish someone had done for me all those years.
As I walked away that afternoon toward my new job and she walked toward the train to her mother’s house in Jersey, I was ashamed to realize that I had been judging her in the worst way. Instead of putting myself in her shoes, I was putting my shoes on her. It’s an easy mistake to make with someone who was hiking the same strange trail with you for years. I realized that there was a huge difference between she and I. Opera was a slow death for me. I ran to it because I could hide in it – and just because I could. I didn’t know what I wanted so I convinced myself that was it. The day I owned my misery and held myself accountable for everything surrounding my operatic aspirations, the old me died and something else deep within me was finally born. Being true to one’s self is the hardest thing in life for anyone and requires the most bravery.
…On the other hand, she absolutely loved it. She loves the struggle, she loves the journey, she’d be happy singing the rest of her life no matter who she was living with or how much money she was making. She was happier than I ever was singing opera.
Before I could reach out to her and apologize, she sent me a text from her train, “It was so great seeing you again! I just have one question.”
“Okay,” I responded back, “what is it?”
“Do you think I should quit?”
I sunk in embarrassment. Time to salvage myself and let her stay on her path wherever it leads. “Absolutely not!” How in the heck am I suppose to tell her where she should go when I’m still figuring out where I myself should be going? “You love it more than I ever did. Do what you truly love and you’ll be happier for it. You’re far happier than I was and you’re more lovely because of it.”
Her response? “It is all Renee Fleming’s fault. 🙂”
This post is dedicated to my parents for putting up with my operatic shenanigans for 2 decades. Often times, they enjoyed it far more than I did.
I Can't Take Me Anywhere 