Stand Tall and Find the Light
Janice L. Mayer
The smallish plane, friendly flight attendants and the warm cookies with the chocolate still goopy and runny was a sure sign that I was leaving New York and headed to the Midwest. The stunning sycamore trees with their ghost-like white-painted bark, and the flat expanses of russet-colored dirt were clues that I was in Kansas.
I was told that fog rolls over the plateaus between the airport and Lawrence in the mornings, but the only evidence of Pfog when I arrived in Lawrence were the banners heralding “March Madness” and honoring Pfog Allen and the 39-year tenure of the famed coach of the legendary KU Basketball team, the Jayhawks. KU enters the NCAA playoffs as the defending champion. Leading this year’s team are the 6-foot, 9-inch twin brothers: Marcus and Markieff Morris. They grow ‘em tall in Kansas!
But everything seems tall in Kansas to me; take the state flower, for instance – sunflowers. They’re majestic stalks with bright glowing faces turned to the sun. They stand 6 feet tall and find the light!
And there is the “Statuesque” mezzo-soprano who invited me to visit Kansas; Joyce Castle who grew up in the metropolis of Baldwin City. While maintaining her international-level career, she also serves as Professor of Voice at KU, her alma mater. Joyce Castle so embodies the word ‘statuesque’ that composer Jake Heggie and librettist Gene Scheer composed a chamber cycle for her with that very title (released on Americus records as a benefit for Classical Action: Performing Arts Against AIDS). I was there to work with 21 graduate students in voice at KU, and advise them how to best prepare their audition materials and select their repertoire for entry into the professional world. One of John Stephens’ students (bass and head of KU’s voice department) was Matt Haney, a strapping guy from a football-playing family who was in transition from baritone to tenor repertoire. He may be a heldentenor – and surprisingly not the first one to hail from Kansas. Dodge City’s James King was one of the most prominent American heldentenors. Among this Metropolitan Opera artist’s many recordings is the 1965 DECCA disc of Die Walküre (with Birgit Nilsson and Hans Hotter, conducted by Sir Georg Solti) and the Deutsche Grammophon Parsifal with Dame Gwyneth Jones, conducted by Pierre Boulez. Internationally renowned soprano and Professor of Voice at Indiana’s Jacobs School of Music, Patricia Wise of Wichita recalls a performance with James King, “back in about 1976 when I began my 15 years at the Vienna State Opera, I was singing in a performance of Ariadne to a sold-out audience of Viennese Strauss lovers. At the end of the performance, the cast lined up in front of the curtain after the solo bows. Looking down the row of my smiling colleagues I saw three more Kansans: James King (Bacchus), Janice Martin (Ariadne) from Salina, and Barry McDaniel (Harlekino) from Prairie Village.”
And then there’s Samuel Ramey, the most recorded bass in history – from Colby, Kansas which is 400 miles west of Lawrence and almost on the Colorado border. Mezzo Joyce DiDonato – last year’s Beverly Sills Award recipient at the Metropolitan Opera – may be petite in stature, but her career is HUGE. Born in Prairie Village, KS she has already appeared at Houston Grand Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago and San Francisco Opera here in the United States and at La Scala, the Paris Opera, and in Berlin, Munich and Vienna among many other international venues. Her peers from Kansas include soprano, Maria Kanyova and baritone, Daniel Belcher and the list goes on…
So what is it about Kansas that it has generated so many important American opera singers? If it’s the water, South Dakota should irrigate because I can think of only one or maybe two Valhalla-destined singers from The Mount Rushmore State. I was curious so I asked some of the native sons and daughters: the Joyces – Castle and DiDonato, baritone David Holloway of Gas City, Kansas (who is the Director of the Santa Fe Opera Apprentice Program and Head of Voice at the Chicago College of Performing Arts ), Patricia Wise and Sam Ramey.
Interestingly Joyce Castle and David Holloway both report having made their debuts as singers at the age of three – yup 3! Neither can remember the occasion, but second-hand accounts from siblings have Joyce singing “God Bless America” in church with her mother accompanying her and David relates “I have been told, though I have only a vague memory, that I sang from the back of a truck with my sister, Ruth, playing piano, “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah” at some community gathering.” Well, starting young surely gives one an advantage. Joyce Castle continued on to portray Little Red Riding Hood herself in school when the cute little Shirley Temple-clone actually cast in the part fell ill – an “All About Eve” moment, perhaps? Joyce was already too tall and not blonde, but that did not hold her back. She remembers a standing-room-only crowd in the school gym – exciting stuff! Later she found her real mezzo repertoire as the Wicked Stepmother in ‘Snow White.’
Sam Ramey’s debut was as Nanki-Poo in The Mikado as a high school junior – yes Nanki Poo, not the Mikado. He laughed and said, “they thought that the best singer in the school should have the male lead, so they transposed all of the songs down for me.” And then senior year, he was cast as the Scarecrow in that Kansas classic Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz.
Patricia Wise and Joyce DiDonato also began singing in church choir – a commonality among the ladies. Patricia’s start was as American as apple pie. Her father was the bass in a Barber Shop Quartet and “we were blessed in those days with the Community Concert Series which brought to our small high school auditorium the Vienna Boys Choir, Rise Stevens, and other great performers from the world of classical music. But no opera in El Dorado. We moved to Great Bend, KS. (not far from James King’s home town) and my voice teacher there gave me arias like Quando m’en vo, Un bel di (!), which I thought were amazingly beautiful and emotional. There I performed my first stage role, Yum Yum in our high school choir’s presentation of The Mikado. (We now have a ‘little list’ of young artists launched by The Mikado!) I fell in love with singing and acting at the same time. Still no opera. Later, as a sophomore at Kansas University where I studied with Miriam Stewart Green (she often spoke of her talented student, Joyce Castle) and was accompanied in lessons by David Holloway, I tried out for the chorus of Madame Butterfly (the Pinkerton, Edward Sooter later sang lead roles at the Met). At rehearsals when I wasn’t on stage, I went out into the darkened hall and cried my eyes out listening to the beautiful music so expressive of this tragic story. I was hooked! The next year I tried out for Santa Fe Opera’s apprentice program (singing Sempre libera for John Crosby and John Moriarty) and found myself having to choose between going to the Miss Kansas beauty pageant that summer or playing the role of Clorinda the ugly sister in Cenerentola at Santa Fe. The choice I made set me on my way to a 35-year international opera and concert career.” And it doesn’t get more American than having the Miss America pageant in the mix at the start of one’s career, does it?
Joyce DiDonato’s stand-out moment as a young performer was pretty high-brow: “I think it was singing my first solo, “That yonge child” in Britten’s Ceremony of Carols with the sophomore girls chorus. That piece was very challenging, and we were (dare I say it) amazing!!! And Going to “State Choir” in Wichita as a senior was one of the highlights of my entire 4 years in high school!”
By the time they were seniors in high school Patricia Wise, Joyce Castle, David Holloway and Sam Ramey were all studying piano. Joyce’s mother taught her and her sister for one year beginning at age five and then turned them over to the local piano teacher. Joyce is so proficient that she believes she is the only actress to perform her own onstage piano part in Weill’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. Patricia Wise began studying piano at age seven and was playing violin in the school orchestra at age 14. Why violin too? “Because carrying a violin case to school looked cool in those days.”
An excellent musician, Patricia looks back on her first performing accomplishment as “earning 1’s in piano state competitions for solo performance. As a member of our local student music club in junior high, I presented a short program of American folk songs; it was my first public performance as a singer,” she added. David said “father and my older sister played piano and, therefore, I sat down at an early age and started playing by ear the music that I was hearing from them. I didn’t have a good sense of harmony or anything, so I mostly played a melody along with whatever I made up as the harmony, but it was definitely by ear. My parents started me on piano when I was 5, and I basically took lessons up through graduate school. So I can truly say that piano is what took me out of Gas City, Kansas.” Sam’s mother always wanted him to study piano as a child, and at one point they had a piano in the house “because someone needed a place to store it for a year or so.” Sam balked, but did begin to study in high school because he intended to major in music in college and “thought he should get a jump on it.”
For Miss Castle and Mr. Holloway it was off to University of Kansas and for Sam it was Kansas State for 2 years until “I ran out of money and laid out for a year.” (Sam later finished his degree at Wichita State which had a more active performance program than Kansas State.) However it was his music teacher at Kansas State who introduced him to an aria from what would become a signature role: Figaro’s Non più andrai. Sam went to a record store (Remember record stores???) and flipped through the bins until he found a recording of Enzio Pinza singing opera arias. He would often go to the library to listen to opera records. One day he heard that Central City hired young singers for the chorus. The local radio station let him make a tape to send in to be considered and he was hired in the summer of 1963. The repertoire “was great for basses that summer: Norman Treigle and Richard Cross alternated as Don Giovanni, Spiro Malas was a Leporello and Justino Diaz was the Commendatore. I had never seen an opera before I was actually in one.” The Metropolitan Opera broadcasts were David Holloway’s introduction to opera and for Joyce DiDonato it was PBS telecasts that enticed her. “My father attended the Lyric Opera of Kansas City, but he never did convince me to go with him. I relied on the PBS Met broadcasts. I wasn’t quite mature enough to focus for the radio broadcast alone, but watching it as well really hooked me.” Joyce Castle was “hooked” too – at a performance of La bohème at the Lyric Opera of Kansas City. “My sister was already in college and she and her friends invited me to go to the opera in Kansas City with them. I remember it vividly. We sat in the balcony and Jan Peerce sang – it was very exciting!”
But all this Italian, wasn’t it forbidding as a young Midwesterner, I asked? Sam Ramey admits that it was “daunting” at first to think of learning whole operas in another language. Conversely Patricia Wise recalls, “If anything, the foreign language element was an enticement to opera appreciation. Certainly too, I had a huge curiosity about all things foreign. And I have been an avid reader since first grade. In the 50s and 60s in Kansas, there was little exposure to other languages. But my father was a salesman of oil well drilling supplies, and he often told of German communities in western Kansas where people spoke with accents and odd sentence structure.” Joyce Castle had a grandmother who was Czech and heard her speak in her native language. “I wanted to find out what it meant and I was curious about other cultures. When I started my career and moved to Paris, I had only taken one semester of French. I knew I had to study more and so I lived in Paris for six years and then lived in Berlin to study German as well.”
David Holloway’s experience was similar and he ended up living abroad for a number of years. “My High School; Iola, Kansas High School, only offered Latin as a language when I was there, and I took it one year. I have to say, however, that my parents, especially my mother, were very interested in the “outside” world and we frequently had visitors from Asia, Europe, and South America through our local Methodist church, so that I grew up with a lot of curiosity about other lands and other people. I always wanted to perfect languages and learn them and communicate with other people in other lands through them. That longing has never changed with me. Today, I still think in German, frequently, after spending 10 years there singing, and because we have many friends there. We also have many friends in Italy, and I can think in Italian, and in France, and we correspond with them in their languages. It is clear that something else had taken over with me and my family. We have maintained our friendships and even expanded them since returning to the US in 1991. As a matter of fact, we have had 4 different German students live with us, one of them for 4 years, while she studied at Roosevelt University.
The profession of singing is a profession about opening yourself up to languages and other people and other ways of “seeing” things. It is the aspect of the profession that I stress the very most in my teaching. I try to help young singers connect in a personal way with the texts of the works that they are singing. There is no more universal way of communication in the world than through opera and song.”
Joyce DiDonato’s incentive to achieve fluency was the universal language of food. “I don’t know that I was easily drawn to other languages, it was more a necessity to become a singer, so I dove in that way. Once I started traveling and catching glimpses of the culture, then I was completely enthralled in learning the language. To be honest, you can order better food that way, if you know how to speak to the restaurant owners!”
All agree that today aspiring singers have a much easier time hearing and seeing opera because of the HD transmissions, You Tube, streaming and the internet access that simply wasn’t available when they were growing up. “They have the world at their fingertips now with cd’s and dvd’s and You Tube! Everything is at their disposal – so I say it just depends on how hungry they are. If they have a large enough appetite nothing will hold them back from making their way – but they may have to get creative along the way!” says Miss DiDonato. Miss Wise adds “But I don’t think we should underestimate the power of real drama. We tend to think only of comic opera when introducing children to opera. Kids today are used to violence and strong emotions in the media. I think they would love stronger stuff. And opera is about the un-enhanced power of the human voice depicting strong emotions. The fact that one person can “throw” her voice out there over a 60-90 piece orchestra without a mike should not go unnoticed or unappreciated.” A new operaphile is encouraged by Joyce DiDonato to “listen, listen, listen – and GO! Attend the opera, search out the HD Movies on the weekend, get the dvd’s and GO to your local theater! We need the support, and there is nothing equal to experiencing it LIVE!”
Abundant talent and outsized enthusiasm for opera coming from the middle of the country may seem really incredible. “Although Kansas is known more for its wheat than its corn, maybe it is the grain we eat or ate,” suggests Patricia Wise. “But seriously, there was a long tradition of making our own music because so much of the rural territory was too far from any cultural center. I recognized this fact in college when I wrote a paper on the subject for a music education class. Also, since 1935 until today, the Midwestern Music and Art Camp established by band director Russell L. Wiley, music has been nurtured on the campus of Kansas University, attracting the finest young musicians and artists from all over Kansas and America for six weeks of music making in choruses and orchestras. There for two summers I was introduced as a teenager to Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Orff, and many other masters of classical music. The “camp” was made up of young people (including a young baritone named David Holloway) who loved making music, and they had little competition from sports or modern technology. Some years later when I was living in New York and performing leading roles at City Opera (often with Sam Ramey as my Figaro or Raimondo or Basilio), I had a cocktail party for college acquaintances from KU in Lawrence who were also living in or around the city. There were twenty friends from my class and a year or two before who were making their living as performers in the city. Quite a crop that year from the fruitful plains of Kansas!
And perhaps, as Joyce Castle posits, it truly is a result of “long, hot, peaceful summers in the backyard where we made up plays – there was lots of room for imagination. And you have to have quiet to get your own creativity working. With the wide-open spaces in Kansas you’re freer to be imaginative and you can let your voice go a very long way.”
All of these Kansas vocalists have come a very long way down their own yellow brick roads and have helped to advance the art form and build American audiences for opera. Many thanks to Patricia Wise, Joyce Castle, Joyce DiDonato, David Holloway and Samuel Ramey for sharing their stories.