Interview, Michael Spyres

Over the past five years or so, the self-taught Missouri-born tenor Michael Spyres has established himself as one of the most exciting and unusual voices on the international bel canto circuit: like his compatriot Bryan Hymel, he combines a big heroic sound with clarion high notes and vocal flexibility to rival the likes of Juan Diego Flórez, and has recently been making waves in the French dramatic repertoire that most tenors can't or won't sing. Given Opera Rara's reputation for championing both obscure nineteenth-century works and the emerging singers who can do them real justice, it was perhaps inevitable that this artist and this label would prove to be a match made in heaven, with Spyres's stupendous performance on their 2014 recording of Donizetti's Les martyrs cementing the reputation of singer and work alike. He returned to the studio for the similarly stratospheric role of Henri de Bruges in Opera Rara's latest bit of musical excavation, Le duc d'Albe, and was game enough to nip over from Paris (where he was singing Mitridate) on the Eurostar to make an appearance at the recording's recent lunchtime launch in London, where he spoke most affectionately about Opera Rara's role in his career to date and almost raised the roof of the Coliseum's crush-bar with a stentorian top E in an excerpt from Les martyrs!

I met up with him for coffee afterwards to find out more about his unusual career-path as a singer and the French heroic repertoire which really makes him tick…

How similar are the vocal demands of the two roles you've just recorded for Opera Rara: Henri in Le Duc d'Albe and Polyeucte in Les Martyrs?

Actually really quite similar – they were both written for the famous tenor Gilbert Duprez, who overtook Adolphe Nourrit at the Paris Opera, and for whom Berlioz also wrote [Benvenuto] Cellini). Vocally it feels very much the same: you have to have that heroic middle voice but you also have to be able to do a full voix mixte up to Ds and E flats…There are a few Ds written, and we interpolated a few E flats!

The plot of Le Duc d'Albe is very closely related to that of Verdi's Les vêpres siciliennes - do you notice any similarities in terms of the vocal writing for the hero, Henri, in both operas?

Absolutely. The big thing that I’ve noticed with this particular type of writing, especially Donizetti and Rossini, is what they did dramatically to push forward the vocal writing when they moved from Italy to France: when you sing and study the score, you really notice that for the most part any of the dramatic scenes are going to be written a step or two full steps above what they used to write in Italy, because it keeps the singer completely on edge…If you look at how they wrote during the bel canto period, it’s almost all beautiful low-middle voice, then you have a couple of high notes. Everyone has this myth of bel canto as being the highest repertoire, and it’s not even close to the truth! It’s perfectly written for the voice, and you can interpolate high notes depending on the [individual] voice, but with this kind of writing that Donizetti and Rossini did when they came to France, it was all about excitement and about revolution: Le Duc d’Albe wasn’t allowed to be produced in Italy, and even Vêpres had to be switched. Everyone just had to go against the church at that time in order to get things produced, and you can really tell that there is this anger in the writing – as a singer, you have to keep that calmness in terms of the technique but for the most part the writing is just constantly on the edge and you don’t know if you’re going to make it!

You can’t keep everything full voice like you can with bel canto singing where you can really keep the larynx down and the sound beautiful - with this repertoire it’s like you’re constantly ready to fight! A lot of people think ‘Oh, they didn’t know how to write for the voice’, but it’s simply not true: they wrote for brilliant people who knew their voices really well, and the reason they wrote as they did was for the drama. It’s like when recently I heard Lady Gaga doing a tribute to David Bowie (and she was AMAZING, she’s singing all the notes he sang) but there was no drama there – none of the sense of a voice at its limits that you got with Bowie!

Your voice has attracted attention for its unusual combination of characteristics: an almost baritonal weight and colour in the lower and middle registers, combined with an agility and freedom at the very top that we usually associate with much lighter tenors. Which came first?

I started as a baritone, and then when I started having lessons I learned to open up the nasal passages - I had a teacher for two years and he was the only real teacher that I had, from 19 to 21. He was one of these natural tenors, and he thought I might be a tenor, and my reaction was ‘Come on man, there’s no way!’ My first arias and roles that I learned were bass-baritone roles [Michael then sings me part of Leporello’s 'catalogue aria' from Don Giovanni, superbly!], and it was really easy to make that sound, but it’s detrimental to your voice until you learn really where things should lie, and that to me was the biggest problem because I was essentially an autodidact. My whole family are singers, my sister’s a Broadway singer, and I’ve been singing my entire life – it was just second nature to me and the easiest thing in the world was to sing baritone and musical theatre repertoire, but then opera was a big challenge. I could fake high notes, but for years I couldn’t sing above a G other than in falsetto. It took me well over six years to stand up and say ‘I am a tenor!’

It wasn’t a Eureka! moment. It took years, because the hardest thing about letting go and becoming a tenor is that you have so little control and you get so little back. It feels like you’re just barely singing when you’re singing correctly as a tenor, but with baritone you can feel it in your upper chest, and it feels so great, like a good friend. And it’s so hard to give that up. The sound has to go out to [the audience] and you get nothing! (Well, eventually you get paid more than everybody else!) But it’s a disassociation of emotion, to be honest, because you don’t get that immediacy of a sound-wave and the rush of feeling that you get in even the high baritone roles.

Until about 1850s, baritones and tenors didn’t really exist. There was a lower spectrum of baritones and a higher spectrum of baritones, everybody had the same (and to be honest everybody DOES have) nearly the same vocal range, of just about three and a half octaves – but the problem is that barely anybody knows how to get to the extremes. And it wasn’t until the 1850s and 1860s, when orchestrations started becoming bigger and bigger along with this need for immediacy of emotion, that they started to realise that the whole fach system had to come into play. I think that certain fach systems might be true scientifically, but barely anybody understands technique so they end up singing the wrong repertoire, and that’s one of the biggest problems nowadays – people are in the same boat that I was in for years. The funny thing is that if you look at some of the greatest teachers and singers of all time – the first one that comes to mind is Manuel García, he was famous for singing the really high crazy stuff that Rossini wrote for him (a lot of the things that people associate with Juan Diego Flórez now), but García was also a very famous Don Giovanni! That’s how wide-ranged people were, even up until the late 1800s – there were tenors who honestly would sing Ramiro in La Cenerentola and Tristan in the same week, and that’s because people didn’t have this craving for ‘Sing as loud as you can!’: it was all about artistry, and often about keeping it down.

The giant voices, they aren’t allowed to develop nowadays, because younger kids that have these monstrous instruments often have no idea what to do with them – they’re thrown on stage and they blow their voice out. Out of maybe 100 people that I looked at when I was 21 and thought ‘All of these people are going to make it!’, three of them have any kind of career today, because nowadays people don’t realise that Franco Corelli didn’t make his debut on stage till he was 33! The immediacy of career is pushed so much these days, for everybody.

You mentioned being an autodidact – how did this all come together for you, both in terms of consolidating technique and career opportunities?

I quit college after two years, and for the next five years I lived at home with my parents and was a construction worker: I would do that during the day, then practice for eight hours a night! I would literally sing through the entire Schirmer Tenor Aria book – 32 arias, every single day! And it was so interesting to see how all the different types of writing felt…You can get more specialised once you truly understand what your voice can do.

Lindoro (in L’Italiana in Algeri) was my first Rossini role (in Belgrade in 2005) and I would love to do it again, now that I actually know how to sing high! I’m starting to get into the Verdi repertoire, and I’ve done a lot of French grand opera – [Berlioz’s] Cellini is one of the heaviest parts that there is - but the great thing is that I’m coming into a place where people are starting to offer me age-appropriate roles, lots of bel canto and Verdi…I’ve also been offered roles that I’ve had to turn down because you still have to have somewhere to go, and I’ve seen colleagues and friends even younger than me who are already having vocal problems. You should sing oratorio, you should sing lieder, AND you should sing opera - because that’s what everyone did till we got to the last fifty years and people started to get so specialised (‘No, I just sing my five operatic roles!’), and it’s detrimental to the voice to only sing one repertoire. Humans are so dictated by patterns, and we get into bad habits unless we start mixing it up: maybe you realise ‘I’m giving too much on my heavy repertoire’, or maybe you’re singing lots of fast coloratura and realise ‘I’m not singing with my full voice!’. And so once you start going in and out of different rep, even if it’s only for yourself, you will become a complete singer once you realise that you need a little bit of everything!

How did you eventually find your niche with this ‘unsingable’ French repertoire?

It was a gradual thing, because when I moved over to Europe I was 25 I did auditions for about two and a half years and I got nothing! I was living in Vienna and singing in the Schoenberg Choir – I’d been a choral singer for my whole life, my parents are both choral teachers, and my brother’s a choral conductor too – and that’s how I was able to pay for auditions, but after those two and a half years of auditioning as a standard Verdi and Puccini tenor I really wasn’t making any headway. So I thought ‘It’s time to change tack and go with my real passion, and that’s Rossini and Donizetti and a lot of other crazy repertoire that nobody else sings!’ And I knew that there was a possibility of getting into it, but I didn’t know whether there was an actual career. I’d tried every door that I could the normal way, so I auditioned for a festival that I consider has made me what I am today: Rossini in Wildbad.

It’s a small Rossini Festival in Germany that’s about 30 years old: barely anybody knows about this place (I think the town maybe has 10 000 people in it), but basically every Rossini singer that you’ve heard about in the last twenty years came through there and then went to Pesaro. So much unheard music from that time, Cimarosa etc, is being done there! The man who runs it is Jochen Schönleber – I can’t say enough amazing things about him, because he’s got such a passion for this bel canto repertoire, and particularly Rossini. They’re the ones who gave me my first big break, when I did La Gazzetta, back in 2007, and then my first international success was in 2008 doing Otello – that made people go ‘Hey! There’s another American tenor that can do this crazy Rossini stuff!’ and that’s when I started getting offers to do the French grand opera.

I had an incredible experience with Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots in 2009 at a festival in New York called Bard Summerscape, about two hours north of New York City. It’s one of the most incredible festivals ever, because they only do obscure works with period instruments, a little like Opera Rara; we did a 4 hours 45 minute Huguenots, uncut, with original instruments (including two instruments that don’t actually really exist, so they had an expert that modified an instrument and brought it in!). It was then that I realised that I was part of some sort of alternative universe of opera: people are so caught up in the big places (not to knock Covent Garden and the Met, they’re what brings everyone to opera) when really there are so many other careers to be had with these obscure operas. If you can sing them, they’re everywhere!