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Rodney Gilfry began his 2002-3 season portraying the charismatic but troubled Nathan Landau in the world premiere of Nicholas Maw’s Sophie’s Choice for the Royal Opera-Covent Garden in London. He then traveled to Dallas for the title role in Don Giovanni, a part for which he is justifiably well known. He spends the spring and summer with two great operas from the 17th and 18th centuries, Rameau’s Les Indes Galantes at his former European home company in Zurich, and Monteverdi’s The Return of Ulysses in Munich. In between, there were concert performances of Romberg’s New Moon for City Center Encores! in New York, as well as orchestral engagements, recitals, a cabaret act, and a regular radio show, “Los Angeles Opera Notes on Air.” To some, this variety might seem novel; for the versatile young baritone it is typical of the career he is making for himself.

This month, Mr. Gilfry travels back to London to reprise the role of Stanley Kowalski in two concert performances of André Previn’s A Streetcar Named Desire. USOPERAWEB phoned him recently at his home in Southern California to talk about this and other matters.

First of all, though, we wanted to know about his upbringing and his road to opera. “I was born in Covina, California, and raised in West Covina, which is next door. When I was 12 we moved to Claremont, California, and that’s where we lived until I graduated from high school. My mother was a singer—a soprano. She didn’t sing professionally, but she sang in choirs and for weddings and stuff like that. My father was a music educator for most of his career. He started out as a band and orchestra leader in high school and later at the college level in Washington and Oregon. My parents also owned a music store when I was a young child. They sold it to a friend who gave them musical instruments when he couldn’t make the payments. We had a garage full of instruments and we could take anything and my father would teach us how to play it. I ended up being sort of a minimally trained amateur on a lot of different instruments. And I played a little guitar and bass in a rock band for awhile.

“When I was young I wanted to be a fighter pilot. Then I thought about being an airline pilot, but I knew that most pilots started in the military and that seemed less savory with the Vietnam War going on. In high school I started to get more and more involved in music, singing in the choir and doing musicals. So, I thought I would become a high school music teacher.

“I got my bachelor’s degree in music education at Cal State Fullerton. But the problem was that I kept singing more and more. I was getting major roles in musicals and doing the solos in cantatas and oratorios. I was entering voice competitions and winning them and so everyone was encouraging me to think about being a professional singer. But I kept saying no. I wanted to be a teacher. It was more of a practical thing because I knew I wanted to have a family and I didn’t want to do a lot of traveling. I married the day after I finished got my bachelor’s to a wonderful woman I had done musicals with in high school. She really convinced me to pursue a career as a soloist, telling me this is the time now to try to make it as a singer and that I could always go back to teaching at some later date.

“Then I did a Master’s Degree in Vocal Performance at USC. My most influential teacher was Martial Singher. I had various part time jobs for a few years—working at a music store, cutting glass in a picture-frame factory, driving a furniture truck—things like that. But more and more I was able to support us with my singing.”

Was there a “big break” or a moment when you knew you were on the right path? “One of the things that told me I had something going was getting an agent after I had finished my master’s degree. I had decided to be a concert singer, so that I would be gone primarily on weekends and be home with my family during the week. I remember doing the Bach B-minor Mass at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Master Chorale. I never thought I’d sing with such an auspicious group and I thought, ‘if I can do this, this really says something.’ But, I knew I was a big fish in a small pond in Los Angeles; it’s not like New York where you’ve got hundreds of singers. And I knew that the most well known and successful and highly paid concert singers were actually opera singers who sang concerts. So, I decided I needed to get some operatic experience.

“At that time, the Los Angeles Opera was starting up and they engaged me to do small parts in their first season. One of them was opposite Plácido Domingo in Otello. I also went to Europe to audition and I had offers from the Frankfurt and Hamburg Operas. So I had to decide whether to stay here and try to get into one of the apprentice programs in the U.S. or go to Europe and get on stage and learn by doing. I elected to take a contract in Frankfurt that began in the fall of 1987 and I moved my family over there—by then we had two children. Four days before my debut, the opera house burned down. A lot of people jumped ship, but we stayed. It was very rough. Instead of doing eleven roles my first season, I did only four. But it was still a great experience, even though we had to perform in the playhouse next door. I stayed in Frankfurt for two years and then went to Zurich and sang with the Zurich Opera for five years under contract.”

STELLA!

It was around this time that San Francisco Opera announced its intent to commission André Previn to write an operatic adaptation of Tennessee William’s play, A Streetcar Named Desire. Landing the role of Stanley was a major coup for Mr. Gilfry and one that took his career to a new level. “I had a wonderful manager at the time, Matthew Epstein, who heard San Francisco was planning this. He thought I’d be perfect for it and proposed me. The main thing was convincing André Previn . He had seen me do Billy Budd and we sent him a video of me doing the Count in The Marriage of Figaro. But neither of those is close to Stanley Kowalski. It was very difficult to arrange a meeting because we were never in the same part of the world at the same time. But I happened to be in Vienna doing some concerts with Nikolaus Harnoncourt and I saw a poster announcing that André was going to be conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in a couple of days. I thought he must be rehearsing somewhere, so I walked around the building and heard an orchestra playing. I went into the office and asked if it was André Previn conducting and was told he was. I called my manager, who called Previn’s people and they arranged a breakfast meeting the next day.

“When I went to meet André , I hadn’t shaved for a couple of days and I wore a big, bulky sweater, so I looked kind of tough. I gave him a firm handshake and we sat down to breakfast and I kind of acted like Stanley Kowalski. He seemed to be pleased and convinced that I could play the part. Well, five days later we were both in Washington, DC, where he was being honored as part of the Kennedy Center Honors and I was there as part of the tribute to Marilyn Horne who was also being honored. There was a State Department dinner where we all met and at the reception beforehand I saw André . This time I was wearing a tuxedo and I had shaved, of course, and my hair was blown dry and I looked quite different—more like a young Republican [he laughs]. I walked up to him and said, ‘André , hello. I’d like to introduce you to my wife.’ And he looked and looked at me and it took him a few seconds to realize who I was. He said, ‘Rod, you shaved!’ We talked a little and then I walked away and he continued looking at me. Well, I thought I had blown it and that he was having second thoughts, because I was a totally different person from the one he had met in Vienna. I quickly arranged to get him a videotape of a Don Giovanni I had done in Amsterdam that was really grungy and kind of animalistic. Fortunately he watched it and was reconvinced. He told me later that he had been having second thoughts after he saw me in Washington.

"I really thought this was too good to be true. Of course, nobody had any idea how it might be received. But I was aware of what a great thing it might be. I knew from the beginning that it would be a big feather in my cap to be able to say that I created that role. It was definitely a big step up in my career.”

Learning a brand-new opera poses a unique set of challenges. “I was very excited to get the score, which was all in manuscript. It was quite difficult to read and decipher what the notes were supposed to be. André uses a sharp pencil and his writing is quite small. When I received the score, I looked through it for an aria, but didn’t find one. So I just started from the beginning. I worked on it with some people here in Los Angeles first. The summer before we began rehearsals I was in Glyndebourne doing Capriccio and I asked the rehearsal pianist if she might have time to help me with this new score. It turned out that she was going to be the rehearsal pianist in San Francisco! We spent days working together and it proved to be much more difficult than I had thought it would be. André writes in a way that is not straightforward. I think the trickiest part was that I really didn’t have any melodies to speak of. My part was written in a more declamatory style, which is right for Stanley because he is not a melodic kind of guy; he’s not one to stay on one thought or in one mood for very long, which is the obvious reason for the lack of an aria as well. But, it was very slow learning.

It was inevitable that the opera be compared to Elia Kazan’s classic 1951 film version, starring Vivien Leigh, Kim Hunter, Karl Malden and, of course, Marlon Brando. “I hesitated for the longest time to watch the film. I had never seen it and I didn’t want to see it because I really wanted to create my own character. But, everyone else knew the film and I asked myself if I was being an ostrich with my head in the sand. I realized it would be helpful and in the end I broke down, rented the video. Brando was incredible and I think that what I would have come up with on my own would have been so pale by comparison, it ended up being a good idea that I watched it.

“But to do all this while singing is a whole different thing. Opera acting involves being able to do those things you would do as an actor while doing some very unusual things with your voice that an actor would never be asked to do and making it all fit together and seem natural. From the beginning I had a good idea of who Stanley was and how we were alike and not alike. I had discovered something called an enneagram, which is kind of a personality typing. You take a survey of about 200 questions that concern the way you would react in certain situations and how you characterize yourself and based on your answers it assigns you one of nine basic personality types, with a lot of different refinements. I took the test and I had an expert in the enneagram who was also a writer take the test as Stanley Kowalski. I got a little book on me and one on Stanley and comparing the two was very interesting. When I came into rehearsals I felt as though I knew the character really well—probably better than any character I’ve ever done.”

The San Francisco production, directed by Colin Graham, was quite naturalistic and involved a lot of physical violence, not something one normally sees in opera nor something most singers are comfortable acting out. “It was tough. Stanley is a pretty mean guy. I had to do the same thing in Sophie’s Choice which I just did in London. I had to treat Angelika Kirchschlager very brutally because the character does that. Before rehearsals of Streetcar I would tell Elizabeth [Futral, who played Stella] or Renée [Fleming, who played Blanche] that what I was about to do was Stanley, not me. Afterward I asked them to please forgive me and they told me it was okay. It’s not a stylized kind of violence; it’s very real. In The Marriage of Figaro, if the Count slaps Cherubino it’s very stylized. This was serious stuff and it got pretty nasty. But, it is part of the job and everybody knows that. The more real it is, the better it comes off. I don’t enjoy it, but we all have these little components of our personality that we can imagine. Doing a role like this gives the opportunity to bring them out.”

There was no doubt that the opera was compelling theatrically, but we wondered if it was satisfying to perform musically. “It’s a difficult evening in the theater. Stanley is in a bad mood most of the time. The closest thing Stanley has to an aria is when he’s talking about the Napoleonic code and how it applies to his marriage and his possessions and his wife’s possessions. But it’s not melodic, it’s more conversational. I didn’t have any real musical phrases except for one part at the end of the opera when Blanche is about to be taken away to the sanitarium and Stanley is talking to Stella, telling her that everything’s going to be fine when they can be alone again and make love with the colored lights going over his head. This is something he likes, to have this kind of loose, loud sex. That was cut from the opera in San Francisco and I begged André to put it back in, to give Stanley some redemption and to show his romantic side. It’s so colorful and such a great image. But that’s about the only place in the whole score. Musically, Stanley is kind of a bad guy and he doesn’t express his badness in beautiful phrases like Scarpia does [in Tosca].

“After the premiere I spoke to André about the possibility of adding an aria, but there was the obvious problem of not having a paragraph or two of text in the play. I put together a text that included a slim majority of Tennessee Williams' words and my own-made up words in my best Stanley Kowalski style and gave it to André and he was considering writing an aria. At one point I thought the aria was finished but now I don’t think it’s going to be there for the London performances. I have a list of cuts, but no additions.”

Have there been offers to repeat the role? “Yes, I turned down quite a few. I wanted to do it with Renée again for one thing. It was a wonderful experience the first time around, but I didn’t just want to go on the circuit and do it anyplace that would ask me. If they asked me to do it at the Met, I would do it in a heartbeat, of course, which sounds very snobbish. I probably shouldn’t say this, but every time you’re offered an engagement, you think of it in terms of why you’re doing it. I’ve made the mistake before where my intuition has told me not to take certain jobs and I’ve taken them and my intuition has always been right. Something much more appropriate comes along in the same time and I have to say no. So I took the decision many years ago that if something didn’t feel absolutely right, I’d rather sit home with my family and not have work during that period than take the wrong thing. This was the first time I felt it was the right time to do Streetcar again. With André conducting and with Renée coming back, I thought it would be good. It was supposed to be fully staged but that was changed. Still, I’m looking forward to the opportunity to revisit the music and to see what more I can do with it this time.”

A Choice Role

Gilfry scored another major success in Sophie’s Choice. “It was one of the best experiences I’ve had in my career, particularly the rehearsal process. It was a wonderful cast and a great director, Trevor Nunn, and conductor, Simon Rattle. The character, Nathan Landau, is fascinating because he is a paranoid schizophrenic and has these extreme moods—highs and lows and tenderness and rage. The music had real substance and great beauty and dramatic force; it is as multi-faceted as Nathan’s personality. It was very challenging to do, but really gratifying. I make no secret of the fact that I’d like to do some straight acting. One of the great things about this was that we rehearsed it the first ten days as a play without any music. We had no idea we were going to do that so we were totally unprepared. It was a little daunting when we began, but it turned into great fun. It brought a whole cornucopia of ideas and perspective to each line and I think it really made a difference in our performances.”

We asked Mr. Gilfry how he felt his career was going up to now. “As a matter of fact, it’s going exactly as I’d like it to go. I have been making an effort to get into more than opera and classical music. I’ve done some musicals and I’d really like to do a leading role on Broadway. I’m involved in the development of a new musical that is expected to open on Broadway in a few years. It’s based on a famous, modern film. I can’t tell you any more than that because they don’t want me to talk about it. I have a cabaret show that I’ve done in several places which has been really good.”

What’s in the cabaret act? “Mostly things from musical theater. It revolves around stories of my life. I do a funny song called “How are things in Cucamunga?” that has different words from “How are things in Glocca Morra?” from Finian’s Rainbow. Charles Nelson Reilly is a friend of mine and he wrote the words for it and he also directed my show. I do stuff from Most Happy Fella, Camelot, Carousel, South Pacific. It’s all related to growing up in a musical family, meeting my wife, going to college, my first professional experience singing opera. I sing the ‘aria’ from my debut in Otello as the Herald, which is one line and that’s the entire role, which usually gets a laugh. Because of the show, I have a theatrical agent now who is working with me to get into television and film. What I’m doing is trying to be less of an ‘opera singer’ and more of an entertainer. Los Angeles is the best place to do this sort of thing and with my family here I can be home more. So I’m exploring some other talents I think I have, at least to try. If I fall on my face, that’s cool. I can say I’ve done it.”

Singers who “cross over” risk being taken less seriously in the opera world. “I don’t really worry about it. I may well be taken less seriously, but hopefully it will be a passing thing. I’m not really responsible for my reputation. I do what I do and I have as many reputations as there are people who know me. I try to do what I do well and live by my code of ethics and see how it turns out. I certainly don’t want to give up opera, even with all these other things. This is just a way of expanding my activities. I have dreams in opera that are actually being fulfilled now. - "I’m doing my first Don Carlo in San Diego next season and after that comes Doktor Faust in San Francisco. Those are two roles I’ve wanted to do for a long time.”

But before that, there will be another world premiere, Deborah Drattell’s Nicholas and Alexandra at the Los Angeles Opera in which Gilfry will play Tsar Nicholas. In other words, there won’t be any time soon for slacking.

Rodney Gilfry on record

Check out USOPERAWEB’s interviews with Anthony Dean Griffey and Elizabeth Futral.