Features
Sweet Victory
Greer Grimsley has skirted the fast track, carving out an honorable career path on his own terms. Today, his imaginative acting and elegant musicianship have made him a favorite at U.S. regional companies and around the world. F. PAUL DRISCOLL chats with the New Orleans-born bass-baritone about his ever-evolving artistry.
Portrait Photographed by Lee Crum at Soniat House in New Orleans
Grooming by Bridgette Black
© Lee Crum 2010
It's February, and a light snow is beating against the windows in the offices of OPERA NEWS. Greer Grimsley settles back in his chair, his extra-long legs stretched out in front of him, preparing to talk about himself and his career, a prospect that he says makes him feel "hugely grateful and surprised and honored, but intensely self-conscious." Onstage, Grimsley seems to be the least self-conscious man imaginable: his half-naked, totally crazed Jochanaan, a prophet of truly Biblical dimensions, recently ate up the stage at San Francisco Opera; his beautifully sung Wotan, a characterization of enormous humanity and surprising tenderness, has been the musical and dramatic power center of Seattle Opera's Ring cycle in its last two outings, in 2005 and 2009. Offstage, Grimsley is a tall, striking man, with little in his appearance that marks him as a performer, aside from a stage-worthy mane of long, gray-brown hair: his manner in private is perfectly affable yet scrupulously reserved. At first meeting, he seems more comfortable listening and watching than talking. "My first voice teacher was a big proponent of watching other performers. It didn't have to be a great performer, but by watching people perform, you learn something — no matter if they are talented in their craft. You learn from watching, and in this business, of course, by listening. To this day, I still learn from watching people."
Now almost thirty years into his professional career, Grimsley is in his prime as an artist, an actor of imagination and integrity who deploys his lambent, handsomely colored bass-baritone with world-class musicianship. Considering the quality of his work and the esteem in which he is held by his peers in the industry, Grimsley's profile in the opera houses of Manhattan is surprisingly low: he has done some fifteen performances with the Met since his 1996 debut there, as Balstrode in Peter Grimes, and has, astonishingly, never sung with New York City Opera. Stephen Wadsworth, who directed Grimsley's Seattle Rings and who has known him for more than twenty-five years, has an explanation as to why Grimsley is not as celebrated as he should be: "Greer's work is egoless, pure and simple. It isn't about anything except serving the piece. People who choose service over maneuvering have a longer road, and I know that has sometimes been frustrating to Greer, but he has stuck to his guns, working methodically, thoughtfully and thoroughly on his roles, and growing steadily as a vocalist and an actor. What he's interested in is the truth, so that's what he does. Greer is the opposite of self-promotion."
Away from New York, it is a different story: Grimsley's schedule holds an impressive mix of dates in international-caliber venues as well as in U.S. regional companies, with his signature roles among the juiciest assignments available to a bass-baritone. His OPERA NEWS interview took place during a one-week window of opportunity between a just-finished run as Scarpia in Montreal and an upcoming Fliegende Holländer in Syracuse; the remainder of his very full calendar for 2009–10 had dates in Ottawa (Macbeth), Denver (Scarpia) and Cologne (Wotan), as well as a return in July to Seattle Opera, the company that established him as a Wagnerian to watch, for Kurwenal in a new Tristan. Next season promises Wotan in Shanghai, Kurt Weill's Dreieinigkeitsmoses in Toulouse, Telramund at Lyric Opera of Chicago and Gounod's Méphistophélès in San Diego; beyond that are engagements in Berlin, Barcelona and Venice. Grimsley says he's "happy for the work, wherever it brings me" and adds that "discipline and staying connected to family" are what keep him sane when he's on the road, away from the home in Pennsylvania he shares with his wife of twenty-three years, mezzo Luretta Bybee, and their teenage daughter, Emma. (This past summer in Seattle, the entire family was onstage for the Ring, with Bybee among the production's Valkyries, as well as its Norns, and Emma a super in Götterdämmerung.)
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As Méphistophélès in New Orleans Opera's 2007 Faust, with Emily Pulley (Marguerite)
© Janet Wilson 2010
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In conversation with Grimsley, one soon becomes aware that his range of reference is wide — he cites C. S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters as useful preparation for understanding the character of Scarpia — and his spirit is a generous one; his assessments of performers, conductors and directors are accurate yet compassionate, whether delivered on or off the record. He has a sharp eye and an even sharper ear; his gift for mimicry ranges from a dead-on Sammy Davis, Jr., to the accents from the wards of his native New Orleans. It was in New Orleans that Grimsley, then a seventeen-year-old student at Brother Martin High School, first experienced opera, as a super in a New Orleans Opera presentation of La Juive, with Richard Tucker. "The first opera that I ever saw I was in. I remember Tucker's voice quite vividly, even to this day, and the sheer scale of his performing, which was big. But never having seen an opera, just the whole concept of drama and music together was absolutely incredible to me. That's what started me on my path."
Grimsley entered New Orleans's Loyola University as a voice major, but his path to opera took several of what he wryly calls "big lefts" in his early years. He worked his way through college in the restaurant industry — he now says that he was "educated in two businesses simultaneously" — and was variously a wine steward at New Orleans's landmark restaurant Antoine's and an assistant manager at Commander's Palace. After a two-year stint as manager of a dinner theater in Naples, Florida — where he also performed, making him in all likelihood the only Wotan in history whose resumé also includes Natalie Needs a Nightie — Grimsley applied to Juilliard for professional studies and was accepted. While he was at Juilliard, Grimsley first heard an artist who was to be a powerful influence on him. "The first person I heard at the Met was Cornell MacNeil, who was incredible. It was Pagliacci, and he was Tonio. Oh, my gosh. I was up in the quarter seats and his voice had such presence — it just slapped you in the face. It was amazing. At that age, thinking about the kind of singer I wanted to be and the kind of music I wanted to sing was something that was evolving. It was especially powerful to hear an artist like MacNeil, whose work was so text-driven. I ended up doing the Baron in a La Traviata with him later on, in New Orleans, when he and his son Walter were singing the leading roles. I had a chance to ask him a few questions, and he talked to me about the text and how he approached it — how he weighted it. But most of the time, I learned by just watching him."
After his Juilliard time ended, Grimsley had his introduction to the professional world at Houston Grand Opera, where he made his debut in 1980, as one of the Armed Men in Die Zauberflöte while a member of the Houston Grand Opera Studio. "What was great about Houston was that it was a safe place for me as a singer. People didn't really know what to do with me, even through that time in Houston — they knew probably that I was going to end up doing the repertoire that I was going to do, but what do you do with someone who's that age? Because I had a fairly easy top, they sort of pushed me to be a baritone. And so I thought, O.K. I'll try that and see if that's where I belong. And I did that for a fairly good while — sort of singing in the baritone repertoire, but still singing Escamillo, which is sort of a Netherlands as far as classification is concerned." Within a few years, Escamillo provided Grimsley with a career-altering break when both he and Bybee, whom he was then dating, were cast in an international tour of La Tragédie de Carmen, the Tony-winning reduction of the Bizet opera by director Peter Brook.
"For almost two months, we worked with Peter as actors, getting to know him and getting to know his work. I worked for four hours in the mornings learning the cape moves from a real matador. Peter was, oddly enough, very easy to talk to, because he was very simple in what he wanted. And if there was a question of choice or a question of what we should do, his response was always, 'Does it tell the story? Are we telling the story with that choice?' He had a staging plan for the show, obviously, but he didn't insist that it be exactly the same every night. There were three or four casts of us, and we were doing eight shows a week on that tour. He was amazingly focused. Every once in a while, if we were gathered with him in a very relaxed setting, he would talk about other productions that he had done. But when we were there to work, he would be as concentrated as I've ever seen anyone be. I understood how he saw things only by sitting behind him when I wasn't called to be rehearsing — I brought my camera to take a picture of what was being rehearsed and then realized, 'This is what he's seeing.' He was looking through a lens in his mind — he staged that Carmen in a very cinematographic way. He was able to meld a film experience with a live experience. That was his genius. I have no idea how he was able to do that. I've worked with other film directors, such as Carlos Saura on his Carmen. For the whole rehearsal period, [Saura] had his lens up to his eye to see what he wanted. But Peter would just watch us. He saw exactly what the camera would see inside his head.
"One thing that I learned from Peter Brook was to stay open in rehearsal. I bring my experience to the process — opera is a collaborative art form — and I try to respect other people's opinions. But if I feel that I'm asked to do something that's going to confuse an audience member, I have to say something, even if it's as simple as telling a director or a conductor, 'You know what? I've done this before, and this is how I've seen this work really well.' Not to discredit what they were thinking, but sometimes there are things that just are crazy for crazy's sake. In many cases you have to be strong about who you are as an artist and be able to say, 'You know what? This is the line here. I can't do what you are asking.' That was hard for me to learn, but I learned it."
While on tour with the Brook Carmen, Grimsley landed an offer from Scottish Opera to sing his first Jochanaan. German opera was an area of the repertory that Grimsley had regarded with caution, but Bybee urged him to accept the role. As she remembers it, "He said, 'Wow. Hmm. I don't know. That's kind of heavy. Do you think I should really do that?' And I said, 'You need to sing this. You'd better do it.' I was really well acquainted with his voice at that point — he was so well-trained, his last teacher had been very careful about keeping things contained and not letting him oversing. Greer knew how to do that, but he needed to add the breadth in his sound that would come with actually doing one of those big roles. My gut told me that he wasn't going to get it from some teacher — he was going to get it from getting out on the boards and doing it. So as we were talking about this, Greer leaned back — he was sitting up on one of the makeup tables at the railway station where we were performing, because Peter never liked theaters for that Carmen — and hit one of the light bulbs and singed his arm. Zap! He still has the scar."
Grimsley says now that it was singing Jochanaan that convinced him he was a bass-baritone, and more than twenty years later, the role still sounds like a natural fit for his voice, its very size and power part of the surpassing nobility of his characterization. "Jochanaan is a man of conviction. It's a never-ending struggle to make [Salome] as beautiful as possible, because there are some very bombastic parts to it. I'm always looking for the most lyrical way to sing it while being true to what Strauss wrote. The music is a reflection of who Jochanaan is. Having been to Israel and seen the Qumran, I try to visualize what it would be like for him, to be moved from this tranquil setting by the Dead Sea to a cistern near Jerusalem. The cacophony of what city life would be — the noise itself — would drive Jochanaan crazy." Conductor Nicola Luisotti became a Grimsley enthusiast when they collaborated on Salome at San Francisco Opera in fall 2009. "When I began working with Greer on Jochanaan," he says, "I was completely amazed at the way he could manage a voice of such size with such beauty and such musicality — no forcing, no screaming, just singing. It was fascinating. Jochanaan is a very short role, but very demanding, but Greer gave me the feeling that for him singing this was like drinking a glass of cool water."
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As Wotan in Die Walküre at Seattle Opera, 2005
© Chris Bennion 2010
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Beauty and economy are hallmarks of Grimsley's Wagner performances as well. In Stephen Wadsworth's staging of Das Rheingold at Seattle Opera in 2009, Grimsley was a handsome, eager young god, passionately in love with his Fricka and unmarked by the tragedy of what would follow in Die Walküre. But what is most striking about Grimsley's performances is how completely lyrical they are; one doesn't catch him "acting." In Wadsworth's Das Rheingold, acting and singing were as one: everything Grimsley did was informed by the music. Sometimes, Grimsley's immersion in Wotan's music took even his wife — who sang Waltraute in Seattle's 2009 Walküre with him — by surprise: "In the Valkyries scene, we had some interaction and yes, he became the character, and I felt definitely like his child. But I also had my sort of third ear cocked for how he's doing. That never goes away. And when he nailed it, there were times when I welled up with tears — completely inappropriate dramatically — because just seeing and hearing somebody so generous, who has literally worked his way through this business and not been handed anything, is such a sweet, sweet victory, you know?"
Grimsley's first Wagner role at Seattle was Telramund in Wadsworth's 1994 staging of Lohengrin, "and even with that I was a little trepidatious. But that really started me into loving it. Seattle had double cast the show, and the [other Telramund] had gotten sick. Speight Jenkins came to me and said, 'Do you think you can do the other performances?' And I said, 'I'll give it a go' — not really thinking that this was Wagner and you can't do that. I ended up doing five Telramunds in seven days, with the first two being opening night and a matinée back-to-back. At the end of those five [performances], I was tired physically, but vocally I was in great shape. And I thought, O.K., well, I think I can do this repertoire."
When Wadsworth's Ring was first mounted in Seattle, in 2001, Grimsley sang Donner and Gunther; he took on Wotan in the cycle's 2005 revival. Wadsworth says that Grimsley made the king of the gods his own immediately: "Wotan became Greer's Wotan right away, and there were many things he did with ease and naturalness that I had never seen. Certainly I had never seen such a youthful, sexy, reckless Rheingold Wotan, for example. The second time around [in 2009], I saw fresh, live, authentic energy in every scene he did. He had really mastered it, and it blossomed. In the Erda scene in Siegfried — he had a beautiful partner in Maria Streijffert — Greer's Wotan was sensual, volatile, urgently needy of her understanding, discovering a way of articulating the change that had come over him. I never thought the scene could be like that."
For most observers, the summit of Grimsley's achievement in the Seattle Ring was Wotan's "Leb' wohl" at the end of Die Walküre. Stephanie Blythe, Grimsley's Fricka in 2005 and 2009, remembers a 2009 rehearsal: "We had just finished the Fricka–Wotan scene [in Walküre], and I stayed to see the run of the rest of the act. I had seen Greer do the Act II monologue with Brünnhilde back in 2005 and was very impressed with it then, but what I saw and heard that day [last summer] was nothing short of miraculous. His singing was glorious. The tone was beautiful, yes, but so were the color and the weight of the words. They felt as if they hung in the air as he sang them. The emotions flowed through the text in this gorgeous, harmonious way that made us feel what Wotan was feeling. We weren't just hearing the story again, we were hearing this story from a completely different viewpoint, and the loss he was expressing was palpable. Greer had connected to something new and very powerful, and when he finished, there wasn't a dry eye in the room — and no one left the room for some time. It was as if we didn't want to leave that space while the message was still hanging in the air." Like Blythe, Wadsworth thought that Grimsley had reached a new level of personal excellence in the 2009 Ring performances: "I don't think any of us expected the sheer beauty of the singing last summer. And his acting performances were more nuanced and more emotionally raw than I had any reason to expect, and I have known and worked with him for over twenty-five years and really really loved his work and believed in him. Something happened last summer. His many years of dedicated, fierce concentration came together. For the many of us who have known him a long time, it was a really moving time. At the end of the performances and rehearsals, I just felt gratitude, the way you feel it when an artist does something recklessly wholehearted and also perfectly shaped and it opens a world to you."
What is it about Wagner that makes it feel so right to Grimsley? He pauses and looks out the window for a short, tight beat before answering. "Keeping up the intensity of the drama in Wagner — the times when you have to stand and deliver and sing — is exhilarating, but there's soft singing that's required in Wagner, which I absolutely love as well. People think of Wagner as a lot of loud singing, and it's not. When I started singing Wagner, I don't think I was surprised as much as happy that I had found a niche for myself. Not that I'm only a Wagner singer, but Wagner is a place that felt really comfortable. I felt that I finally found where I can use my talents to their fullest." 
