Giving The Devil His Due

By Michael Walsh

One of the great things about opera is that any boy can grow up to be Mephistopheles, even if he is the son of a meatcutter from Colby, Kans. One of opera's problems is that it is still necessary for a performer to win a % European reputation before he can impress a major American company. For proof of these maxims, consider Samuel Ramey.

In his repertoire of classic, bel canto and romantic bass roles, Ramey, 45, is without peer. He is a seductive Don Giovanni and a boisterous Leporello in Mozart's Don Giovanni, a poignant Don Quixote in Massenet's Don Quichotte and a terrifying barbarian chief in Verdi's Attila. This month he is in Italy for appearances at La Scala in his favorite role, the sexy Figaro in Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro.

Ramey's silken voice, which ranges high into traditional baritone territory, is worlds apart from the toneless barking and roaring that too often pass for singing among basses. A flexible, liquid instrument, it can scale the trickiest Rossini coloratura passages or rattle the rafters in triumph.

At 6 ft. and 175 lbs., the sandy-haired, blue-eyed Ramey cuts a commanding figure onstage. Although shy in private life, he is physically fearless in front of an audience; the burst of acrobatic twisting, leaping and rolling with which Ramey depicts the devil's discomfiture at the end of Arrigo Boito's Mefistofele is one of the most breathtaking spectacles in contemporary opera performance. European companies clamor for his services; two summers ago, the Paris Opera staged a vivid production of Giacomo Meyerbeer's 19th century spectral curiosity, Robert le Diable, just for him.

In America, though, Ramey is only now getting full recognition. Like Beverly Sills, Ramey first came to prominence at the New York City Opera, where he zoomed to starring roles. And like Sills, he was long snubbed by the Metropolitan Opera, finally cracking the Met for a 1984 staging of Handel's Rinaldo. Ramey had little better luck at the country's other two major international opera houses, in Chicago and San Francisco.

Unlike Sills, he turned to Europe -- to Covent Garden, La Scala and the Vienna State Opera. But what a difference a decade makes: last September, his towering presence energized a Figaro in San Francisco; next season he is tapped for Faust and Figaro in Chicago. Even the Met has come around. This season audiences hailed his performances as Giorgio in Bellini's I Puritani and Escamillo in Carmen; he will sing both the Don and Leporello in 1989-90.

Not bad for someone who never even saw an opera until he was in one. Ramey's first exposure to music was at home and in church. "By the time I was nine or ten, I knew my voice was different from everyone else's," the erstwhile boy soprano recalls. "My voice already had vibrato, and I stifled it when I sang solos. I didn't want to be made fun of." At that time his taste ran more to Pat Boone than to Robert Merrill. Young Sam was unimpressed by operatic singing: "It was such a foreign sound."

A chance encounter with an Ezio Pinza record changed his life. Thrilled by Pinza's rich, robust tone, Ramey later enrolled in a summer workshop at the Central City Opera in the Colorado Rockies. "This was fantastic!" he exclaims. "There was everything -- dancing, acting, singing -- all combined in one art form. I decided I would give it a shot." In time, he found his way to New York City, where he supported himself and his wife Carrie as an advertising copywriter for a book publisher.

At City Opera, he inherited many of Bass-Baritone Norman Treigle's most famous and glamorous roles. Treigle, who died in 1975, was a powerful, athletic singer with a wide following. "It was not easy," says Ramey. "A lot of people in the company would go out of their way to tell me, 'You've got big shoes to fill.' That was all I needed to hear." But Ramey is a better singer than Treigle ever was, and he soon made his mark.

What accounted for the Met's reluctance to take him on? Questions of casting and contracts fascinate and frustrate opera fans, who are usually well aware of hot new reputations in Europe. One reason may be that the company already had two fine American basses in James Morris and Paul Plishka; another is that Artistic Director James Levine tends to favor his own discoveries. There was also the perceived stigma of the City Opera; the two companies may be geographical neighbors, but they are artistic strangers. "There were lots of theories," notes Ramey. "One of them was that I was such a big star at City Opera that people wouldn't pay $60 to hear me at the Met when they could go next door and see me for $28."

Today he still devotes much of his time to Europe, although he keeps an apartment in New York City. Ramey enjoys the Continent's greater musical sophistication and adventurous repertoire. "Many singers make a career of doing the same operas over and over," he says. "But I am always looking for the unusual or the rarely performed works." The Paris Robert le Diable, the saga of a man who discovers he is a devil's son, was one such project. Another is Anton Rubinstein's obscure The Demon, whose title role was sung by the great Russian bass Feodor Chaliapin; Ramey hopes to perform the part someday.

"I have always enjoyed playing the real sinister, evil characters the most," says Ramey. "The bad guys always have more fun, I guess." Here is a singer who knows how to give the devil his due. And now America is learning too.

With reporting by Nancy Newman/New York