If you ask tenor Michael Spyres, personal and professional lives are one and the same. While to some singers this may seem unhealthy, for Spyres it’s only natural—the Mansfield, Missouri, native’s family was, after all, dubbed “Most Musical Family” by the state’s then-governor Bob Holden in 2002. “I was named after my uncle Michael, who wanted to be an opera singer,” Spyres explains via a Skype interview from his dressing room at the Salzburg Festival during a performance as Tybalt in Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette. “He actually died when he was 38 years old and never really got to make the opera career that he wanted to, so I grew up with that back story in my head.” Quite literally, Spyres is now making an opera career in his uncle’s name. However, unlike many American singers, he has launched his career primarily in Europe and currently makes both his professional and personal life work on the other side of the Atlantic.
In an age where differentiation is a must, more and more American singers are eschewing the route of conservatory, graduate school, Young Artist Programs, and the crawl up the repertoire ladder to jump directly into foreign opera companies (a route that no less than Marilyn Horne took and singers like Takesha Meshé Kizart continue to explore). Yet Spyres dropped out of college after two years, worked various jobs from teaching to construction, and moved back into the house where he grew up to train for at least four to five hours per day.
“It was a great way to be able to figure out my voice,” he explains before adding, “I have wonderful parents who are supportive and don’t mind that I was yelling and keeping the neighborhood up. . . . [It was] exactly like Rocky or Wet Hot American Summer.” He then moved to Europe, studying both voice and language in Germany (at the Konservatorium Wien) and Italy and earning major breaks at Bad Wildbad’s Rossini Festival, Opera Ireland, and La Scala. And while he has had equal success in the States with Opera Theatre of St. Louis’ Young Artist Program and the Metropolitan Opera regional auditions (of which he is a three-time winner), for the time being his briskest business is across the pond, where his home base is now Belgium.
“I do think for me it was a huge decision to move away into a foreign environment, but one that had to be made,” he says of the separation from his family—most of whom still live in Missouri (though the bond of music means that Spyres has his family’s full support regardless of what continent he’s on). In the days before Skype and Facebook, “it was a very tough adjustment because I could only talk at length to family once every few weeks.”
Like many singers, Spyres’ life abroad was changed by the advent of video chatting as a means of staying in touch a world away. “I can keep in touch as if we are in the same town, especially with Skype video chatting because it allows you to have a visual image of the family and friends that is on a whole other level of communication. The wonderful thing is also that you can share moments at the same time from a world away or just hang out and spend time with your family as if you were at home together, which is one of the most important things to have when having this crazy lifestyle.”
It works out for more than just family—our entire interview with Spyres was coordinated through Facebook, e-mail, and Skype. Moreover, the tenor has an important ally and fellow Missourian with him in Belgium: soprano and fiancée Tara Stafford. The two plan to make a rare stateside appearance when wed in their home state this winter.
Even in Europe, as Spyres explains, “you have to do Mozart, and then most German singers stay in German repertoire, and most Italians stay in Italian repertoire.” However, there is much more room to experiment thanks to a large per-capita of opera houses, adventurous programming, and a greater opportunity for research. “I was very lucky to be here to meet the right people, to be able to do these kind of weird [roles],” Spyres says, referring to a résumé that includes Mozart’s La Betulia liberata (sung under the baton of Riccardo Muti), Donizetti’s La favorite, Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots, and a slew of Rossini, from Le siège de Corinthe to La gazzetta to Otello (a recording of which was released earlier this year on Naxos). He returns to La Scala next year to continue his Rossini specialization, bringing an agile trill and ardent tessitura to La donna del lago.
Spyres committed to singing after initially trying a career at cartoon voiceover work. The ability to manipulate his voice for animated characters translated, in the singer’s mind, as an ability to tailor his voice to roles that were already a good fit. Discovering this specialization in the leggiero tenor range has allowed Spyres to corner a market which few tenors can lay true claim to (especially now with Bel Canto heavyweight Juan Diego Flórez’s schedule packed with more recitals than operatic roles). It’s also a discovery which he fully attributes to moving to Europe.
“I had been trying to do what everybody else does—auditioning with the standards—but I couldn’t compete sound-wise,” explains Spyres. “I was able to make a career here because I’m doing a repertoire that not many people sing anymore.”
Here the tenor’s roots show, discussing oh-so-American ideals as individualism and the theory of, as he puts it, “figuring out things for myself—for better or worse.” For singers working abroad, there is more at stake. It makes more fiscal sense for an Italian company to hire an Italian singer, so there is immediately the task of convincing them why a foreign singer (whose last name isn’t Netrebko or Domingo) is the better choice. And for Americans in particular, for whom opera is not an intrinsic part of cultural capital, the task is that much more daunting. Singers like Spyres—not to mention innovations like YouTube—are making it less so.
“We’re one of the youngest nations,” says Spyres, “but I think that we’re starting to turn around a lot more . . . in opera.” He does believe, however, that making a career as an American in Europe requires a more significant work ethic. “We have to work harder, because we’re the underdogs in the opera world,” he adds, revealing a disdain for both laziness and singers who do not know the music upon entering a rehearsal.
In addition to the numerous challenges, there are also major perks to living in Europe as a singer—beyond the respect one gets from locals that Spyres describes as being “usually reserved for a doctor in the U.S.” No matter how qualified the language teacher you may have in the States, it does not compare to doing linguistic fieldwork. Spyres estimates it takes about six months before one can speak and think in a language while abroad, thanks to the immersion and the acceptance that mistakes will be made. But regardless of where he is singing at any given time, the ability to get by in German, French, Italian, and Serbian has proved useful for the tenor.
“The most bizarre thing is that after living over here for a couple of years, you’ll sometimes go to a rehearsal and you have to switch between three languages,” he says. “It really opens you up as a musician, because you start becoming attentive to sounds that native speakers have.” Such attentiveness has given Spyres a chameleon-like nature with languages, as heard in the Naxos Otello or the Bard SummerScape Festival’s Les Huguenots, now available for download on iTunes.
“The other thing that one has to do when singing in Europe is go to the museums and learn about all the places you travel to,” Spyres says of the added dramaturgical advantages of living across the pond. “The culture is so rich with history that there is no excuse for being bored.” Being around people who intrinsically understand the medium is perhaps the most advantageous facet of living and working as a singer in Europe—much in the same way that Spyres and his family embrace folk music back on the homefront (his sister, a trained classical violinist, is also a fiddle virtuoso). Being on the continent that created opera also provides some valuable added perspective to the art form’s twenty-first-century interpreter.
“One of the hardest things to come to grips with as a performer is that the art we do is an interpretive one, and that our words and music are not composed by us so we are distanced from that which we are trying to express by two degrees,” Spyres explains. “Because opera singing should be the pinnacle of higher art—since one must act, sing, [and] dance at once while doing the most challenging feat of vocal production—most people never get past the technical demands into the realm of expression and therefore have this idea that what we do is kind of meaningless. . . . [Living in Europe] has really helped me realize that what we do is, in a very real sense, important.”
