Baritone Michael Mayes had his European debut at Madrid’s Teatro Real in a production of Dead Man Walking in late January. His performance was a tour de force earning a cascade of accolades and rave reviews headed by the reaction of composer Jake Heggie himself, whose opera has been performed more than 300 times since its San Francisco premiere in 2000. “Mike Mayes is one of the finest dramatic singing actors I’ve ever worked with and he is the definitive Joseph De Rocher in Dead Man Walking,” says Heggie. “Vocally and physically, he embodies and lives this character as nobody else has.”
I had three quality encounters with Mayes while he was in Madrid: at a press conference before opening night, in a two-hour interview in the cafeteria of the Teatro Real, and at an evening soirée with Fulbright Fellows to talk about his career.
Among those at the press conference were Sister Helen Prejean, author of the book that was turned into a film, an opera, and a play; Joyce DiDonato, who portrays Prejean in the opera; and composer Jake Heggie. From what they had to say, it became clear to me that Dead Man Walking (DMW) not only has the power to inspire an audience but it can also affect the lives of the artists taking part in it. It was instrumental in leading DiDonato to work with inmates at Sing Sing Prison in a Carnegie Hall project. Maestro Heggie has gone on to compose other operas of comparable social resonance. And for Mayes, who has now performed the role of convicted murder Joseph De Rocher in seven different productions, the opera has marked a “before” and “after” in his career.
Mayes grew up in a mobile home in the small town of Cut and Shoot, north of Houston, Texas. From the time he was a boy of 6 and 7, he was steeped in bluegrass, country, and gospel music. His father, who had a job working as an electronics technician on microwave communication on the pipelines that crisscrossed the state of Texas, would take him along in his pickup truck.
“We would spend a lot time together riding around Texas,” Mayes recalls. “My dad was my first voice teacher, for sure. He’d turn on radio KIKK. Country music would be playing, and he’d start singing along with George Jones, Hank Williams, and Willie Nelson. He taught me how to sing harmony.”
Mayes took up his dad’s guitar, learned to play by ear, and began singing in the Missionary Baptist Church. The preacher and his family were bluegrass musicians, so Sunday evening worship was a virtual jam session. Everyone sang out of the Highway to Heaven Hymnal with a piano, guitar, and bass ensemble accompaniment. “And I tell you what,” says Mayes, “if there’s anything that’s good for the confidence of a young, budding musician, it’s playing in church.” At the end of the service he would stand next to the preacher and everybody would go by to tell him how “good” he had sung. “I got a lot of confidence that way,” he says.
A football scuffle in freshman year of high school left Mayes with some broken fingers, forcing him to drop typing class. The school counselor gave him a choice between drama class or the choir. Choosing choir set him on the path to an opera career. His singing talent got him into the Texas All-State Choir, and in his senior year that led to three scholarship offers to study music.
He scrapped his original plan to join the Navy and chose to study at the University of North Texas in Denton. Not yet knowing how to read music and confronted with what he calls “20th-century, atonal, beep-boop, squeak stuff with crazy time signatures,” he went to see Mel Ivy, chair of conducting and ensembles. Totally discouraged and in tears, he told him, “I don’t belong here. I’m out of my depth.” In response he heard, “Son, you’ve got the talent. Just calm down. Get through the semester. We’ll put you in a remedial class. You’re a smart boy. We’ll teach you what you need to know.” Mayes says, “I would’ve quit had it not been for him.”
Other mentors made decisive contributions to Mayes’ artistic evolution. One was his sophomore year voice teacher, David Sundquist. Mayes was still singing as a tenor, but after four weeks of coaching, his teacher told him, “You’re not a tenor.” Mayes credits Sundquist with teaching him all he needed to know to sing in his high voice. “That really kind of got me excited,” he recalls. “Singing in my high voice in a big hall with the sound bouncing off the wall—this was like the NFL of singing. It really turned me on.”
Another mentor at UNT was Cody Garner, Mayes’ second voice teacher. “Garner is still alive, and comes to everything he can,” Mayes says. “He instilled a vocal confidence in me that was absolutely essential . . . and really laid the groundwork for my entry into classical music.”
Mayes’ first encounter with opera was negative. In his freshman year he saw a production of Saint-Saëns’ Samson and Delilah and was turned off by the audience. “‘What is this stuff? People in tuxedos, in furs and minks, sitting still for three and half hours listening to music in a foreign language?’ I didn’t get the music; I was a rube. There were moments I was in it. But you know, it was people in big costumes singing slow-moving stuff. It was just so stuffy and so far away.” He asked himself, “What am I doing this for?”
He began to get some answers the summer after his sophomore year when he got cast as Frank Maurrant in Kurt Weill’s Street Scene in Stephen F. Austin State University’s summer opera program. This was a game changer that eventually led to his whole-hearted conversion to opera. He interpreted a character similar to men he knew while growing up. And it was in English.
Nonetheless, he continued learning the standard baritone repertoire pieces. He won a prize in the Palm Beach Opera Vocal Competition—a cash award and an opportunity to sing “Ò vin, dissipe la tristesse” from Hamlet with a full orchestra directed by Anton Guadagno. “So that was sort of a cool thing, just standing up there with that wave of sound blasting you in the back while your voice is coming out,” he recalls.
For grad school, Mayes landed a full ride at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. And it was in Cincinnati that Mayes had his first professional encounter with DMW. He played First Prison Guard in a production directed by Leonard Foglia at Cincinnati Opera in 2002. As he watched John Packard interpreting Joseph De Rocher, he remembers thinking, “I can’t do this . . . not yet, because I don’t have all the tools. But I know this guy. I know this piece and this story. This is the thing I want to do!
“Andy Wilkowske was playing the other guard,” Mayes continues. “We’re supposed to be sitting there looking tough. We both broke out crying when Joseph’s mother pleads for his life. I had never experienced that. I had never cried in any kind of theater!”
Within 10 years Mayes had developed the tools and was ready. “I was talking to Kostis Protopapas, [artistic] director of the Tulsa Opera. We were in a bar having some beers, you know, like I do. And he was saying, ‘I really want to do this DMW. You know this piece.’ And I say, ‘Yeah. . . yeah.’ He says, ‘It’s risky, you know, Tulsa, Oklahoma.’ Other states are trying to get rid of the death penalty and Oklahoma is putting it in an express lane.
“And I do something I never do, because I’m always scared shitless in opera, always afraid that I was in a place I shouldn’t be. I say, ‘Kostis, I’m your Joseph. There’s nobody who can tell that story like I can. If you give me that role, I promise you we’ll do it like it’s never been done before.’ He looked at me and said, ‘All right, I’ll think about it.’ Well, two months later here comes the contract.”
The Tulsa debut as Joseph De Rocher marked the “before” and “after” in Mayes’ career mentioned previously. His ability to plumb the depths of the personality of that character and convey his anger and pain to the audience opened a new understanding into his singing craft. “For the first time,” he says, “I understood the power of this art form to touch people and to touch me. And then, when I understood that, I understood, ‘That’s the way I have to do everything else! It’s got to feel like this when I do Rigoletto. It’s got to feel like this when I sing Scarpia, when I sing Di Luna. Even when I sing “Barber.” These emotions have to come through.’ That was my entry point. That’s when I began to love the classical operatic repertoire, right there, when I began to understand the emotion and the power that it has.”
And as for touching other people, a letter written to Mayes opened up a whole new dimension in his relation to an audience. It was from a woman who had driven hours from Kansas to attend the performance of DMW in Tulsa. “My daughter was murdered seven years ago,” she wrote, “and I want you to know that you changed the way I think about the man who murdered her.”
That letter changed things even more for Mayes. “Now you can’t go back—that’s a one-way door,” he explains. “You can’t go back. You can’t phone it in anymore. You understand that the stakes are extremely high every time that you walk out on that stage—not because of your career, not because you may not get the next contract, or because you may be embarrassed because you get a bad review—but because there’s somebody in that audience that needs a catharsis.”
The 2012 Tulsa DMW production also signified a “before” and “after” for Mayes with the new roles he would take on. In the six years before 2012, he had been cast in a variety of operas in the classical repertoire like Don Giovanni, The Magic Flute, and The Barber of Seville. From Tulsa he went on to perform Joseph De Rocher every single year thereafter, including the Madrid and London debuts earlier this year. This led to other roles he classifies as “Contemporary American Verismo Opera” (CAVO) or “opera with a conscience.” He draws a line from his first experience with the role of an archetypal, angry white husband in Street Scene, to John Proctor in The Crucible while in graduate school, to his first experience as First Prison Guard in the Cincinnati production of DMW, to his two roles in Margaret Garner in 2006, and finally to his DMW Tulsa debut.
Mayes explained this new genre to the group of Fulbright Fellows in Madrid. “Contemporary American Verismo Opera is in the vernacular not only in verbal language but in musical language as well,” he said. “It is opera that has a distinctly American flavor and that examines a distinctly American social problem. The 2000 world premiere of DMW in San Francisco was the bottleneck through which all modern opera passes.” Before that, the only CAVOs of importance were Street Scene from the 1940s and Susannah from the 1950s.
“After ‘Dead Man’ had its huge success in San Francisco and subsequently in markets around the country,” he continues, “people realized that there was this real desire for an opera audience to understand opera through a different prism about subjects close to the American soul, such as capital punishment and PTSD. Now there are all these composers and librettists out there that are examining these subjects. And the great thing about opera is that it has a format for addressing these kinds of social and cultural issues.”
Besides DMW, since 2014 Mayes has performed in a string of CAVO works: Three Decembers, Great Scott, Out of Darkness, Everest, and three on the subject of PTSD: Canticle of the Black Madonna, Glory Denied, and Soldier Songs. And he has a cache of anecdotes about how these works have impacted certain individuals in the audience.
In the press conference before the opening night of DMW in Madrid, Mayes mentioned a critical moment in his life “when everything changed.” Later, in our interview in the cafeteria of the Teatro Real, he told me he wanted to share this story in more detail in case it might help other singers. It’s a story that helps explain why he is so convincing every time he interprets Joseph De Rocher in the last moments of his life.
“I went through a personal trauma in 2009, went into a severe depression, was suicidal, almost knocked myself off,” he recounts. “That’s what I’m saying about this business. It will eat you up. Now I know I had depression—and now that I know it, I can manage it. But then, I didn’t. I just thought that was my reality. Everything was terrible. And I beat the hell out of myself all the time.”
One night Mayes had been drinking and things seemed particularly bad. “I’m sitting there. The house is empty. I sat down at the edge of the bed and my foot hits against something hard under the bed where I kept my shotgun. I pull that shotgun out and I said, ‘There’s a way out. I can just end this. I’ll right the shell, put the gun in my mouth—I’m gonna end this thing.’ I put my finger in the loop.”
Thankfully, in that moment, a voice inside Mayes reminded him of the things he had to live for. “I couldn’t pull the trigger, couldn’t do it. Something just said, ‘Don’t do this. Your mom, your dad, your nephews, your nieces, your sisters—you can’t do this to them.’ That was like my rock bottom. That was really the beginning of my life. I was reborn in that moment.”
The literal cleanup the next day also helped to set Mayes on his new path. “When I pulled the gun out, I was drunk,” he explains. “So when I set it on my lap, my finger hit the trigger and ‘boom’ it went off in the bedroom. It put a hole in the drywall. The next day I had to show the house. So I had to go to Home Depot to buy spackle and a patch kit. There’s nothing that will put you on the path like patching a hole that was meant for your head. That was the moment in my life when I set my eyes on a goal and I went, ‘I’m not going that way again’—and I haven’t.”
People have advised Mayes not to share this story, telling him some might think he’s crazy. “But I think it’s important,” he says, “I think it’s important for people to understand, especially other singers. I don’t give a hoot if people in the world think I’m nuts. I tell the story because I want people to understand that ‘Hey, you are worth it!’ Maybe if they hear that story they can turn around, they can stop it. Don’t let that thing take you over, take you out of the world. Had I pulled that trigger in 2008, I would never have done Dead Man Walking, Glory Denied, Everest, Three Decembers. I’d never do any of these pieces that changed the lives of people in the audience.
“It changed my life. It made me a happier and a better person,” Mayes continues. “I’d not have been standing on the stage at the Teatro Real looking up at an audience of howling people. I’d never got there. That’s why I tell the story because there may be a young artist, there may be a young singer who’s sunk everything they had into this career. They sunk money—they’ve got debt coming out their eyeballs. They can’t see any way out of it. And maybe the only way they can see out of it is to end it. But if they end it, they never get to do any of that stuff.”
Mayes is candid about how difficult this career can be. “There are a lot of singers out there. It’s an incredibly stressful job—more now than ever because we’re under assault in the arts. Everywhere you look in America, they’re cutting funding. Opera is struggling, fighting for its life. Universities are turning out more singers than ever, so you have a whole lot of singers competing for [fewer and fewer] jobs. Your self worth goes in the toilet.”
Mayes is determined, however, to not lose sight of the hope he has found and to share that with others. “Whenever it’s dark, it’s always darkest just before dawn,” he says. “That was my birthday in 2008. That’s when I was reborn. I got rid of a lot of things then. I cast off a lot of ballast. I cast off that ballast so I could float and get to where I need to be.”
