Titus had earned his spurs in a variety of Juilliard productions, and had even performed in a Washington production of La bohème, but this was his first high-profile role—and it immediately launched him to fame in the national pop-culture scene. Anxiously waiting backstage for the opening curtain, Titus’ publicist told him, “There are 182 critics out there, do well!” Titus reassured himself by recalling Ethel Mermon—who had said in a similar situation, “I know my lines”—and thought to himself, “Well, I’m well rehearsed.”
Titus did “do well,” and the critics responded with rave reviews.
He had indeed been well prepared, but by much more than the rigorous rehearsal routine for the premiere of Bernstein’s Mass. Titus brought to his role as the doubt-ridden Celebrant a rich mosaic of musical experiences from his childhood and adolescence, as well from his superb professional training at Juilliard. In an interview backstage last December at Madrid’s Teatro Real, where he was singing the role of Wanderer in Wagner’s Siegfried, he recounted for Classical Singer the details of a career forged by a combination of talent, self-belief, and hard work tempered with a fair dose of serendipity.
The roots of a career
Titus’ first musical memories are from early infancy. He vividly remembers falling asleep in the twilight of his room to the sound of Chopin, played by his mother and grandmother in the living room. At age 3, his mother noticed him transposing Christmas carols with one finger on the piano. That soon led to piano lessons, but he gave them up at age 12 because he hated practicing and learning musical theory. One frustrated piano teacher who gave up on him told his mother, “This child has no talent!”
Nevertheless, Titus did manage to absorb some basic artistic interests from his mother. She took him to see Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake at age 5. Titus says he was so enthralled with the experience that when he got home he put on his long johns as if they were leotards and danced around the living room. His mother also loved opera and would tell her son about the time she attended a performance of the legendary Russian bass Feodor Chaliapin when she lived in China as a child.
A move from West 156th Street in Manhattan to Denver, Colo. provided a totally different ambience in which young Titus’ artistic inclinations could take root. High school brought sports activities. Titus began lifting weights, and went out for football and track. While learning to hurl the discus and shot put, he made friends with another kid who happened to be a Mario Lanza fan. After school they would spend hours imitating Lanza recordings in the basement, and Titus soon realized that he could reach all the high notes. Meanwhile, he took up the guitar (to impress girls) and learned to play the contemporary repertoire of sixties folksongs: Berle Ives, The Kingston Trio, The Limelighters, et al.
All this effervescent adolescent artistic activity finally had its denouement when the high school drama department decided to do the Broadway musical High Button Shoes. Titus had watched his fair share of sixties television, which featured personalities like Red Skelton. He got the leading role of the “Flim Flam Man” doing Skelton’s pantomime character “Freddy the Freeloader.” Suddenly he found he had become a Big Man On Campus, admired by students and teachers alike. Titus also recalls how mesmerized he was the first time he heard the orchestration for the show and got a inkling of the myriad of sounds produced by violins, flutes, trumpets and bassoons, sounds that he was somehow about to be involved in.
Whetted by this experience in high school musical comedy, Titus’ artistic appetite propelled him into community theater. He got seven small roles in a production of Bernstein’s A Wonderful Town—and he got his first good review when a reporter commented on his versatility.
A year spent at the University of Colorado’s music department brought him under the tutelage of Bert Coffin, author of The Singer’s Repertoire, a series of books that catalogued arias and songs sung by sopranos, mezzo-sopranos, baritones, bass-baritones and basses. Here he began delving into the classical repertoire, while taking lessons from a legendary voice coach who assured him that he had a great voice and arranged for him to record a demo tape of the Mozart aria “Non piu andrai.” In that year of college, Titus worked in a dinner-theater cabaret called Pilk’s Flaming Pit in Cherry Creek, Colo., where he sang highlight pieces from musical comedy.
Looking back, Titus sees a step-by-step process: high school performances, community theater, and finally, getting a paying job in which he had to join AGMA (the American Guild of Musical Artists) and AFTRA (the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists). He even dabbled in ballet.
When Titus graduated from high school, he was 200 pounds of bone and muscle amassed by lifting weights and made lithe by track and football. He did a stint in the Denver Civic Ballet and entered the male corps de ballet. Of that experience he said, “When I started doing my pliés, and putting on my leotards, and jumping around,” Titus recalls, “I realized they needed some big, strong guys to lift those rather overweight ballerinas in the company.” He stayed in the company long enough to dance in Hérold Title’s La Fille Mal Gardée.
A part in the production of My Fair Lady, directed by Jerry Adler at Cheeseman Park in Denver, offered Titus an incentive to try his luck in New York. Adler was heading back to Broadway to direct On A Clear Day You Can See Forever, starring Robert Goulet. He encouraged Titus to audition for a role. Titus went to New York, and joined about 70 competitors at a “cattle call” in the basement of the Mark Hellinger Theater. For some reason, however, Adler wasn’t there.
The adjudicator actually gave Titus an intro: “tata-ta-ta-ta-tam.” Titus choked, couldn’t find his note, heard “Thank you! Neeext!” and before he knew it, he was on the street, deeply depressed and thinking: “This Broadway thing is just not gonna work. I just don’t know anything about music.”
From the depths of his disappointment, however, he forged a decision to try out for three music schools: the Mannes and Manhattan schools of music, and Juilliard. He got a job, studied the catalogues of the schools to see what he needed for the entrance exams—and was accepted by all three schools. He chose Juilliard.
The Juilliard experience
For the next seven years at Juilliard, Titus was under the tutorship of Hans Heinz, a former tenor at Düsseldorf Opera who had taught Tatiana Troyanos and Richard Cassilly.
The Juilliard experience offered much more than voice training. It laid the foundation of a career in opera, especially in its theatrical and choreographic training. Titus’ first productions at Juilliard were under the opera department director, Christopher West. He was given walk-on parts for works like Nozze de Figaro and La bohéme, and he performed an early singing part in Monteverdi’s Il Combatimento di Tancredi e Clorinda. But he considers that his big break at Juilliard arrived when he did the little one-liner of “Posteritá” in Madame Butterfly, which he would later sing big time with Renata Scotto.
After Tito Capobianco took over the opera department at Juilliard, Titus got the role of Figaro in Barber of Seville. Thanks to his good reviews, the role marks the true beginning of his professional career.
Titus rounded out his musical education with experiences like the Friday afternoon recitals, featuring artists such as Gherig Olson (Titus remembers Olson performing Chopin, pounding an eight-foot Bössendorfer piano so hard that he moved it across the stage!) and the Juilliard String Quartet. Titus says of Juilliard that it provided “an overwhelming cultural experience. Music was everywhere. It was New York at its finest!”
For body movement, Titus studied under José Limon, who coached him in his “vanishing point” technique, inspired by Michelangelo. The technique is, “an idea that there is a point out in the horizon by the public,” says Titus, “…and that a string was pulling your wrist [toward it], the impulse coming out of a joint…giving a very interesting skeletal image to the way the body moved.”
For acting, Titus studied Alexander Technique with Drama Department Director John Houseman, who “insisted that all his actors take it up. I suppose Robin Williams did it too,” Titus says. “Kevin Kline was there at that time as well.” The Stanislavsky Method from the Actor’s Studio was also important.
“I read all those books,” Titus says. “They tell you to pick up everything you can from your environment and use it at some time in your life to feed the creativity. They tell you how to fill out the role, how to explore your emotions in a role, how to put on a mask or makeup to be somebody different, and find out something new about yourself in that role.”
Titus waxes enthusiastic as he recalls his Juilliard years.
“There were all these talented people from different disciplines, all mixed together in this nuthouse called Juilliard,” he says. “Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zuckerman were also there. I used to play pool with Zuckerman, who was a great pool player, I might add. I sat next to him in ear training class.”
“So there were all these incredible people, and the atmosphere was just bursting,” Titus recalls. “And we moved to Lincoln Center, where we were able to attend the Met and plays at the Vivian Beaumont. I would eat my lunch in front of the Calder structure, [which was] mirrored in the pond, and just get involved in how the reflection shimmered, and then walk around it. And I also got involved in photography.”
At a time when structural philosophy was in the air, from the structure of thinking he made a parallel with opera and began to look for structure in an opera score or in an opera character. He began to analyze his singing and focus on the kind of sounds he was making, on the musical nuances of the word in a musical structure. This process helped him develop what he calls the “palette of the inner workings of a singer.” It led him to think about when a phrase started and when it finished, about not allowing his mind to jump ahead and destroy the melody he was singing, to wait until the end of the vibration, or to allow the consonant to vibrate at the end before going on to the next stop. This structural thinking was also a tremendous help in developing his ability to memorize and build an inner world that he could trust when he went out on stage.
Titus also developed a technique for aligning his inner world with the staging, the choreography, and with his function in the totality of the piece. He related this technique to a balance between an “inner critical eye” and an “inner supportive eye.”
And so, several years after his failed audition in the basement of the Mark Hallinger Theater, Alan Titus prepared to audition for one of the great musical geniuses of his time, at a hall on New York’s 57th Street. Seven years at Juilliard had provided him a wide repertoire of talents and techniques to show Maestro Leonard Bernstein.
Dressed in jeans and sporting long hair, Titus auditioned with a Harry Belafonte song called “Water Boy.” Accompanying himself with the guitar, he threw in a few effects. Titus later learned that as of that moment, Bernstein had given him the part, but he went on to sight-read on the piano the piece that the Celebrant plays in the production.
“What else you got?” Lennie asked, and Titus replied, “I’m going to sing Ford’s aria from Falstaff.”
“So here I give Verdi to this poor Broadway pianist,” Titus remembers. “He sounded like some percussionist trying to play the piano, and could barely get through it. But I sang it for Lenny. He saw how a Juilliard education paid off.
“So here I was at 25, opening at the Kennedy Center.”
The Bridge to Europe
Bernstein’s Mass is a hybrid of musical genres ranging from opera to late 60’s Broadway rock musicals. And Titus’ early professional success had its yin and yang aspects. On the one hand, he got great reviews, made a recording, went on tour and gained considerable notoriety. On the other hand, his very versatility was considered a handicap. Juilliard had made him familiar with classic operatic roles. He could sing Escamillo in Carmen for instance, but Mass required a baritone-martin.
“Lenny wanted a very high voice,” Titus explains. “He coached me in some of the numbers like “Simple Song,” which, by the way, I can still sing in that kind of quasi-jazz mode. So there were all these combined styles and nuances, not only the sort of operatic power in the aria “When things get broken” at the end of the Mass, but quasi-crooning, straight tones, etc. …With all these different styles, the opera community looked at me as not serious about opera.”
Titus told his publicist, Peter Gravina, “I really am committed to opera.” And a bit of serendipity helped bring it about.
Titus had debuted as Marcello in La bohème at the Washington Opera before starring in Mass, but the New York City Opera provided his real entrée into the opera business. The company arrived at the Kennedy Center with Ariadne auf Naxos while Titus was still singing the role of the Celebrant. After his gig with Mass, Julius Rudel recruited him to sing in the City Opera’s production of Summer of Smoke.
Titus sang the small part of Archie Kramer—but he got to work with Frank Corsaro, a director associated with the Actor’s Studio, who provided a major inspiration. One part led to another, and he began a run of productions with City Opera that included the role of Silvio in Pagliacci, then roles in the Monteverdi opera Poppea, in Domenic Argento’s Miss Haversham’s Fire, and as Ford in Verdi’s Falstaff.
City Opera also gave him the opportunity to sing a lot of Mozart. He was still young and his voice lent itself to lyrical baritone roles. Strauss’ Fledermaus and The Merry Widow gave him what he calls “bread and butter” roles.
Moving away from Bernstein’s Mass into classical opera roles, Titus found inspiration in the beautiful singing of other artists. Backstage at the Kennedy Center he had run into veteran bass Donald Graham, whom he had met at a dinner with a teacher years before in his college days at Colorado University. Graham’s voice had been the first truly mature bass Titus had ever heard and he remembers being “knocked over” by the sound of it. The two would later sing in City Opera productions of The Barber of Seville and Don Pasquale, along with Beverly Sills. As his voice began to mature and a heavier color began to develop, he aspired to the noble, dark, Italian sound he used to admire in recordings of Cesare Siepi and Giorgio Tozzi.
Titus made his European debut in Amsterdam, in the lead role in Pelleas and Melisande, conducted by Dennis Russell Davies. He sang with Edith Matess and Donald MacIntyre. The latter was doing “The Ring” at Bayreuth at the time. MacIntyre filled Titus in on what it was like to sing within the hallowed walls of that Wagnerian temple, and gave him a few pointers on how he sang Wotan, providing advice that came in very useful later.
Titus spent the rest of the decade and the early eighties shuttling across the Atlantic. “But I wasn’t able to break through this image I had in America of what they call a cavalier baritone,” Titus says. “And I knew there was more in me. I knew I could do more.” The key—yet more training, and getting to Europe, where the possibilities were greater for the standard repertoire (there were simply more theaters).
Finally, Titus got an audition at Düsseldorf and landed the role of Don Giovanni, which began his European journey. His agent at the time, Matthew Epstein of Colombia Artists, suggested he prepare all his Mozart roles with Ubaldo Gardini, the prompter or souffleur at the Met, who had formerly worked at Covent Garden and had coached many great singers in Italian. Titus recalls his first coaching session with him. “The first word that Almaviva says is ‘Susanna.’ So I began pronouncing the name: “Su…” But he interrupted immediately, saying, ‘No.’ I tried again: ‘Sssu…’ He said ‘no’ again. Finally, he said, ‘The sexiest consonant in Italian is the ‘S,’ and he pronounced ‘Sssssusana!’ I’ll never forget it!”
Gardini taught Titus both the Mozart style and the Italian style, and helped convey a particular tradition, which helped him reach a new level of understanding and role preparation.
The fruition of this coaching showed in Titus’ rendition of Don Giovanni in Düsseldorf. After performing there and returning to New York, he got a call at about five in the morning saying a singer had just cancelled a recording of Don Giovanni with Rafael Kubelik. Fully prepared after his work from Gardini, he got the role.
“Here I was in Europe, working with established European singers, in a very rarified atmosphere,” Titus recounts. “…Here I was with my first Don Giovanni recording. Serendipity!”
Word of Titus’ talent got around the European opera world. After the premiere night of a production of La bohème in Paris with Pavarotti, he got a phone call from Munich announcing that Maestro Wolfgang Sawallisch, director of the Staatsoper, wanted to hear him sing.
“Well, sweat already began to form on my brow,” Titus says. He flew to Munich and auditioned. Sawallisch was very impressed and gave him a four-year contract.
That began a very important professional relationship.
“He was the most important conductor of my career, because he solidified my musical thinking, and he taught me what a conductor needed from a singer to accompany him better,” Titus says of the maestro. “Talk about the inner eye! When you’re on stage with Sawallisch in the pit, there is musical intensity. He has a kind of energy that he is able to galvanize through his musical concentration that I had never before encountered. He is certainly a genius. It was as if fire was going across the musical staff! I will always be incredibly grateful for this opportunity. We did Hindemith, Strauss and Mozart together; I did Hindemiths’s Cardillac with him, Don Giovanni and then he jumped me into the role of Figaro in Nozze di Figaro without any stage or orchestra rehearsal. He said, ‘You can do it.’ And if he said it, that meant you could. The highlight of my association with him was my La Scala debut as Mandryka in Strauss’s Arabella.”
Sawallisch stimulated Titus to explore a whole new Fach. The opportunities in Munich were so enormous that over the next four years he learned 36 new roles, almost one a month. Today he can count more than 110 operatic roles, including oratorios and Lieder recitals. It was an exciting time for Titus.
“I learned something with every piece,” he says. “And I moved with what I learned to the next one, and I learned more. And I took this process and I kept it going, and I kept learning more.”
When Sawallisch left the Munich Opera, Titus changed management and began exploring Wagner. He met Dorotea Galatt in Nice while singing in Pelleas and Melisande. She asked him to audition for Bayreuth. Then, in 1992, festival adjudicators heard him perform in Hans Sachs in Frankfurt. That started the ball rolling.
Titus’ interpretation of Orest in Electra at La Scala in 1994, under the direction of Giuseppe Sinopoli, began another important professional relationship and led to a total involvement in Wagner. He auditioned with Wotan’s monologue from the second act of “Walküre.” Sinopoli had his doubts. “I don’t know; you’re pretty young,” he said. But he gave Titus the part, and in 2000, he went on to do all three pieces in “The Ring” at Bayreuth.
Titus was enthralled—but the enthrallment was short-lived, thanks to the incredible amount of work demanded of him.
“We started in the beginning of April for an end-of-June opening,” he says. “It was a real roller coaster ride. Jürgen Flimm was a director sent from heaven! Here was a theater man, like Frank Corsaro, understanding the inner workings of the actor, with Sinopoli in charge of the music. It was a dream team!”
“But then,” Titus adds somberly, “tragedy struck. Sinopoli had a heart attack in the orchestra pit while conducting the third Act of Aida in Berlin; and four weeks later, my mother passed away—2001 was a difficult year to get on the stage.”
Maestro Sinopoli was the last of a series of teachers who helped mold Titus’ voice to its superb maturity, while his mother was the original inspiration behind his musical career. Now after five years of Bayreuth, Titus is a “Lord of the Ring,” a vocal athlete who has triumphed in what, for a singer, is tantamount to a cross between the Tour de France and the Olympic Games. Bayreuth means three days of four operas, with an average of four-and-a-half hours on stage. And, Titus adds proudly, “I’m only the second American to sing the role of Wotan at Bayreuth.”
