Meeting Robert Dean Smith off-stage for the first time brought Ted Baxter
to mind.

What on earth would they have in common - Bayreuth's new reigning
heldentenor and the Mary Tyler Moore Show's pompous, hilariously
dimwitted silver fox of a TV anchorman?

Smith - half Baxter's age, as unpretentious as any singer I know, and
sharp as a tack - has the same speaking voice:  a mellifluous, carefully
modulated, deep baritone.  That's really not what you'd expect from the man
who won a triple crown in the Wagnerian Walhalla this year:  the title role
of "Lohengrin," Walther in "Die Meistersinger," and Siegmund in "Die
Walkure."

While this year's Bayreuth casting might have been a dramatic fluke, in one
of the most impossibly dramatic last-minute replacement stories, the triple
assignment is now official for next season as well.

The man from Chetopa, Kansas, is making his US opera debut in the War
Memorial Opera House as Walther this month.  The role requires almost
constant presence on stage for over five hours ("I am there at the
beginning and at the end") and production of un-Baxterlike, high, strong,
heroic tenor sounds seemingly forever.  Still, here in San Francisco,
Smith gets two or three days off after each performance.  In Bayreuth this
August, the day after Smith finished his five-hour tour of duty, the phone
rang and Wolfgang Wagner asked him if he would sing Lohengrin.  In an hour
- which is how long the festival had to replace the tenor unable to go on.

"I am healthy," Smith remembers his first reaction, and the conclusion:
"I can do it." He did, and the reviews were ecstatic, establishing the young
American as one of the most sought-after members of the most exclusive club
in the world, that of good, reliable, strong, crowd-pleasing Wagnerian
heldentenors.

Shortly after that dramatic Walther-Lohengrin doubleheader, by the time
Smith arrived in San Francisco last month for rehearsals, his calendar
filled up through 2005:  Berlin, Munich, Covent Garden, Barcelona, Vienna,
Paris.  One place missing so far from his dance card:  the Met in New York.

Two obvious points here are begging the question - first, why does a Kansan
take a dozen years to arrive in California (on his first visit here, by the
way) to make his US debut; and what is an obviously baritonish voice doing
on the Wagnerian high wire without a safety net.

These seeming contradictions are not at all mysterious to opera fans:
many American singers get their start, or even spend their entire career,
in Europe; many heldentenors come from the lower depths.

In Smith's case, the road led from saxophone and voice studies in Kansas
to voice only at the Juilliard (a master's degree in opera), and then a
series of small opera houses in Germany - Bielefeld, Wiesbaden, Kassel,
Bremen, Mannheim.  He spent the first seven years singing baritone roles:
Valentin, Marcello, Malatesta, Figaro, Papageno.  In Bielefeld, he sang the
role of the Count in Lorzing's "Der Waffenschmied," and another American,
Janice Harper, sang Marie.  In the opera, the two get married, and that's
what the two musical ex-pats did too.  They live in Lugano, Switzerland.

It was in Wiesbaden that Smith first noticed "the top notes developing." He
started vocalizing in the tenor range, "just to see what would happen." By
1989, he made a decision to switch.  Mozart played a big role in his career
(in the same fashion as for another new heldentenor star, Gosta Winbergh)
- Smith's first on-stage tenor role was Don Ottavio (in Kassel), followed
by Tamino.  Mozart and daily disciplined work, Smith says, paved the way to
singing a "bel canto Wagner," instead of declaiming and barking.

His first Walther, the role he is increasingly making his own, came in
Mannheim in 1996, along with lots of Puccini, Don Jose, Enzo, and - closer
to his current "fach" - Florestan.

By 1997, he auditioned in Bayreuth (before Wolfgang Wagner and Daniel
Barenboim) and was engaged as the cover for Walther.  As in "Lohengrin"
this year, a cancellation also paved the way to success in Smith's first
time in Bayreuth.  (He is staying in San Francisco through the two upcoming
performances when Jay Hunter Morris sings Walther - acting as cover again
- but this time chances are he is not hoping for a cancellation.)

The future is chock full of heldentenor roles, of course, riding on top of
the supply-and-demand train, but Smith is determined to maintain a variety
of repertory.  Next, he will sing the title role in Stravinsky's "Oedipus
Rex" in Amsterdam's Concertgebouw (where he will also perform in Mahler's
"Das Lied von der Erde"), then in "The Bartered Bride" and as Bacchus in
"Ariadne auf Naxos" (quite a stretch from Smetana to Richard Strauss),
oratorio roles in the "Missa Solemnis" and the Dvorak "Stabat Mater."

All this combines to keep him away from home.  The last time he calculated
how much time he'll spend this year in Lugano, it turned out to be about 30
days.  But he is not complaining.

Janos Gereben/SF
[log in to unmask]