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To decades of opera lovers, Sherrill Milnes is the pre-eminent baritone. These days his mellowing voice is opening new roles, while in real life his characters include new father, master teacher, author.
By JOHN FLEMING
© St. Petersburg Times, published April 15, 2001
When Sherrill Milnes gives a master class, the great operatic baritone often thinks back on his own beginnings as a singer in his hometown of Downers Grove, Ill. He was nervous every time he had a solo in church services and oratorios.
"I remember always thinking, "Could I do this for a living? I don't know if I could, nor do I know if I want to. Do I have the nerves?' "
Milnes obviously got over his nerves. Nowadays, he passes on to aspiring singers his experience from more than 40 years on the opera stage.
"You're going to be nervous," he tells them. "Get used to being nervous. Spend your time improving your product so that it will give you confidence that you know the words, that you know the language, that you know what you're saying, that your body energy is appropriate. Spend your time doing that rather than learning to defeat nerves, because you can't defeat nerves. I figure you're paid to be nervous, and you're singing for fun."
Thursday, Milnes gives a master class for six vocal students from Florida colleges and universities at the Tarpon Springs Performing Arts Center. Hosted by Mary Diana of WUSF-FM 89.7, the class is open to the public. Tickets are $15.
Milnes has a Tarpon Springs connection through his wife, Maria Zouves, a Clearwater High School grad from a Greek family in the area. Milnes and Zouves, a soprano, were both in the recent Pittsburgh Opera production of Falstaff, with him in the title role and her singing the juvenile love interest, Nannetta.
Falstaff, the disreputable knight of Verdi's final opera, is a role Milnes didn't take on until about 10 years ago. At 66, the baritone is, for the most part, no longer singing the roles that made him a household name in the 1960s and '70s. For a generation of opera lovers, he was the pre-eminent American Verdi baritone, a superstar with more than 600 appearances at the Metropolitan Opera and 70 recordings.
In his prime, Milnes' stock in trade was singing sexy parts such as the title role in Don Giovanni or elegant bad guys like Scarpia (Tosca) and Iago (Othello). Falstaff is a different story, with the baritone wearing a fat suit.
"Because I did what the Italians call the bella figura parts -- the handsome parts -- it took some psychological adjustment to play Falstaff," he says. "I had to be willing to give in to some silliness and to looking foolish, with that belly of his. You have to get used to losing a bit of dignity."
Milnes got a good notice from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for his cultivation of the "nobleman in Falstaff," which reflected the approach he took to the role. Often, Falstaff is performed by a bass in broad, farcical terms.
"In some ways, that does the part of Falstaff a disservice, because he doesn't consider himself a comic character," Milnes says. "He's still a knight, but he's down on his luck. The humor in Falstaff comes because he is so serious about what he's doing."
He compares Falstaff to another Verdi baritone role that he has performed countless times, Germont, the father in La Traviata.
"Falstaff is different from the other Verdi parts in that pure beauty of tone and long legato line are not the only ingredient. If you're singing Germont, though it's much shorter than Falstaff, if you don't lay out Di Provenza in a seamless, beautiful line, making beautiful sound with soaring high notes, well, you might as well throw in the towel. Falstaff has line, but it's more word colors than just beauty of sound. Germont doesn't have to be acted as much if somebody can sing with beauty of tone and seamless line. With Falstaff, every word has a different color."
Milnes and Zouves, who studied voice at Stetson University and the University of South Florida, have performed in other operas together, including Don Giovanni and Gianni Schicchi. In Falstaff, their characters have little interaction.
"As Maria says, she has nothing to do with the Falstaff inside the opera, but the most to do with him outside the opera," Milnes says. "Falstaff barely knows that she exists; he's after her mama."
Milnes and Zouves, who were married in 1996 in the office of New York Mayor Rudy Guiliani, a big opera fan, have a 14-month old son. "I have a 42-year-old and a 14-month-old," says Milnes, referring to his elder son from a previous marriage. "That's a good span."
Last month, the couple were in the middle of moving from a house in upstate New York to one in the Chicago area, where Milnes teaches at Northwestern University. They also have an apartment in New York City and a condo in Palm Harbor.
"The trick is knowing if I have a suit or a piece of music I need in one of the places," Milnes says.
In June, Milnes and Zouves are putting on a singer training program, called the V.O.I.C.Experience (Vocal and Operatic Intensive Creative Experience), at Walt Disney World. They would like to move the program to Tarpon Springs next year and are hoping to drum up support with a sold-out evening of music and anecdotes by Milnes in a private home on Saturday.
"We're starting with the master class and soiree," Zouves says. "It would be a lovely thing to put on in that community, and we could help young Greek singers. I'd like to connect the ethnicity with opera."
In 1998, Milnes published a revealing memoir, American Aria: From Farm Boy to Opera Star.
"I have great pride in it," he says. "I wrote every word. I didn't tape it and give it to somebody to write the book. That's what most of my colleagues do. They tape things and give it to a ghost writer. I labored over every word, every phrase, so that I felt it accurately represented my memory of a given event."
Milnes' book covered some sensitive subjects, including his "decade of panic" when he was afflicted with vocal problems. It started in 1981, when, on the morning after a performance of the title role in Ambroise Thomas' Hamlet, "I woke up and couldn't talk. It was a very bad case of laryngitis, and I couldn't make a sound -- just breath came out."
For most of the next 10 years, Milnes struggled with his singing. He canceled engagements. He saw many throat doctors and had two rounds of laser surgery for broken capillaries in his vocal cords.
Eventually, Milnes' singing voice came back, but he gave up some of his trademark roles in Verdi operas such as La Forza del Destino, Luisa Miller and Rigoletto. "You start to lose some vocal gas, some ease in the top," he says. "Some of the high parts become harder."
Milnes' painful experience took a toll on his career, as critics and opera officials noted the difficulties and changes in his sound. He had an unhappy parting with the Met, which stopped giving him big roles. The last performance of his career at the opera house that made him an international star was Aida in 1997.
"It's odd," he says. "The Europeans tend to value and honor age more than we Americans do. In the European houses, they'll go the opposite extreme; there'll be somebody who just can't sing at all, but because they are so beloved, they're still out there. There's more loyalty to age and service in Europe than here."
In his book, Milnes was critical of Met artistic director James Levine. "There has been no response," he says. "Jim has been inappropriately silent. I tried to avoid sour grapes. But there should have been something, considering all the performances we did together."
Today, Milnes enjoys the prospect of singing some of the Verdi baritone roles of older men, including Falstaff. "Voices change over time," he says. "They get thicker, they get heavier. That's the reason for Falstaff being an older man's part. It needs a weightier baritone. An older actor has more savvy than a younger actor."
Sherrill Milnes gives a master class at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at Tarpon Springs Performing Arts Center. Tickets: $15. A video of Tosca, with Placido Domingo, Raina Kabaivanska and Milnes, shows at 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Tarpon Springs Cultural Center. Tickets: $1. (727) 942-5605.