My friend and colleague from City Opera, Carl Tanner, is making his Met debut tonight, and the Times has a really nice article about him. Thought you might enjoy. He's a Southern boy, a proud gay man, and a great guy.
December 26, 2010
Bounty Hunter Takes His Skills to the Met StageBy DAVID BELCHER
Carl Tanner is a truck driver turned bounty hunter turned opera singer making his Metropolitan Opera debut on Monday. Yes, it’s a long story — but that’s only the beginning. He’ll slip into the role of Dick Johnson, the pistol-packing, high-note-hitting romantic lead in “La Fanciulla del West” for one night, almost like a Wild West bounty hunter who rides into town for what’s called in that trade a quick collar.
It’s a role he has sung dozens of times around the world, but he’ll be starring in this Puccini opera for the first time at the Met, which commissioned “La Fanciulla” and where it had its world premiere a century ago this month. Mr. Tanner’s performance is a one-shot deal, if all goes as planned. As the standby for the tenor Marcello Giordani, by contract he gets to sing the role one time during the run (through Jan.
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Dick Johnson is just the type of guy Mr. Tanner would have pursued in his former life. The two are a renegade and a bounty hunter separated by 100 years. In fact, Mr. Tanner’s life sounds like a modern-day antithesis to that of Dick Johnson, the bandit who falls in love with Minnie (the soprano Deborah Voigt), a bar owner in a California gold rush town in 1849.
“I’ve learned how to spin a six-shooter onstage, but I wouldn’t spin a real gun offstage,” Mr. Tanner said over a recent breakfast at an Upper West Side diner. “And let me tell you, I couldn’t spin a 9-millimeter or a sawed-off shotgun when I was bounty hunting.”
Mr. Tanner, 48, is a hulking, blond teddy bear of a man with a slight Southern drawl and a knack for storytelling. He grew up in a household of four boys in Arlington, Va., and studied voice at the Shenandoah Conservatory of Music in Winchester, Va., before becoming a long-haul trucker to pay the bills and avoid office work. On a hot Saturday afternoon in 1989, while stuck in traffic on Interstate 95, he was singing along with Plácido Domingo on a Met radio broadcast of “Tosca.” His windows were rolled down, and he heard a car horn pierce his impromptu duet.
“This lady in a red convertible was blowing her horn at me, so I yelled something colorful back at her,” he said. “She asked why I was driving a truck. She told me that I had missed my calling.”
That same day he returned to the trucking office, where his boss, coincidentally, had heard the same Met broadcast and asked Mr. Tanner whether he was ever going to pursue his love of singing. It was the first of several “Twilight Zone”-like moments during a day that changed his life.
His car broke down on the way home, and while walking to his parents’ house nearby he found a four-leaf clover minutes after asking God to send him a sign if he was supposed to become an opera singer. His father, who worked as a building painter for the federal government, greeted him when he arrived.
“He told me, ‘I heard that Plácido guy on the radio singing that opera stuff that you sing,’ ” Mr. Tanner remembered. “Then he said, ‘You don’t want to be old like me and realize that you didn’t use what God gave you.’ ”
These coincidences — or messages, as Mr. Tanner likes to call them — sprang him into action. He continued voice lessons and began working with a coach in New York, Gerald Brown (with whom he still studies), while driving trucks for a few more years. One day a friend told him about a bounty-hunting job in Arlington. The money was good, Mr. Tanner said, and he learned how to use three large guns. But two events occurred that still haunt him and turned him away from that line of work.
First was the case of a teenager holed up in a cabin in West Virginia. Mr. Tanner and another bounty hunter, called in by the boy’s parents, cased the place. “I saw someone inside, then heard loud sounds at the front door,” he recalled. “I realized someone was shooting.”
The teenager, he said, shot at him 17 times through the door, then ran from the house. But Mr. Tanner tackled him, hogtied him and put him in the back seat of the car.
“I thought to myself on the ride back, Why am I not singing? as I’m preaching to this kid,” he said.
A week later he was offered $500 for 30 minutes of work on a bail bond that was about to expire. He didn’t have a good feeling about it but couldn’t pass up the cash. “The only thing you have in that business is to trust your gut,” he said.
A fellow bounty hunter covered the front door of an apartment in Arlington where the suspect was hiding, and Mr. Tanner covered the back window in the two-story apartment building. When the front door was stormed, the suspect jumped from the second-story window, grabbed overhead electrical wires, was immediately electrocuted and fell to his death at Mr. Tanner’s feet.
“That was the end of my bounty-hunting career,” he said. “I had nightmares for a year.”
He moved to New York in late 1990 at age 28 with $77 in his pocket. He worked as a singing waiter at Asti’s restaurant, where Richard Gaddes, a former general manager of the Santa Fe Opera, invited him to audition for the company. He was an apprentice there for the summers of 1992 and 1993, making his debut in 1992 in “The Sorrows of Young Werther” and singing the role of Prince Calaf in “Turandot” in 2005. (Mr. Tanner also sang this male starring role in “Turandot” in the Met’s summer parks series in 1993, but “La Fanciulla,” also known as “The Girl of the Golden West,” is his official Met debut.) He has sung more than 40 roles in dozens of opera houses throughout the United States and Japan, but performs mostly in Europe.
In a review of “Pagliacci” at New York City Opera in 2007, Bernard Holland wrote in The New York Times that Mr. Tanner “was a convincing Canio, taking advantage of the level of rug chewing built into the part, but not abusing it,” adding that “musically and physically he does well.”
His schedule as a singer keeps him on the road from 7 to 11 months a year. When he’s not traveling, he lives in Arlington with his partner and their 2-year-old son.
Dick Johnson has become a signature role for Mr. Tanner with companies like the Deutsche Oper in Berlin; the Opera Orchestra of New York; the Vlaamse Opera in Antwerp, Belgium; and, more recently, in a concert version at the Edinburgh International Festival last summer.
Mr. Tanner said he has discovered parallels between his life and the story of Dick Johnson. “When you’re a bounty hunter, people think you’re a tough guy because you chase and arrest people, but I wanted to know what made people tick,” he said. “When you’re arresting people, you notice that we all want the same things, and that we all make mistakes.”
For him the journey from bounty hunting to the opera world has been about finding not only similarities between fugitive and pursuer but also between fugitive and singer.
“The most insecure people I knew were criminals, but the most delicate and insecure people I know now are entertainers,” he said. “In opera you want to be loved and appreciated, but then that’s the common denominator with every person alive.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/27/arts/music/27tanner.html?_r=1&hpw
