Samuel Ramey Has Made a Deep Impression : Music: Opera’s newest superstar is a bass from the Midwest United States who can cut a dashing and swashbuckling figure on stage.

Giants of the opera usually go for the high notes. Sopranos Maria Callas and Leontyne Price come to mind, as do tenors Luciano Pavarotti and Placido Domingo.

Now comes a Midwesterner who has reached the top on the low road. For the first time in years, the opera world’s superstar is a bass, Samuel Ramey.

He cuts a dashing figure on stage: tall, dynamic, graceful, a swashbuckler when the role calls for it. But it’s his voice that makes him opera’s most in-demand basso.

Ramey has joined a line of deep voices that includes Luigi Lablache, Edouard de Reszke, Feodor Chaliapin, Ezio Pinza, Cesare Siepi and the fine American bass that Ramey followed at the New York City Opera, Norman Treigle.

Ramey, at ease and confident off-stage, smiles. “I don’t think that success needs to change anybody. I’m from the Midwest. I think that has a lot to do with it.”

The bass is often a villain in opera, but Ramey doesn’t mind. Villains are often more interesting than heroes, he says. “The real personality parts are the ones I enjoy the most.”

The singer, who heard his first opera at age 21, says: “There was no exposure to opera where I grew up in Kansas. After I decided I wanted to try to become an opera singer, you always have dreams of singing in places like La Scala or Covent Garden. You never really think when you’re beginning that it might happen. I guess I sort of took things as they came and let the career develop in the way that it might.”

His debut part at Covent Garden and La Scala was Figaro. “He’s making the bed in the beginning,” Ramey says. “There’s nothing terribly flamboyant about that. But it’s a good debut part for me. I think it’s one of my best parts. It’s always been a lucky opera for me.

“One of the oddest things I’ve ever done on stage was a few years ago in Pesaro at the Rossini Festival. I did ‘Maometto Secondo.’ I’m brought in on this throne being carried by these soldiers. The director had assembled very big guys, body-builder types. I sang this aria sitting on my throne. Then I got down and I climbed on a human pyramid. I did the second verse standing on two of these guys’ shoulders. It’s one of the most difficult pieces to sing. But it really made quite a spectacular effect.”

Ramey has deliberately delayed singing the title role in “Boris Godunov.” “I think it’s a part one shouldn’t do when you’re young. I will do it the first time in the spring of 1993 in Geneva.”

The Metropolitan Opera is presenting “Semiramide” this season for the first time since 1895 because there are singers such as mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne and Ramey who can handle the fast coloratura.

Horne, who stimulated the current interest in Rossini operas, recalls when she started to sing Rossini and other bel canto operas with Dame Joan Sutherland. “The tenors and basses would be a little on the weak side. Now we’ve got lots of tenors and astounding basses, with Sam Ramey leading the pack.”

Horne chose Ramey to sing Argante, king of Jerusalem, in Handel’s “Rinaldo” with her in Ottawa in 1982, and Canada lent the production to the Met as a Bicentennial gift in 1984. It was Ramey’s Met debut. He was pulled on stage standing in a chariot, announced by trumpets and drums and began to sing full voice.

“His aria is a mighty and magnificent challenge to a bass and in it Samuel Ramey won the Metropolitan audience in a night,” says “Kobbe’s Opera Book.”

Ramey says: “It has got to be one of the best entrances in opera. . . . It was a very exciting moment musically and dramatically.”

Ramey was born in Colby, Kan., in 1942, son of a meat cutter. Two brothers and a sister are much older. His singing debut, as a child, was one verse of “We Three Kings of Orient Are.” He graduated from high school in 1960, having played the scarecrow in “The Wizard of Oz,” the senior play.

His father died when he was a college freshman, and Ramey took a year off and worked in a haberdashery. He worked his way through Wichita State University, finally getting a bachelor of music degree in 1968.

The seed of ambition to become an opera singer was planted when Ramey, in college, heard a record by Pinza. It grew and flowered when he was hired for the chorus at Colorado’s Central City Opera the summer of 1963 and heard Treigle sing “Don Giovanni.”

Out of college, he went with the Grass Roots Opera Company in Raleigh, N.C. After a year he moved to New York, got a job writing copy for a textbook publisher who gave him time off to audition.

The year after that, 1970, he married Carrie Tenante, who worked for RCA Records and now travels the international opera circuit with him, organizing their airplanes and hotels.