The Unlikely Opera Star

Any young man growing up outside of Europe today who sets his sights on becoming an opera singer isn’t going to have it easy. But if that young man happens to live in Mexico, his career path may be particularly rocky.

Unlike Europe, Mexico has comparatively few institutions to support, let alone launch, an operatic career. “It’s unusual to be an opera singer in Mexico because we have only one opera house in the country,” explains Mexican tenor Ramon Vargas, during a conversation at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

“In Mexico, we have many people who sing, but we don’t have training,” he continues. “We are 90 million, more or less, the Mexican people, and the people like me--Mexicans who sing in world opera--are maybe three or four.

“A Mexican young man that wants to be an opera singer is crazy. In America it’s also strange, but in Mexico, it’s crazy.”

Fortunately, Vargas never let the long odds deter him--which is why, at only 35, he has already performed and won acclaim in such vaunted venues as the Metropolitan Opera, La Scala, Covent Garden and Opera Bastille.

On Saturday, Vargas makes his Los Angeles Music Center Opera debut as the love-struck peasant boy Nemorino in Donizetti’s “The Elixir of Love” at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. The new production of the comic bel canto opera is directed by Stephen Lawless and conducted by Gabrielle Ferro.

It’s but one in a string of high-profile engagements that Vargas has had in the past several years. Yet for all that success, he remains acutely aware of how exotic his career still seems to his friends and family back home.

“After I was a professional singer and [made] my big debuts in big theaters, I came back to Mexico and my friends [said], ‘What do you do in Europe?’ ” Vargas says. “I said, ‘I am a singer.’ And they [said], ‘OK, but what is your job?’ ”

Vargas grew up in a middle-class household in Mexico City, the youngest son of nine children born to a businessman and his wife. It was, as he describes it, a “very normal family in Mexico.”

Blessed with a natural talent, he began to sing in church when he was 9. “I was in the choir in the Basilica de Guadalupe, the most famous basilica in Mexico City, for three years or a little bit more,” the gracious, cherub-faced Vargas says. “It was a grand experience.”

By the time he reached adolescence, the church had introduced Vargas to a wide range of classical styles and genres. “I sang all the music, from all the periods, beginning with the Gregorians,” he says. “It was maybe my best period in my life, like a paradise.”

It was also pivotal in terms of introducing the young boy to his destiny. “I was signed for music,” Vargas says, in his slightly fractured English. “I stayed in music all my life after this experience. I believe a lot in music experience for children because I am the product of this.”

Enraptured though he was, the onset of adolescence, and the change of voice that goes with it, soon intervened. Several years went by, while Vargas despaired of ever regaining a singing voice.

Then, at 17, he ran into the man who had coached him when he was singing at church. “Maestro Lopez asked me, ‘How is your voice?’ ” Vargas says, “and I said I lost my voice. When I was a child, I had an angel voice. Then, I thought my voice was ugly.”

Lopez persuaded Vargas to sing for him. “I did an audition and he said, ‘Your voice is there, only the problem is that it is not mature. It is normal, but you have to work with your voice and be patient.’ ”

Encouraged, Vargas once again began taking serious voice lessons, but he still wasn’t thinking of singing as a career. To earn a living, he set his sights on becoming an elementary school teacher.

Soon, however, he realized that he would have to choose between his passion for music and his more pragmatic plans.

“At this moment my teacher told me, do something with [your] voice and talent, but [don’t] do two things in the same time,” Vargas says. He chose music.

In 1983, when he was 22, Vargas won the Carlo Morelli competition, a prestigious opera prize in Mexico. “This competition was very important for me because I said, ‘OK, I tried, and I won,’ ” he says. “Then I started to sing professionally in Mexico. But I always [felt] that I was not ready.”

His apprehensions turned out to have some basis, when, after only a year of work, in 1984, Vargas developed serious voice problems. “I [had sung] all my life with pleasure, but then it was sufferance,” he says. “I lost a lot of time, but I have to sing only with pleasure. If not, I don’t do it.”

After some rest and recuperation, however, Vargas, then 25, rolled the dice again. “In 1986 I said, ‘OK, I [will take] my last chance,’ ” he says. “Now I go to Europe. If something happens, OK. If not, I [will] travel in Europe and go back to Mexico and that’s my last chance.”

He was determined not to end up in the same boat as other Mexican singers he’d seen. “I saw this situation with other singers in Mexico,” he says. “They sing in a few things, sometimes, but it is not enough, and I do not want it. For money, they have to do other things and it is very bad.”

Fortunately, something did happen when Vargas went to Europe. He won the Enrico Caruso tenor competition in Milan in 1986.

“Then I said I [would] stay in Europe,” says Vargas, who took up his studies at the school of the Vienna State Opera and had his first exposure to a major opera company: “It was the first time I sang in a real theater. This was a fabulous experience,” he says.

He signed his first contract in 1988, with the Lucerne Opera in Switzerland. Two years later, Vargas decided to abandon that salaried position and become a free agent.

“I said now I have [made] the decision to be a singer, and I want to be one of the best singers,” he says. “I left this small theater where they pay me for every month. Now I want to be free. It is the last step for a young singer.”

His breakthrough came in 1991, when he first won major roles in major houses. He performed in Rossini’s “Mose” at the Teatro Comunale in Bologna, and shortly thereafter, Vargas was seen in Rossini’s “Stabat Mater” in Paris, under the direction of Myung-Whun Chung.

From that point on, Vargas began to work steadily in the best houses. In 1992, he opened the Rome Opera season in “Il Barbiere di Siviglia” and made his Metropolitan debut as Edgardo, opposite June Anderson, in “Lucia di Lammermore.”

In the past few years, his career has continued apace, in both Europe and the United States. Writing in Opera magazine about Vargas’ Edgardo in San Diego, former Times music critic Martin Bernheimer said: “He sang with rare sensitivity and bel canto purity, filing his slender tenore di grazia to a perfectly poised whisper in moments of tenderness yet rising to the heroic outbursts with ample thrust.”

Yet no matter how the praise rolls in, Vargas never quite escapes the tension he feels between his origins and the exigencies of his art. It is, he says, a matter of cultural differences.

“In Mexico, we are far away--from the mentality, and also from Europe and America,” Vargas says. “It’s very hard for the Latin American people because we have another mentality--slowly, slowly--and here it’s all fast. We live better in many things. We don’t have money maybe, but the people are happy.”

Still, the culture gap hasn’t prevented Vargas from having a career, although he remains ambivalent about the effect it has had.

“If I was born in America or Europe, my career could be faster,” he says.

“I have a good career, but I lost time because I wanted to do many things,” Vargas continues. “The time is gone now. I do not lament. For me now, it’s perfect because I take my time.”

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“THE ELIXIR OF LOVE,” Los Angeles Music Center Opera, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Music Center, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown. Dates: Saturday and April 30, May 3 and 5, 7:30 p.m.; April 27, 1 p.m. Prices: $22-$120. Phone: (213) 365-3500.