The American Precedent

Dwayne Croft, one of the rising stars of the Metropolitan Opera, is a prime exemplar of the new breed of singer. He’s got the right stuff, that is, for a world where “stand and sing” declamation has gone the way of Feodor Chaliapin and Rosa Ponselle, and a production isn’t really considered a hit unless it crops up on TV.

Tall, trim and photogenic, Croft is clearly ready for his close-up. He is as often praised for his naturalistic acting as for his opulent voice. And although his star was already in ascent at the time, it was last spring’s telecast of the Met’s “Billy Budd”--in which he sang the title role--that really brought the singer national name recognition.

All artists, of course, are a product of their epoch--a fact not lost on the baritone. “A lot of that has to do with what opera has become,” says Croft, referring to the fuss that’s been made about his thespian skills. “Since television’s become more important, it’s become more of a media event. The acting has become more important, and the way you look physically has become much more important. I think that also draws in a bigger audience too, because people can start to get into the drama of it as well as the music.

“Opera used to be more for the [live] audience and making these big gestures so that the people in the family circle could see what’s going on,” he continues. “I used to sit up there [in the highest balcony] when I was in college. You can only see this little figure down on the stage. You can’t see their facial expression. I know that what I do now on stage, without binoculars, you wouldn’t be able to pick it up.”

You would certainly be able to hear it, though, as Los Angeles audiences can attest. The singer is making his company debut in L.A. Opera’s most recent revival of its Jonathan Miller production of “Don Giovanni,” which opened last week.

Nurtured in the Metropolitan’s Young Artists program during the early ‘90s, the 38-year-old Croft has triumphed in that much-vaunted house in the title roles of works as varied as “Eugene Onegin,” “The Barber of Seville,” “Pelleas and Melisande” and “Don Giovanni.” This fall, he appeared in the Met’s starry “Marriage of Figaro,” featuring Cecilia Bartoli, Renee Fleming and Bryn Terfel, among others. And next season, Croft will create the role of narrator Nick Carraway in the much-anticipated world premiere of John Harbison’s “The Great Gatsby,” based on the 1925 F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, also at the Met.

“Dwayne is one of the most beloved artists at the Met and a great favorite of the audiences here,” says Metropolitan Opera assistant manager Sarah Billinghurst. “He has a wonderful voice and is very elegant on stage. He’s always had a beautiful voice, but he’s become more confident, and his presence on stage has grown. He really is one of the best young American artists around.”

What’s striking about Croft’s connection to the Met, in fact, is the extent to which he’s built his career there. While common wisdom still holds that a young singer must put in time in Europe to launch his career, Croft has made his mark largely on domestic soil. “He’s really a home-grown product of the Met--an artist who really has made his career in America and whose career in Europe is just starting,” says Billinghurst. “It’s unusual for a singer to be as totally American grown as this.”

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Croft may have the nerves of steel it takes to sing on the Met stage, but he’s not one of those performers who’s comfortable in a constant spotlight. Indeed, he was full of jitters as he sat for an interview in an office in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion one recent morning. Polite and congenial, he nonetheless appeared surprisingly ill at ease for a seasoned performer.

Shifting in his seat and looking around the nearly empty room, Croft peppered his speech with false starts, “you knows” and “ums.” When answering questions, he would often look away, as though being watched made the task all the more difficult.

Hours later, however, a different Croft appeared. Striding into an evening rehearsal, he was composed, confident and friendly. Even in the stop-and-start context of an Act 1 work session, it’s easy to detect the magnetism and dulcet tones Croft brings to “Don Giovanni.” Playing off the charismatic antics of Richard Bernstein’s Leporello, or wending his way through a bevy of fan-fluttering maidens, Croft’s Don is as assured as Croft the interviewee was uneasy. He has an effortless camaraderie with his fellow performers and seems ever the gentleman--whether lifting a dancer here, whirling two more there or engaging in boisterous musical repartee with Bernstein.

Croft first assayed the Mozart role in Santiago, Chile, in 1995. Since then, he has also played the part not only at the Met, but also in Santa Fe, Vienna and Washington, D.C. Writing about his 1997 Met debut in the role, Opera News called Croft “splendid--proud, debonair, louche, impressive as both singer and actor.” Similarly, the New York Times noted Croft’s “suave bearing and smooth and attractive vocal tone.”

The role of the remorseless skirt-chaser would not seem to be a natural fit, either dramatically or vocally, for the well-mannered and unassuming Croft. Yet he has hidden resources that can make it work.

“I enjoy doing Don Giovanni more from a dramatic sense than I do actually singing it,” says Croft of the role, which is sometimes sung by lower-pitched bass baritones. “Even though I [can] sing really high, I have a lower extension that I’m able to lock into, and I do have more low notes than most high baritones.”

And dramatically, it’s simply a matter of employing the convincingly mutable persona that has become one of Croft’s calling cards. With no formal acting training to speak of (other than some advice from a college singing teacher), Croft relies on the most basic and fundamental of actorly tools--empathy.

“I just put myself in the situation of the character, and I listen to what’s being said to me and I try to make it as spontaneous as possible,” says the New York-based singer, who last year married fellow Met artist Ainhoa Arteta. “I don’t try to force anything to happen.”

Nor is that empathy limited to the characters he plays. Croft, his colleagues will tell you, is equally caring when it comes to those with whom he works.

“I admire and respect Dwayne more than I can say,” says tenor Jerry Hadley, who has sung frequently with Croft at the Met and who will play Jay Gatsby to the baritone’s Nick Carraway next winter. Hadley uses words like “generous” and “decent”--not always part of the description of opera stars. “There are very few artists today who are as meticulous in their preparation of a role as is Dwayne, nor are there many who are as sensitive to the people with whom they share the spotlight.”

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It’s tempting to ascribe Croft’s gentlemanly and unpretentious ways to his upbringing, which was as modest as the Met is grand. But the real wonder may be how it was that such a boyhood would produce a Met singer. “People ask all the time where did it come from, and I have no idea,” says Croft, calling himself “a fluke from a tiny town.”

The younger of two sons born to a carpenter and a homemaker, Croft grew up outside Cooperstown, N.Y. “We didn’t even live in Cooperstown, which is a small town itself,” he says. “We lived outside of a suburb of Cooperstown--in the boondocks. My parents live in the woods, basically. But we did go to school in Cooperstown.”

Both of the Croft brothers became interested in music during their school years. They took up singing as boys and later played instruments in school bands and the like. It was Dwayne’s trumpet playing that led him to discover opera--when he got a job performing in the Act 2 parade of “La Boheme” at the then-newly formed Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown in 1975.

“I remember watching the opera and laughing and thinking it was funny,” Croft recalls. “But then suddenly I started listening and staying and watching rehearsals and really liking it. It just grabbed me, and I wanted to continue doing it, so by the next summer I was in the chorus.”

Coincidentally, Croft and his brother, Richard, who is also an opera singer, both discovered the musical form about the same time, although in different places. Richard, away at college, was introduced to it there.

When Richard came home on break, the two siblings would hole up with Puccini’s “greatest hits” and other opera recordings exploring their newfound mutual infatuation. It may not be the stuff of stereotypical brotherly bonding, but it seems to have made a lasting impression.

“We talked about this just recently because we were singing together at the Met,” the younger Croft says. “We were reminiscing about that day that we were kids, listening to that recording in my bedroom--and how now we were singing together at the Met and how it was pretty amazing.”

Croft went on to study voice at State University of New York, Purchase. He started out convinced that he was a tenor. But that would change.

In 1989, six years after graduating from college, Croft was living in New York, holding down a job as a gym instructor at a private school. “I’d just gotten a new voice teacher and started really working hard as a baritone, and I was still not convinced of it,” he says.

Within a few months, Croft’s new teacher had set up an audition for him at the Met. If he still doubted his baritone chops, others apparently didn’t. Only a week later, while he was singing back at Glimmerglass, the Met called, looking for someone to understudy a small part in “Gianni Schicchi.” Croft took the gig and basically has been at Lincoln Center ever since.

He entered the Young Artists program at age 28 and began a career that virtually defines the credo “slow and steady.” He covered more roles and then made his house debut in 1990, in the small role of Fiorello in “The Barber of Seville.”

“I was, little by little, given more responsibility,” Croft says.

His next break came in late 1992, when Thomas Hampson canceled his scheduled performances of the title role in Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin.” Croft, who had been assigned to cover the part and sing the last two performances, went on in his stead and received glowing notices. New York Newsday said he was “skillful, impassioned, intelligent and idiomatic,” adding that Croft sounded more Russian than anyone else in the cast.

Another landmark came in 1996, when he performed opposite Frederica von Stade in a new Met “Pelleas and Melisande.” Then came the 1997 “Billy Budd,” a role that Croft calls “a dream part. It sits right in the right part of my voice.” This season, Croft will perform Rodrigo in Verdi’s “Don Carlos” for the first time, at the Opera National de Paris, where he has sung before. But he is in no hurry to rush into a slew of Verdi roles. “He’s very careful to sing exactly the right roles for his weight of voice,” says the Met’s Billinghurst. “He’s very sensible, knows what he can do.”

“The Great Gatsby,” which bows at the Met in December 1999, will mark the first time Croft has performed in a world premiere. He was just beginning to learn the score during “Don Giovanni” rehearsals and didn’t yet have much to say about his character Nick Carraway.

“It’s very hard for me, when I’m rehearsing a part, to be learning more,” says Croft. “You want to just go home and forget about music.” He welcomes the challenge, however, as well as the chance to participate in such an eagerly awaited event at the Met.

Could there be a downside to being well-liked at the Met? Only a slight one, in that Croft has very little out on CD. “Because of my career at the Met, I’ve stayed in the United States more,” he says. “There aren’t as many opera recordings coming out of the United States. It’s just a matter of singing more in Europe, and that’s starting to happen.

“I still will sing a lot at the Met,” adds Croft, who has also sung in Vienna, Bordeaux and London. “A lot of my work in the future is at the Met and that’s great. I mean, that’s home. I’m able to sleep in my own bed.”

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“Don Giovanni,” L.A. Opera, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, L.A. Music Center, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown. Wednesday, Saturday, April 27, 30 and May 2, 7:30 p.m.; Tuesday, 1 p.m. $25-$137. (213) 365-3500.