COVER STORY : One Life, Two Worlds : As an Opera Singer, Rodney Gilfry Inhabits a Foreign Land Where High Art Triumphs Over Pop Culture. As a Family Man, He’s Happy to Barbecue in the Burbs.

the tradition started in the opera houses of Italy. Just before the curtain goes up, one singer exhorts another, “In bocca al lupo!” “Into the mouth of the wolf!”

“Crepi il lupo!” comes the reply. “Die, wolf!”

This is not Italy, though. This is Zurich, where church bells bong and trams groan precisely on time, where clear-mindedness leaks from the stone faces of the banking houses and permeates the air. Yet in the murmur and chatter coming over his dressing-room intercom from the audience that waits in Zurich’s opera house, Rodney Gilfry can hear the sounds of the wolf salivating. The 6-foot, 3-inch baritone, in 18th century knickers, vest and ponytailed wig, is bent over a computer spread sheet. He is going though a list of more than a hundred notes he has made on how to improve tonight’s “Don Giovanni.” Some of the notes are for his fellow cast members, and he must figure out how to convey his thoughts without abrading any egos. Most, though, are for himself, the centerpiece, the Don Giovanni of this production.

With half-closed eyes, his right hand gesturing in front of the dressing-room mirror, he mouths reminders about phrasing, emphasis, minute stage actions:

“ ‘Povera infelice’--not desperate, ‘ashamed.’ ”

“No laugh in ‘al fin . . . pulito?’ ”

“Take hat off after ‘cari amici, buon giorno.’ ”

The wolf, hungry for perfection, is not just in the audience, but in the singer, too.

*

Consider what opera demands of singers. They must train for years to establish control over the muscles and ligaments of their larynxes. They must learn to exploit the antagonism between the muscles of their chests and stomachs to create pillars of air to vibrate their vocal folds.

They must learn to amplify their sound in the changeable resonator of their facial cavities--the singer’s version of a trumpet’s tube or a violin’s hollow body--and to project it across a cavernous hall without a microphone.

They must apply their fragile instruments to some of Western civilization’s most difficult and treasured music, before audiences sometimes predisposed to scorn their presumptuousness.

They must learn to act and to articulate flawlessly in half a dozen languages.

They must carry all this off with technical precision, yet artistic abandon, and try not to let a momentary lapse in self-confidence cause the entire edifice to collapse.

They must embrace a life of displacement, of waiting in airports and sleeping in hotel rooms. Telephone calls and e-mail must suffice for connection with the people they love. To work in an art form whose essence is the passion of human existence, they must struggle to have meaningful emotional lives.

And heaven forbid that they should come down with a cold.

It is no wonder that Americans tend to think of opera singers as being from foreign places--if not from foreign lands, then at least from a foreign psychology: all this dedication to the difficult over the easy, the sublime over the fleetingly amusing.

Yet it would be hard to find a man more American, more Californian and suburban, than Rodney Gilfry, who, at 40, is one of the world’s elite lyric baritones. Born in Covina and raised in Claremont, he was bred to tract houses, smoggy sunshine and working on cars in the driveway. When he is home, in a middle-class subdivision outside Rancho Cucamonga, he barbecues in the backyard and carts his three kids around to music and soccer practice.

The most successful singer spawned by the L.A. Opera, Gilfry is esteemed for his elegant voice, incisive acting and striking good looks. Among American lyric baritones, he is second in international recognition only to Thomas Hampson, who is four years his elder. His ascendancy parallels that of L.A. Opera as a major venue. Gilfry’s career began with a one-line role in the company’s inaugural production in October 1986. This season he will sing, for the first time in Los Angeles, the title character in Benjamin Britten’s “Billy Budd,” which has become something of his signature role. It will be a signal event, capping L.A. Opera’s season as well as the tenure of the company’s founding director, Peter Hemmings.

*

As Gilfry waits onstage for the curtain to go up at Zurich’s wedding cake of an opera house this Saturday night, he wonders if he’s getting ill.

He awoke this morning with a dry throat. Inhaling steam did not help. During his warm-up, when he assayed the high notes of the opera’s famous serenade, “Deh vieni alla finestra,” he couldn’t make them “speak” at a soft volume, and low-C came too easily for his medium-weight baritone. Ahead of him lay a three-hour opera, during which his voice would be tested for 45 minutes.

This production of “Don Giovanni” was already hexed. A week before the premiere, Italian mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli, who was to sing the role of Donna Elvira for the first time, slipped on the ice outside a Zurich shoe store and broke her ankle. Then, just before opening night, Hungarian bass-baritone Laszlo Polgar, who had rehearsed for six weeks the key role of the Don’s servant, Leporello, was felled by the flu. German baritone Manfred Hemm flew to Zurich on short notice and, after a few hours of rehearsal the day of the premiere, went on as Leporello that night. Bartoli sang on crutches.

The cast had three nights to settle itself before the next performance. Don Giovanni, however, had other plans.

The Monday morning after the premiere, unbeknownst to the management of the Zurich Opera, Gilfry took a 27-hour round-trip flight to Los Angeles for a half-day visit on his son’s 10th birthday. He got back to Zurich Wednesday afternoon, with just a few hours to rest before he was at center stage again.

He played the Don as an unctuous, priapic vampire, circling every female who wandered into range. He went into eye-rolling rages whenever the furious Donna Elvira arrived to spoil a conquest. He leapt onto the dinner table in the final scene, kicking off the place settings in defiance of the murdered Commendatore, who had come to dispatch him to hell.

But Gilfry’s legs were rubber. His head swam. Several times, he feared he’d lose his balance and fall over. The timing of the interchanges with the other singers was off. Hemm sang Leporello unexpectedly slowly and, in trying to pick up the tempo during their exchanges, Gilfry left out words or started on the wrong words. In the energy-draining last scene, he had to command himself to sing, not just make noises on pitch. Afterward, the audience was generous with its applause, but the baritone knew better.

Tonight he is rested. He has had three days to disassemble, oil and fine-tune this Don Giovanni. Laszlo Polgar, still flu-weakened, finally is on hand to sing Leporello. The 1,100-seat house is sold out, waiting. Only this ghostly matter of throat microbes flits at the edges of Gilfry’s concentration.

When the curtain rises, Don Giovanni is trying to force himself on Donna Anna. He duels with the young woman’s father, the Commendatore, and slays him. Gilfry and the slightly hoarse Polgar flee offstage and bustle into the wings, eyes wide.

“Man, I almost lost my breath,” says Gilfry. “I can’t figure it out. I wasn’t moving around all that much out there. It’s like I forgot to breathe.”

“Wie ist meine Stimme?” Polgar asks him. “How is my voice?”

“Es klingt gut. Keine Sorge,” Gilfry replies. “It sounds good. Don’t worry.”

Polgar paces about. Gilfry struggles into a full-length pigskin coat for his next entrance. Sotto voce, he practices an impending phrase in different ways: “Poverina . . . poverina . . . .”

*

Gilfry’s faith in the perfectability of what he does would give him away as an American even if so much else did not.

His ceaseless tinkering with his operatic performances reflects the teenager who once rebuilt the engine of a 1965 Ford Fairlane station wagon, and the middle-aged suburbanite who devours Scientific American and enthuses about his multitiered mechanic’s toolbox. His computer spread sheets bemuse his European colleagues nearly as much as the high-tech mountain bike he rides from his small rented apartment to the opera house.

A French reviewer once referred to him as a “California surfing-boy.” Over the years, Gilfry has applied himself to weight training, developing a physique that opera directors, who have seen their share of endomorphs, love to expose on stage.

“I’m tempted to say that nature has played a certain trick here,” says Placido Domingo, who has worked with Gilfry. “By giving him this beautiful voice, it steered him away from becoming a matinee idol in the movies or television.”

In no role do Gilfry’s looks, athleticism and dramatic attributes combine to greater effect than in that of Billy Budd, Herman Melville’s angelic but doomed young sailor. Many consider Britten’s version (composed in the early 1950s with libretto by E.M. Forster) the best opera of the last half-century. With a large, all-male cast comprising the crew of a British man o’ war during the French Revolution, and the stark juxtaposition of Billy and the evil John Claggart, it overflows with the sort of drama that makes grand opera grand and operatic.

Wherever Gilfry has sung the title role, he has drawn effusive praise. “Rodney Gilfry seems put on earth to portray Billy,” wrote John Briggs of Opera News.

“The role is the one I’m most attached to,” Gilfry admits. “It really felt like it was written for me, and it’s really the only role I’m very protective of. I think I’m one of the best. I used to say the best, but I’m not that arrogant anymore. I feel like I understand it better than anyone else. I may be deceiving myself on that, of course, but I feel almost like anyone else who does it should have to audition for me.”

Gilfry’s looks are sometimes a magnet for barbs. In the London Daily Telegraph review of his performance as Stanley Kowalski in last year’s premiere of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” the critic snarled, “Rodney Gilfry’s pectorals were more impressive than his baritone.”

The baritone now resists those who would display his physique gratuitously. When the director of the Zurich “Don Giovanni” suggested during rehearsals that Gilfry strip to the waist in a scene, Gilfry refused. “It’s one thing in the case of Billy Budd. He’s a young sailor who climbs around on ropes all day. He’s going to look fit,” Gilfry says. “But with Don Giovanni, I said, ‘No, no, that’s it.’ To be singled out all the time for physical things, I’m just getting tired of it. I’ve done too many of them now.”

*

Through the first act, Gilfry’s and Polgar’s voices have held. Now, at intermission, Polgar is off hunting Kleenex backstage, and Bartoli is being trundled toward her dressing room in a wheelchair.

In Gilfry’s room, his dresser, Nancy Hintermann, peels off his sweaty blouse and puts him in an undersized blue bathrobe. A functionary of the opera company enters and hands Gilfry an envelope. It is fat with Swiss francs. As in Italy, opera singers in Zurich are paid in cash during the first intermission, which traditionally ensures that they will show up for the first act and feel obligated to go on for the second.

Gilfry counts the cash (the Zurich opera pays a singer of his stature, on average, from $5,300 to $6,700 per performance) and locks it in a drawer. Then he is off, spread sheet in hand, the tails of the bathrobe flying, to call on Polgar.

“Ich habe ein Paar Bemerkungen und Fragen fur dich,” he begins genially. “I have a few remarks and questions for you.”

Polgar listens with game skepticism to Gilfry’s suggestions about how they can improve some of their exchanges in the second act. “Ich wurde es versuchen,” Polgar says. “I’ll try it.”

Checking items off his list, Gilfry heads downstairs for the stage, where stagehands are modifying the set for the final scene, in which Gilfry drops from a scaffolding into the fires of hell. He wants to try the stunt a different way, to make it look more like he’s being pulled down.

He climbs to the top and tries hanging by one arm while gesticulating with the other, then drops with a loud thump. He tries it again. The stagehands look at him like he’s crazy. He tries it a third time, then shakes his head.

“Es geht nicht,” he tells them. “It doesn’t work.”

He has lost track of time during the 30-minute break. Hurriedly re-costumed, he realizes he’s forgotten the gun he’s supposed to wear in the next act. He and Hintermann sprint to the props department.

Hintermann buckles him into a holster just as the second act is about to begin.

“I gotta pee,” he announces.

“There’s no time,” she tells him.

“The next act starts with my first note . . . .”

“You’ll just have to wait.”

*

Gilfry’s late father, Wayne, a band teacher at La Puente High School and a music store owner, used to rouse the family on Saturdays by blasting John Philip Sousa through the house. His mother, Frances, led children’s choirs at Claremont United Methodist Church, where Gilfry, his brother and sister sang.

At Claremont High, Gilfry starred in musical productions, and he later enrolled at Cal State Fullerton to become a choral teacher. He distinguished himself as a soloist with the university’s choir and by graduation had a reputation, built at weddings and in concerts with small local orchestras, as the best young baritone in the Los Angeles area.

An invitation to fill in for an ailing singer at the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara led him to the late French baritone Martial Singher, a renowned opera singer and recitalist. Gilfry studied with him for six years. “He was the first teacher I worked with who was a true master of the art,” Gilfry says. “He didn’t think singing should be technical but artistic. I rebelled against that but eventually took it as my credo.”

Gilfry earned a master’s degree at USC and, in the fall of 1986, launched his operatic career singing one line as a herald in L.A. Opera’s first production, Verdi’s “Otello,” starring Placido Domingo. Auditions in Europe landed him a two-year contract with the Frankfurt Opera. So in 1987, Gilfry and his wife, Tina, their 2-year-old and 3-month-old daughters in tow, transplanted themselves to Germany and, later, to Zurich.

Gradually he progressed through the Continent’s larger opera houses as a guest artist in major roles. He sang under conductor Carlo Maria Giulini at Milan’s La Scala in 1990 and over the next five years performed in “The Barber of Seville” at the Vienna State Opera, in “Billy Budd” at the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden in London, and in “La Boheme” at the Munich State Opera. Concurrently, he was singing leading roles with increasing frequency at L.A. Opera and, by 1996, had debuted at the Met, Lyric Opera of Chicago and the San Francisco Opera.

Gilfry’s suave baritone gained him a reputation as a consummate singer of Mozart. One of his 10 recordings, “Don Giovanni,” under conductor John Eliot Gardiner, was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1996.

San Francisco Opera provided Gilfry with his highest-profile engagement when it chose him to create the role of Stanley Kowalski in Andre Previn’s “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Critics from around the world thronged the premiere, and a performance was broadcast nationally on public television. Although Gilfry cut a forceful, menacing figure, the score gave him scant opportunity to showcase his singing.

Gilfry and his family stayed seven years in Europe. With his career taking him away from home more often and Tina tending three young children far from relatives and friends, California beckoned.

“It would break my heart when we’d go back,” Gilfry says. “I’d see my kids and their cousins--they’re the same age and they just love each other. For me, it was like, ‘Ohhh, this is the way it’s supposed to be.’ ” In 1994, he and Tina bought the house outside Rancho Cucamonga; it is across the street from her sister, whose husband is a former LAPD cop.

The move back home has come at a price to his career. He is distant from New York and Europe, the twin axes of the opera world. Moreover, Gilfry is determined to be part of his family’s life; he has limited the number of engagements he accepts and tries to concentrate them within manageable commuting distance. Over the next 18 months, he has double engagements at the Met and the San Francisco Opera. In addition to “Billy Budd,” he will sing in Donizetti’s “The Elixir of Love,” at L.A. Opera, beginning Sept. 11.

“He’s at the highest level he can be, except for being a superstar,” says Matthew Epstein, who managed Samuel Ramey, Renee Fleming and Kathleen Battle, as well as Gilfry, before accepting the artistic directorship of Lyric Opera of Chicago earlier this year. “He isn’t Placido or Luciano or Bryn Terfel. Their values, their needs are different. Even those people sometimes think they’re on a merry-go-round they can’t get off.”

In 1998, Gilfry says, his performance schedule got away from him. He was not at home 250 days. This year he cut back to 164 days on the road, which entailed a loss in income and exposure.

“I just turn down a lot of work,” he says. “For every time period, I have at least two offers, sometimes three or four, so I pick and choose. I heard an interview with Bryn Terfel recently, and he said he works 11 months a year. I wouldn’t do that either to myself or my family--because they’re the same thing. I walk a fine line. I don’t want to lose my balance.”

Neither Gilfry nor Tina has strayed far from the sense of wonder over the career he is having. “When we bought our house, he’d walk around amazed, saying, ‘Imagine. We have a house--from my singing,’ ” says Tina, who teaches fifth grade in a school a mile from their home. “I think it would help him to say, ‘I’ve arrived. I’m good.’ But I’ve known him since he was a kid and we used to talk about his doing this, and it’s happened, and it’s almost scary.”

*

Don Giovanni is circling beneath the window of Donna Elvira’s maid, singing “Deh vieni alla finestra.” The serenade is always a high point, a tuneful, un-operatic thing that illuminates how simple Mozart’s genius can be. Gilfry is singing it with such elegance, such softness and sweetness, that a listener might almost believe the Don’s feelings for the 14-year-old girl are those of love, not lust.

Offstage, everything stops. Bartoli leans forward in her wheelchair. Soprano Elizabeth Magnuson, who sings Donna Anna, stands beside her, also rapt. Stagehands, assistant directors, singers’ relatives--Gilfry has frozen them all in place.

The serenade confirms that something rare has been going on. The singers have been feeding off one another. Their exchanges have been electric. Their voices have been waxing in power and expressiveness--Gilfry all elegant conniving, Bartoli all spittle-scattering intensity--as the performance progresses. They’ve been coming offstage with excited smiles, congratulating one another, eager for their next turns onstage.

when Gilfry sings “billy Budd” at L.A. Opera in June, it will close a circle for both the baritone and the company. He has never sung the role at his home opera house. Moreover, the production is to be the last performed during the tenure of founding director Hemmings, who has long wished to bring the work here, even though it lacks the box-office appeal of a “La Boheme” or a “Madama Butterfly.”

L.A. Opera had already co-produced a “Billy Budd,” starring Gilfry, with the Geneva Opera, which debuted it in 1994. The opera was to play Los Angeles the following year. Local realities, however, intervened.

“At that time we were suffering from the aftermath of the riots and the earthquake,” Hemmings says. “There were two or three difficult years for everybody, not just for the opera, just getting through and making sure we had some people coming to the performances and some people giving money. And so we couldn’t take the chance.”

After Geneva, the production was presented at Covent Garden in London, the Paris Bastille Opera and the Dallas Opera, but never Los Angeles. The Los Angeles performances will be not only Hemmings’ hard-won swan song, but perhaps the last time Gilfry sings the role. “Billy” should be sung by a young man. Although Gilfry could perform it for a few more years, his schedule is booking up and currently includes no additional “Billys.”

Baritone voices often put on weight as they age. If that happens in Gilfry’s case, it will open the door to somewhat heavier dramatic roles--Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, the elder Germont of Verdi’s “La Traviata,” Posa of Verdi’s “Don Carlo.”

Gilfry and his managers are exploring other possibilities, including pure acting roles in film or on the stage. His potentially most productive move, they believe, is toward more solo recital singing, which takes advantage of his easy rapport with audiences. At Gilfry’s first solo New York recital, in Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall last April, the audience brought him back for four encores. In addition, recitals give a singer control over what he sings, and they typically pay better than opera performances.

In any case, Gilfry can continue singing “Don Giovanni” and Count Almaviva in “The Marriage of Figaro” for a long time to come. “He definitely would be one of the great Mozart singers, regardless of what happens,” says Alexander Pereira, general director of the Zurich Opera. “And this is a great achievement. I mean, this is possibly the greatest music ever composed.”

*

The curtain has come down on Don Giovanni. He has had his rant atop the banquet table. He has defied the spirit of the Commendatore. He has dropped into hell. The flash powder and ultra-flammable paper that make the whole scene explode in a ball of fire have ignited on cue.

The audience is beside itself. Applauding and “Bravo!”-ing, they bring the singers out again and again for bows. Behind the curtain, stagehands, supernumeraries and administrators of the Zurich Opera are on a contact high from the adulation pouring over the singers, especially Bartoli and Gilfry, on the other side of the velvet. Bouquets are being tossed on the apron of the stage. Backstage, Pereira is thrusting his arms up and shouting in triumph.

When the audience has finally quieted and is filing out of the house, Gilfry makes his way past stacks of boards and folding chairs toward his dressing room. “Now that,” he says, “was a little better.”