Detours on a road to operatic success

To hear Carl Tanner tell it, there’s nothing out of the ordinary about his trajectory to opera: from music student to truck driver to bounty hunter to globe-trotting tenor.

After all, the big, burly guy with Virginia in his voice and a down-home demeanor always sang -- to the country station on his dad’s car radio ... with the chorus in high school, where he wrestled and played football ... in his 18-wheeler, “Tosca” blaring from the cab.

As a child, “I knew that I had this ability to go ‘Waaaaaa’ -- and really well,” recalled Tanner, his voice suddenly soaring above the lunch-crowd babble on the leafy campus at the Santa Fe Opera. “But I never would do it, because I didn’t understand what it was.... I didn’t know what operatic voices were.”

Even after he figured it out, it would be years before Tanner embraced the notion of singing as a career.

“It took me so long to learn to love it,” he said.

But love it he does, particularly the demanding role of Calaf in Puccini’s “Turandot,” in which Tanner is making his Santa Fe Opera debut this summer. He describes the role, which he has done more than 50 times, as “a marathon for the tenor.”

“Tenors who sing this role don’t grow on trees. It requires tremendous stamina,” said Richard Gaddes, general director of the Santa Fe Opera.

Gaddes, who first heard Tanner sing at a New York restaurant 15 years ago, says the tenor has “an absolutely world-class voice. He’s a wonderful musician.”

Christina Scheppelmann, director of artistic operations for the Washington National Opera -- where he performed Samson in Saint-Saens’ “Samson et Dalila” last spring -- rates Tanner as among only a handful of tenors who excel at the Italian and French dramatic repertoires.

He’s also “a very generous, really nice guy” who benefits from his varied background, said Scheppelmann, who has known Tanner about nine years.

“He’s just very grounded.... If you’re a bounty hunter and have bullets flying left and right, it does put a wrong note into perspective,” she said.

Tanner, 43, who grew up in a working-class family in Arlington, Va., “got a music degree for my mom” from Shenandoah Conservatory in Winchester, Va.

“She wanted a son with a college degree,” he explained.

But music didn’t feel like a fit. Too hard a way to make a living. He didn’t think he was smart enough. Opera seemed stuffy, intimidating, too full of airs for a “Virginia boy.”

He handed his diploma to his mother and got a license to drive a truck.

“And I loved it,” he recalled.

But the money wasn’t that great, and when he heard through a friend that a bounty hunter was looking for a partner, he says, he started collaring criminals at night and on weekends.

Tanner learned to use a gun, and carried at least a couple, but says he relied more on his wits and what his partner called his “gift of gab.”

“In my two years as a bounty hunter, I had 178 cases and picked up 169 people,” Tanner said proudly.

But the last job was the worst. According to Tanner’s account, a fugitive jumped to his death from his apartment window, right in front of Tanner.

Within weeks, Tanner was in New York, looking for a job.

Gaddes heard him at a restaurant that featured singers.

“I called him to the table and said to him, ‘Young man, you have a wonderful voice.... You need now to go and really study, gain a technique, learn how to sing,’ ” Gaddes recalled.

Tanner, who was an apprentice for two years at the Santa Fe Opera, has sung at La Scala as Don Jose in “Carmen” and at Covent Garden as Cavaradossi in “Tosca.” He was Dick Johnson in “Girl of the Golden West” with the Opera Orchestra of New York and the Deutsche Oper Berlin, and Pinkerton in “Madame Butterfly” in Las Palmas.