Bass David Leigh discovers a successful opera career is not an ‘impossible dream’

NEW YORK — When David Leigh sang “The Impossible Dream” at his father’s funeral, the moment was both a testament to his past and a harbinger of his future.

Leigh, operatic bass, is the son of Mitch Leigh, who wrote the music for the musical “Man of La Mancha,” one of the biggest hits on Broadway in the 1960s, long before David was born .

When Mitch died in 2014 at the age of 86, David was studying voice in the graduate program at Yale and still finding his way as a singer.

“My dad was very eager for my career to take off so he could still be alive and hear me have success,” Leigh said.

Unfortunately, this did not happen. But now, at 36, Leigh realizes that her dream of an opera career isn’t so impossible. In fact, he is quickly establishing himself as a future star in the lowest roles for male voices.

This month he will play the major role of the jailer Rocco in a new production of Beethoven’s only opera, “Fidelio,” at Washington National Opera, which opens Friday.

“He’s going to be the real deal,” said Francesca Zambello, the artistic director of WNO, who chose him for the role. “Such a young bass with such powerful stentorian quality is rare.”

Andreas Homoki, the outgoing artistic director of the Zurich Opera, recalled that last year he was looking for “someone special, not an established artist” to sing the role of the villain Hagen in the last opera of the cycle “ The Ring” by Wagner.

He chose Leigh – and was delighted with the results.

“Aside from his incredibly powerful voice and remarkable physical stature (Leigh is 6 feet 5 inches tall), he is able to convey a very particular vulnerability,” Homoki said. “Given his relative youth compared to his colleagues in the same repertoire, it is difficult to imagine him not having a brilliant career all over the world.”

Gianandrea Noseda, the music director of the Zurich Opera who conducted the “Ring,” was impressed by “the nobility, the aristocracy of singing” that Leigh brought to his role.

In many professions, 36 doesn’t seem young, but some operatic voices, including basses, can take years to establish. “It’s a longer fermentation process,” Zambello said.

Several years earlier in his career, Leigh had said that his relative youth actually counted against him. Most of the iconic bass roles are characters who are no longer young men.

“When I was auditioning all the time, people were like, ‘Can I ask how old you are?’ And when I told them, they said, “Oh, you can sing that when you’re older.” »

“Once a few gray hairs started appearing in my beard, I was very excited,” Leigh joked.

The trade-off is that many basses continue to sing well into their 60s, or even longer. Leigh cited the example of Soviet bass great Mark Reizen, who at the age of 90 performed Prince Gremin’s famous aria from Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin.”

Leigh said he always had an unusually deep voice, but when he first enrolled at Mannes College of Music in New York after Yale, he said, “I didn’t really know what I was doing .”

Joshua Greene, one of his coaches there, remembers that Leigh arrived at Mannes “with a voice that was totally unfinished, full but unrefined.

“The low notes were of a quality you don’t often hear, even on high-level professional stages,” Greene said, “but otherwise it wasn’t clear what was there. It has been very exciting to watch David evolve over the many years we have worked together.

Now, Leigh has comfortably mastered a range of nearly three octaves, from G above middle C to A below low C.

Among the roles he most hopes to perform in the near future, Gurnemanz from Wagner’s “Parsifal” tops the list. In fact, he was scheduled to perform it with the Canadian Opera Company during the 2020-2021 season canceled by the pandemic.

“It’s the most beautiful music of all time,” he said. “It’s in a range where I can be perfectly expressive. I can sing every phrase and say exactly what I mean.

Also at the top of his list are King Philip from Verdi’s “Don Carlo” and some of the great Russian roles, such as the title character from Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov.”

And what about “The Impossible Dream”, the hit song from “Man of La Mancha”.

During his father’s lifetime, Leigh was “very reluctant” to sing it. “It seemed a bit like nepotism,” he said.

That changed at the funeral, and now he happily performs it as an encore after recitals.

“It was a crazy moment,” Leigh said. “It was suddenly beautiful for me to sing it.”