The ‘lumpy guy from Toronto’ makes good
Despite worldwide success, tenor Ben Heppner, who opens Peter Grimes on Saturday, remains humble about his operatic career
The first thing to understand about Ben Heppner is that he doesn’t see himself the way we do.
Watching the heart-rending final scene of Tristan und Isolde at the Canadian Opera Company last season, it was easy to think of him as a superhuman undergoing the greatest torment a man could imagine.
Or in Peter Grimes, which he opens at the Four Seasons Centre on Oct. 5, he looms large as the largest of anti-heroes, a character whose deeply rooted misanthropy could destroy the universe.
But the rumpled, amiable 57-year-old who has just begun his tenure as the host of CBC’s Saturday Afternoon at the Opera and who may well be one of the greatest tenors alive, loves God, his family, his music and his motorcycles, probably in that order. And he laughs when you ask for his self-image.
“I see myself now the same way I have since I walked into the Metropolitan Opera competition in New York in 1988. There were Renée Fleming and Susan Graham, both looking gorgeous. Everyone expected them to win. And all of a sudden, this lumpy guy from Toronto walks in.”
Of course, “the lumpy guy from Toronto” aced the competition and began a great operatic career, but over a quarter-century later he still sees himself as a man with no frills.
“I never knew what all the rules were back then. I’m still learning. But I guess if you’ve got some talent and some wit and some inspiration, you can go pretty far.” That he has. “My father was a farmer,” he says, easing into the story of his life the same way he eases into the comfy chair waiting for him at the COC offices. “I was born in the Fraser Valley of B.C. and raised in the Dawson Creek area. Rolling hills, rich soil, as far north as you can grow wheat. That’s where I came from.
“Well that’s where I came from until I burned the house down, then we moved closer to the city.” He leans in to tell the story. “I was three and a half. I kind of have a memory of being in my parents’ bedroom, which I guess was my bedroom too, since I was the youngest. I decided to play with matches, but once they started burning I ran from the room.
“My sisters asked me what I had been doing and I said nothing, but then the flames started sweeping everywhere. The whole house was destroyed.”
It seems a distant story for Heppner to give such weight to, but his reasons soon become clear.
“In Munich a few years ago, I did a production of Lohengrin. He builds a house together with his bride, Elsa, but in this production, when Elsa finally asks him who he is, he goes nuts.
“He goes up to the bedroom, takes a cradle he made, puts it on the bed, pours gasoline on it, lights a match and sets it all on fire. Then he walks downstage, sits on the prompt box and watches it.”
Heppner’s eyes, large and moist, seek absolution. “At dress rehearsal, what I had done as a child so many years ago all came back to me. It was my grieving moment, 50 years later. I started crying, but then I realized I had a huge bunch of stuff to sing and I had to get my act together.”
Despite the young Ben’s arson, he remembers the family as a happy and resolutely musical group.
“We sang so much you couldn’t shut us up. I think it must have been annoying to be around us.
“And I think I must have been the worst. The moth to the flame. I couldn’t stop myself being attracted to music.”
But for Heppner, that didn’t mean opera.
Not for a long time. “We had two TV channels, on and off. Once in a while you might see an opera and think, ‘What was that?’ People singing intimate things at loud volume levels. That seemed weird to me.”
Heppner thought the only way he could make a living from his passion was to teach music, so he went to the University of British Columbia with that in mind.
“But I’m easily distracted. The next thing you know, I was in vocal performance and then the opera workshop and then . . . ” he shrugs. “You know the rest.”
He won a CBC Talent Festival in 1979, and everyone told him he must go to Toronto to pursue a career in opera.
“They put me on stage very quickly because they needed men. I was incredibly awkward at first. People recognized I could sing, but I was horrible on stage, so wooden. I had to learn how to be vulnerable and I actually enjoy that now.”
“By 1993, I started to feel that I didn’t have to worry about living up to other people’s standards.” BEN HEPPNER OPERA SINGER
He kept moving along, learning one role at a time, putting one note after the next one and “by 1993 I started to feel that I didn’t have to worry about living up to other people’s standards. I had my own. I even convinced the bank that I could buy a decent home.
“My mom said, ‘Can you make a living from singing?’ and I said, ‘Yes, Mom. I fooled the bank and they’re hard to fool.’ ”
But soon Heppner ran into a problem that other opera singers with families have had to face over their careers.
“It was 1996, I was doing Pagliacci here in Toronto. I dropped the boys off at their music lesson and sat there in the minivan like any suburban father. Only I was thinking of a question my wife Karen had asked me. ‘How many more years of not being home are there going to be?’ ”
He looked long and hard at his priorities and restricted the amount of time he has spent on the road ever since. “Did it limit my career? Yes. Do I care? No.”
But a few years later, he started to regret his choice when the famous Heppner voice started giving out in performances. Naysayers were muttering that his career was over.
“I was on a particular blood pressure medication that thickened the saliva and made singing a nightmare, but it took me a long time to discover that.
“I thought I was going to have to liquidate my assets and start a whole new life, but my family supported me 100 per cent. And suddenly, things were better.”
Still, Heppner had glimpsed a life without singing and he knew that all voices eventually stop working. “I have no idea how many years I have left. But when the time comes, I want to be like Ken Dryden. He came in on a high and went out on a high. I prefer to control my own fate like that, instead of suddenly realizing nobody wants you anymore.
“You may lose some elasticity in your voice as you get older. You have to give up some of those top notes. But in exchange, you get colour and power and savvy, and those things count for a lot.”
After the music goes, faith will remain for Heppner.
“Even when things were falling apart careerwise, my faith never wavered. I believe in heaven. I believe there is an afterlife and we need to decide how we respond to that.”
Asked if he envisions some grand operatic repertory company in the next life, he shakes his head firmly.
“I don’t even think about singing in heaven. We haven’t a clue what it’s going to be like. We’re going to be with God and I think that’s enough.”