Tenor Of The Times -- Despite Obstacles, Vinson Cole Is Building A Triumphant Career On Opera Stages Around The World

Opera preview

Seattle Opera presents "Werther" (pronounced Vair-TAIR) by Jules Massenet, based on the Goethe story about a young man who falls in love and commits suicide when the object of his affections will not have him. Starring Vinson Cole in the title role Saturday and Jan. 22, 25, 29 and 30, and Warren Mok on Sunday and Jan. 24; Seattle Center Opera House, $30-$97; 389-7676 or 292-ARTS. -----------------------------------------------------------------

A poet, a Bohemian, a soldier, a sailor, a Spanish prince, a Scottish lord: Vinson Cole has been all of these and more, on the stage of the Seattle Opera House.

The tenor has sung nine major roles with Seattle Opera, in fact, since his triumphant arrival here in the 1988 "Orpheus and Eurydice." A 10th, the title role in Massenet's "Werther," will bring Cole to center stage as a suicidal young lover, Saturday through Jan. 30 at the Opera House.

Would the real Vinson Cole please stand up?

Walking down the parquet-floored hallway of his elegant Capitol Hill apartment, you might imagine yourself in France about two centuries ago. The pale-yellow walls cast a warmth on the winter light as it hits a Yamaha grand piano, almost the only 20th-century note in a living room filled with beautiful antiques and period furniture.

Cole stands up and moves forward - a newly trimmed-down and athletic-looking Cole, dapper in a well-cut jacket and slacks that hint of Italian design.

This is a tenor at the top of his profession. He's sought after to open the prestigious La Scala Opera season, and to sing in Brussels, Japan, Australia, Berlin, Monte Carlo, Boston, Salzburg and other musical centers too numerous to list. He's also a tenor who left his longtime home in New York three years ago to move to Seattle, where he has assembled around him the objects of two decades of collecting (plus some pieces bestowed by a great-aunt) in an array some might find formal, but where he is thoroughly at home.

"I have to travel so much," Cole explains, sitting on a striped sofa beneath a reproduction of an Elisabeth-Louise Vigee-Lebrun portrait.

"I can just as easily fly out of Seattle as anywhere else. And if I'm going to come home, I want home to be really nice. This is what I find comfortable; this is what I enjoy.

"People often think it's a glamorous life, being an opera singer. Actually, though, you live like a monk. You travel; you go to the airport, the hotel, the rehearsal, the performance. You have to be quiet before the performance, and rest afterward. Often I want to go out with my friends, but there's this rehearsal or that performance, and I can't.

"But there are compensations. I have wonderful friends, wonderful colleagues. And I have Seattle, which is really home to me."

Cole has come a long way from Kansas City, Mo., where he grew up in a family in which there was a lot of singing but no professional singers. While still a boy soprano, he began taking voice lessons. A year later, at 10, Cole was starring in "Amahl and the Night Visitors" at the Lyric Opera of Kansas City, where he went on to sing "all the boys' opera roles" until his voice changed.

After high school, Cole knew he wanted to go to college to study singing.

"My father told me I should get an education degree, instead of a performance one," Cole remembers, "to have `something to fall back on.'

"I told him, `First of all, I'm gonna have a career. If I don't have a career, I don't want to be a teacher.' "

He had the pleasure of proving himself right, and of entertaining his parents at his later debuts with the Opera Theatre of St. Louis, the Metropolitan Opera and the New York City Opera. Adding technique to talent

Learning to be a singer wasn't easy. Cole had, and has, the natural instrument - a lyric tenor of incredible ease, the sort of voice that can float like an airborne bird of paradise. The technique was a different matter. Without much direction, Cole fell into bad habits, as he quickly discovered when he auditioned with the respected teacher Margaret Harshaw at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia.

"I sang, and she turned to the pianist and said, `You can leave now; I'm going to tear this one apart.' And she did. But what she did really worked, and I still go back to be a student with her. She is 87 years old now, and still has incredible ears."

After leaving Curtis in the mid-'70s, Cole won the Metropolitan Opera auditions and was immediately snapped up by Santa Fe Opera, then by San Francisco Opera.

"It just happened," Cole said with a modesty not always found among opera stars.

"People seemed to like me and what I did. Then the Opera Theatre of St. Louis opened, and word got out, and before long I was in England and at the Welsh National Opera, and then I sang for Karajan."

Herbert von Karajan, beloved and envied and cordially hated by multitudes of musicians and music lovers, was an autocrat of the podium who specialized in discovering (and occasionally ruining) talented young singers. Cole profited by the former and escaped the latter, largely by learning that he could get away with saying "No" to the maestro. While Karajan's enemies shunned anyone with the conductor's stamp of approval, everybody else was eager to hire the young tenor.

Nearly everybody.

With a list of credentials like Cole's, it is surprising and discomfiting to hear that doors often have been closed to him because he is an African American.

"I'm sad to say it's the truth," he says.

"Look at the number of African-American tenors out there on the world's opera stages. There are hardly any! At the Met, there was George Shirley, and then there was almost nobody. (African-American) women have been much more acceptable - many are making top careers - but for men, it's always been a real tough road."

Cole says the race issue is rarely raised when it comes to concerts, either with an orchestra or as a recitalist. But in opera, tenors are usually cast as the heroes of the production, the guys who woo and win (and often lose) the heroines. The baritones and basses are traditionally the fathers or brothers; it's the tenors who are the romantic partners. An African-American male as a romantic partner, often of a white soprano, is an image that some opera managers continue to reject.

"My manager just goes ballistic," Cole admits, "when he discovers that a certain opera manager doesn't want me because of my color. He asked one manager, `Have you ever seen Vinson Cole? Or even a picture of him?' Opera is all fantasy anyway, and I can look like almost any nationality or ethnic group on the stage.

"I'd rather work where I'm wanted," he says, "and it doesn't matter if I don't sing at a few places here and there. But it does bother me, because I wish the hatred and prejudice didn't exist. I worry because people are being taught these themes all over again by various political groups.

"But there also are so many nice people, Southerners as well as Northerners. Look at Sara Jenkins (the late mother of Seattle Opera general director Speight Jenkins). She was in Dallas society for most of her life, and she also fought all her life against racism. She was such a lovely person; we were very close. On the last Christmas of her life, I went to her home and sang Christmas carols for her." Establishing Seattle roots

Known as a particularly affable colleague, Cole is determined to set down some Seattle roots, and has joined some organizations, including the board of the Museum of History and Industry. He's also a man of considerable self-control. After deciding he needed to lose weight, Cole embarked on a diet he made up himself, in Italy of all places.

"I just decided to do it," he explains.

"I told myself I wouldn't eat after 6 p.m. When I did eat, it was a piece of fruit, a salad, a half-order of pasta with a healthy sauce, maybe a little chicken or veal, and some cookies I found that were made of yogurt, bran and prunes. The people at one restaurant where I ate almost every evening would greet me at the door: Oh, it's Signor Chicken-or-Veal!"

Regular exercise helps, too, though Cole confesses to an occasional weakness for a cheeseburger and fries, and for the tartelettes au citron at Fauchon in Paris. These culinary symbols may be the perfect expression of Cole's "American in Paris" lifestyle.

What does the future hold?

"There are a few roles I still would love to do," Cole says, "including Florestan (in Beethoven's `Fidelio'), if it's approached right. One day, in the last five years of my career, I'd like to sing Lohengrin, in a very lyrical style."

Now in his mid-40s, the tenor surprisingly says he doesn't want to "go on singing for a long, long time. I'd rather have people say, `Why did you retire?' than `Aren't you ever going to?' After all these years, I now am very interested in teaching people how to sing, how to listen. I really enjoy working with people to see the fulfillment of the idea, and the change in their voices.

"I've been so fortunate. I have the desire to give something to other people - because it was given to me."