Ryan Speedo Green

Bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green has held roles at top opera houses, including New York's Metropolitan Opera and the Staatsoper in Vienna. A member of the permanent company of the latter, he is one of few African Americans active in opera in Europe. Green was born on April 1, 1986, in Suffolk, Virginia. Speedo is his given middle name. His childhood, spent partly in public housing and partly in a trailer park, was difficult, and he was placed in a special education classroom intended for, as he told The New York Times, "the worst of the worst." He had brushes with the juvenile justice system but returned to high school, where a football coach advised him to join the school's chorus for easy course credit. A voice teacher heard him and advised him that if he tried, he could make it to the stage of the Metropolitan Opera. At the time, Green told the Times, he thought opera was "was a big fat Viking lady with a helmet, breaking windows," but he attended a production of Carmen starring tenor Plácido Domingo and African American mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves, and was vividly impressed. Green attended the Hartt College of Music in Connecticut and went on to Florida State University for a master's degree. Green began to find roles while still a student, performing as the Commendatore in Mozart's Don Giovanni at the Juilliard School in New York, and holding a residency in 2010 and 2011 at Opera Colorado in Denver. A major breakthrough came in 2011 when Green was named one of five winners at the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions. That win attracted the attention of New York Times writer Daniel Bergner, who wrote a long article about Green and then a biography, Sing for Your Life; A Story of Race, Music, and Family (2016). Green made his Met debut during the 2012-2013 season as Mandarin in Puccini's Turandot and has returned frequently to the stage there, appearing as the Bonze in Puccini's Madama Butterfly, Rambo in John Adams' The Death of Klinghoffer, and a Grail Knight in Wagner's Parsifal, among other works. In 2014, he joined the cast of the Vienna Staatsoper. There, his roles have included the King in Verdi's Aida, Varlaam in Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, and Sarastro in Mozart's Die Zauberflöte. Green has also appeared with other top companies, including the Opéra de Lille in France, and he has sung major concert works, including the bass part of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125, multiple times. The first was with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 2014. In 2019, Green made his recording debut on the Deutsche Grammophon label, singing movements from Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, Op. 123, in the Peace Concert at Versailles under conductor Franz Welser-Möst. ~ James Manheim