Operatic Dilemma : Singer Is Torn Between a Love of Teaching Children and a Big Break in His Musical Career

It’s a case of arias vs. the three Rs. Or the high Cs vs. the ABCs.

Gabriel Reoyo-Pazos is a teacher who sings opera, or an operatic singer who teaches, depending on when you catch him.

One week he is lovingly instructing his fourth-grade class of 32 Spanish-speaking students--in English and Spanish, no less--in his crowded bungalow at Limerick Avenue Elementary School in Canoga Park, and the next week he is auditioning for Luciano Pavarotti’s musical director in Modena, Italy. And passing .

The problem is that Reoyo-Pazos loves both careers, and now that he has won the First International Opera Singing Competition at Sarno’s Caffe’ Dell’ Opera in Hollywood, he is faced with the prospect of having to give up teaching.

It’s not a bad plot for an opera.

Add to all this the fact that Reoyo-Pazos is an immigrant from Cuba who used to mop up spills at K mart and that he is married to operatic soprano Deborah Mayhan, and it’s really not a bad plot for an opera.

“I love my students and I love my class,” said the 34-year-old tenor who minored in music at Cal State Northridge. (He received a bachelor’s degree in liberal studies in 1989.) “And yet, as a human being, I have to do what really makes me the happiest; the most fulfilled. And that is my singing. Life is funny, isn’t it?”

Funny is not the first adjective that comes to mind in describing the life of Reoyo-Pazos. One of 14 children, he was able to legally leave Cuba at 13 only because an older brother first fled the country by swimming to the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay. (He was captured during a first attempt and imprisoned but escaped from prison and swam again.) The pair settled near downtown Los Angeles, eventually being joined by two older sisters, and Reoyo-Pazos faced the typical struggle of an immigrant. Although he sang naturally from age 5, singing was hardly foremost in his mind as he adjusted to life in a new country. He would not see his parents again until his late 20s, when they finally managed to immigrate to Los Angeles.

“For a while I didn’t even talk very much. I was a boy with no parents,” Reoyo-Pazos said as he sat in his classroom. “When you go to a new country, it almost seems frivolous to pursue a career like singing or even to have dreams of it.”

The dreams were revived when the four siblings moved to Glendale, and Reoyo-Pazos took advantage of the Glendale High School music program. He naturally gravitated to activities ranging from singing in choirs and barbershop quartets to playing violin and viola in the school orchestra. Opera finally crossed his path at Glendale College.

“It’s not that I always thought, ‘I want to be an operatic tenor,’ ” he said in a clear, sweet voice that becomes remarkably opulent when he sings. “I just wanted to sing what I liked. When I was a boy, I had heard an opera singer sing, and I thought it was the funniest thing I ever heard! I made fun of her with some friends, you know. But when I was in junior college, someone gave me a tape of a famous tenor by the name of Fritz Wunderlich--and I thought, ‘Oh, what an incredible thing that is! What a beautiful voice! I think I can do that! I think that speaks to me!’ Little did I know it would take years and years and years.”

It took six years of part-time study to complete what turned out to be his minor in music at CSUN. Fearing that he would graduate trained for an “impractical” career, Reoyo-Pazos changed from a music major to liberal studies with the goal of becoming a teacher. “Nobody needs a degree just to sing, but you do need a degree if you decide to teach,” he said.

He was a teacher’s aide in the Los Angeles Unified School District for six years before taking the job at Limerick two years ago, and he is still working toward his teaching credential. Over the years he has supported himself by working in a machine shop, at a child-care center, as janitor at a Catholic school for girls and as a mop-man at K mart, where “I wasn’t doing a whole lot of singing . . . other than under my breath.”

Then, last summer, la forza del destino , or fate, intervened in the form of the Sarno’s Caffe Dell’ Opera contest. Up against 27 singers from all over the world in a grueling 10-week competition, Reoyo-Pazos finished with “Che Gelida Manina” from Puccini’s “La Boheme.” He took the grand prize--a trip to Modena and a September audition with Pavarotti’s musical director, Leone Magiera, dean of voice at the Music Conservatory of Bologna and former director of the famed La Scala in Milan. You might say he took the “grand prize” there too, for Magiera invited the tenor--and his wife--to return Feb. 10 to audition for a formal one-year contract to appear with four of Italy’s major opera theaters, including La Scala.

“This is the equivalent of walking into Hollywood unknown and getting a leading role in a major motion picture,” said George Rivera, director of the Sarno’s competition.

Assuming, as Rivera does, that the tenor will be successful in the audition next month, then Reoyo-Pazos will most likely leave Limerick school at the end of the 1991-92 school year.

The dilemma is especially poignant, given Reoyo-Pazos’ past. His class of Limited English Proficiency students consists of refugees and immigrants--children with whom he strongly identifies. He has dedicated himself to them, adding music and art to their regular curriculum, which he must teach in two languages.

His classroom is ringed by self-portrait drawings of all his students, complete with their signatures and favorite likes and dislikes. “It’s good for their self-esteem,” he said.

Gesturing to a musical staff on his chalkboard, he said: “If I don’t show them music, I don’t know if they ever will be exposed to it. They love it! I teach them rhythm, notation, scales, songs. I wish there was more, but there isn’t, with all the cuts.”

Students would be hard-pressed to have a better music teacher, cuts or no cuts. How many, after all, have a teacher who can negotiate the heart-rending pinnacles of Puccini, Verdi, Donizetti, Meyerbeer, et al? Yes, Reoyo-Pazos sings in the classroom--something his charges found most amusing, at first. Each morning he leads the class in patriotic songs. “They thought it was so funny, which is just fine with me, because when I was their age, I thought it was the most ridiculous thing I ever heard!” The little voices now chime in enthusiastically.

Does he ever operate the class operatically? Does he tell students to “ ‘Otello’ me the answer?” or “Now it’s time to ‘Aida’ lunch?” Not quite, but Reoyo-Pazos does sing the aria, “Celeste, Aida” from Verdi’s “Aida” for one of his students named Aida. He sings “Maria” from Leonard Bernstein’s “West Side Story” for students named Maria. Children named Marta get the aria, “M’appari” from “Martha” by Flotow. Sometimes, just “to see who’s really listening,” he will substitute a student’s name for part of an aria. The first line of “Che Gelida Manina,” which normally goes “Che gelida manina, se la lasci riscaldar” (“How cold your little hand is, let me give it back its warmth”) became “Che gelida manina, Maria Salgado.”

“Maria Salgado looks up,” laughed Reoyo-Pazos, “and says, ‘That was my name!’ They love it, and so do I.”

It is not only students who appreciate having a teacher-tenor around. He is collared to sing at school assemblies, and recently executed the treacherous “Happy Birthday” for an astonished Limerick Principal Ronni Ephraim. As Susan Shaffer, Limerick school coordinator who was in on the birthday plot, put it: “I’m not an opera fan, but when he sings, it’s enough to make me an opera fan. When he used to teach in the room right near the office, I used to slip out and listen to him sing a patriotic song each morning for the kids.”

Fellow fourth-grade teacher Niles Sundstrom first heard the Reoyo-Pazos “pipes” while walking by his classroom. “I heard this professional-sounding voice,” he said, “and I thought he had a recording on, or a radio.” And it was Sundstrom, not Reoyo-Pazos, who pointed out that the tenor organized a school chorus--complete with auditions for all interested students--and took it to perform at Northridge Fashion Square. “He is so modest!” Sundstrom said. “We’re just all pulling for him.”

Going to Italy “would be a wonderful thing, not only for the students, because he’s such a good role model, but a wonderful thing for him,” Sundstrom said. “And he’s not going to forget about the classroom and the children and their needs.”

His greatest fan? Certainly his soprano wife of eight years, whom he met while they were students at CSUN. The couple travels biweekly to San Francisco for private vocal studies with Elizabeth Parham (who also taught Reoyo-Pazos’ CSUN vocal instructor, Kurt Allen).

“We understand each other on a level unlike someone else who wouldn’t be in the same field,” said Mayhan, who performed in the Metropolitan Opera Western Regional Finals in November.

Added Reoyo-Pazos: “I can’t imagine being married to someone who would not understand for me to take two or three hours to learn something a few times a week. We both are our toughest critics, and greatest admirers.”

Should a career change be necessary, Mayhan said she would find it much easier to give up her temporary secretarial work to pursue opera in Italy. “Either way,” she said, “whether he gets an offer and I don’t, or whatever, the most important thing is that we stay together.”

But what if things don’t work out in Italy, and Reoyo-Pazos’ career has a more traditionally tragic operatic ending? The teacher picked up an enormous apple brought to him by a student and smiled.

“You never know what life will offer you, or how things will work out,” he said. “I’m very happy to have this right now, this job. Very, very happy. It’s not that I either sing or die. That’s ridiculous. I’d be very happy singing, and if that doesn’t work out, then I will be very happy being a teacher.”

Till the fat lady sings.