After Long Struggle, Singer Has Met Success, and Her Name Is Carmen

NEW YORK —  Mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves loves to throw monkey wrenches--especially when a repertoire staple like Georges Bizet’s “Carmen” gets a bit dull.

“Why don’t I climb up that ladder tonight, for a change? Or why don’t I come in a little later, and just throw him [the leading man] a curve ball?” the 30-year-old singer says jokingly of her antics.

She has sung the part of the seductive Spanish Gypsy in more than 30 productions on the world’s best known stages. The challenge now is to pump new life into it.

So if she’s “in a dull production” or if the tenor “is not very engaging,” Graves says playfully, “then I’ll purposely throw him wrenches!”

Once a shy, skinny girl from a poor neighborhood in Washington, D.C., Graves has become the Carmen of the day--and one of the hottest new stars in international music.

Gone are the early years when kids snubbed the studious girl who loved music and theater, but “didn’t know any of the hit songs,” she remembers. Now, it’s, “Nah-na, Nah-na, NAH-na!”

Graves giggles as she sings the childish taunt in a rich, low voice. She’s made it, curled up on a sofa for an interview in a Manhattan hotel suite that’s home during her Metropolitan Opera debut in “Carmen.”

Her husband, David Perry, a 46-year-old guitarist and tenor, serves tea as he takes phone calls for her--lining up rehearsals, costume fittings, performances.

In the last few years, Graves has appeared with super-tenors Placido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti and Jose Carreras, and she’s won critical raves for concert and opera performances from Vienna to Tokyo.

Her Met debut in October was filmed for the CBS newsmagazine “60 Minutes.” There’s a reason: Graves’ life story has the stuff of an American dream, a story that began far from champagne-and-crystal opening nights.

As recently as the late 1980s, she was a struggling singer in Boston, four months behind in her rent and working as an overnight hotel switchboard operator and grocery store clerk.

But singing was something she had to do.

“It was all I knew, all I could feel,” Graves says. She entered the Met regional auditions in New England, feeling, “I had to win, I had to.”

She did.

Then a mysterious medical problem that affected her vocal cords nearly grounded her fledgling career. She saw 12 doctors before it was diagnosed as a treatable thyroid condition.

Another obstacle overcome.

Graves was one of three children brought up by a working single mother, whose husband left when Denyce was a baby. It was a strict but loving home for the two girls and boy. Their mother assigned them things to learn and recite to her every night, and sent them to sing at a Pentecostal church on Sundays.

Graves didn’t fit in with the other kids in the neighborhood because of her devotion to books, music and poetry. They called her “Hollywood.” But she blazed her way to the top by performing an opera set in Spain and sung in French.

Bizet wrote a masterpiece about a Gypsy woman, a cigarette factory worker who seduces a soldier, Don Jose.

For Graves, “Carmen is an attitude.”

She’s a woman who’s “ahead of her time, even in 1995,” says the singer. “The one word that describes her is ‘freedom.’ . . . It’s not caring what people think.”

Carmen uses sex to get whatever--and whomever--she wants. But her desires can switch, she’s “unpredictable,” Graves says. And that’s the character flaw that marks her for death, at the hands of the passionate lover she taunts and corrupts, then dumps.

“She’s the most honest character on the stage . . . but she’s sad,” notes the singer. The night before Don Jose stabs her to death, Carmen confronts him with the attitude, “If you’re gonna kill me--do it now. Or else get the hell out of my way!”

“And I don’t know anybody with this sort of--courage,” Graves says.

While Carmen brought her stardom, she also likes to get away from the role. She’s especially drawn to the religious music of Bach, Handel, Mozart and Verdi.

It “does something good for my soul,” says Graves, suddenly looking very peaceful in her black cotton dress with white flowers. In concert, she says, there’s no director. “You get to create an atmosphere the way you see it. And that’s really fun, that’s cool.”

Graves’ travels have left colorful traces in her speech. She peppers her English with foreign words, referring to a rehearsal break by its Italian name, “pausa,” Vienna by the German “wien,” and Seville by its Spanish name, “Sevilla.”

Between engagements, she relaxes by cooking and reading at her Virginia countryside home.

Despite her star status, performances are still scary.

“I’m still really nervous until I get on the stage,” she says. “It’s sometimes just horrible.”

During the tense minutes before going on, Graves says, she relaxes if her husband is “with me in the dressing room, just playing the guitar.”