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Greer Grimsley force of nature and Valentine to opera fans Part 1: Impressions
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Greer Grimsley.
Hellfire and damnation and the lust for power.
Force of nature.
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He’s not only Seattle's Wotan but also Kurwenal, Claggart, Monterone, Scarpia, the Devil himself in Faust, Don Giovanni, Escamillo . . . this is about half of his repertoire, the half I have seen as productions at SFO. Who is this opera god?
Greer Grimsley, bass baritone and barihunk. Husband of Luretta Bybee and proud Papa of Emma.
What impresses somebody so impressive?
He told me over the phone on Monday:
• The composer Carlyle
• Willie Smith
• Placido (“I can’t take my eyes off of him when he’s singing”)
• Luretta Bybee (his wife, a mezzo-soprano)
• Emma (his daughter, almost seventeen and a high soprano,
product of a mezzo-soprano and a bass-baritone Greer says)
Here's the proud Dad's video from Youtube, Emma Grimsley Sings. It's Poor Wandering One from Pirates of Penzance.
What makes me ask Greer the question though is what he said in passing on the stairs backstage a few years ago. It was after Act I in Rigoletto and he was on his way back to his dressing room. Somehow I got him on the subject of Seattle, where the opera awarded him Artist of the Year. He plays Wotan, the wolf, in the Ring Cycle. Die Walkure, Part II, comes to San Francisco this season.
Meanwhile. SFO's Wotan will return in June with only six performances of Die Walkure. The SFO page reads: A powerful god finds himself torn by conflicting loyalties in the second installment of Wagner's majestic Ring cycle, which features the famous "Ride of the Valkyries." Director Francesca Zambello gives this epic tale of an emotionally volatile father and his disobedient children a distinctly American touch while honoring its mythic roots.
So Greer says to me on his way up the stairs, I saw a whale.
Free, grand, powerful, mythic proportions.
Greer Grimsley saw a whale breach in Puget Sound, not in an aquarium. Certainly not in the Mississippi winding through his home town of New Orleans. A killer whale, he said. It came up and spouted and went back under. Greer was in Seattle while performing at the Seattle Opera, where they love Wagner and him for his Ring Cycle. One could hear a childlike awe in his usually booming bass baritone, it was hushed as if he felt astounded. Which is astounding, I told him, considering as one super put it, he is the human PA system. 
Have you ever seen a whale? I saw one of these mythical creatures come to life once. A lone creature breached outside of the San Francisco Bay near Point Reyes and rendered the shivering galley at the lighthouse awestruck and near tears.
I wonder if that whale made this international opera star feel mortal and human scale. Or is it his biblical and commanding resonance that summons the largest creatures on Earth? Similarly there’s the story of how Greer was delivering a curse during Salome at an outdoor theater in Santa Fe when lightning struck. For real. Or as Greer would say growing up in New Orleans,
for true.
Such a majestic creature, like Wagner, could swallow the man whole, even as tall as he is. As they sing during the riverside picnic in Porgy & Bess, he made his home in . . . that fish’s abdomen . . . and indeed the ship interior which imprisoned the Flying Dutchman forever looked specifically like the whale interior from Jonah. That’s what the German designer himself told me during a break in lightwalking, where supers at the opera help the crew set lighting by standing in on stage for the characters. The ship of Wagner's mythical Norwegian captain had huge ribs bending up the walls of the interior.
This rugged spirit seems to make Greer appropriate for the Dutchman particularly in Seattle where there is a large city of Norwegians and other Scandinavians called Ballard. A larger than life statue of viking Leif Erickson takes a stand on the shores of Shilshole near the lochs. For a donation to the historical society a Scandinavian can have his immigrant ancestors’ name, country and arrival date carved into a stone which is placed in the pile at Leif’s viking feet.
This amuses me as I am part Norwegian and it freaks me out when I leave the San Francisco Bay Area where I grew up and find a lost community awash with blue eyes.
Speaking of which, another super had compared the human PA system to Fabio. What do you think? Here's Greer's headshot (he's 52 now).
And just for comparison, here's a shot of Fabio, the romance novel cover and I can't believe it's not butter hunk.
This Valentine special to be continued.
Photo of Greer as Wotan courtesy of Greer Grimsley
Killer whale photo from Solar Navigator
Killer Fabio photo from blogs.tampabay.com/.../
Salome unveiled at SFO October 2009
SFO's Tosca featured in film Milk
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