Ballard Opera Man to retire from Seattle Opera after 43 years of song

In a vast studio at the Seattle Opera Center on a recent Monday evening, a glorious noise was heard. While rehearsing the end of Act I of the beloved Puccini opera “Tosca,” the voices of 46 Seattle Opera Chorus members, 15 youth chorus members, and a handful of solo performers blended as one remarkable wall of sound; if you closed your eyes, it seemed like the chord had a shape, fitting around you, creating its own life. Many who love opera love it because of its bigness, of its way of making life into something larger: more dramatic, more melodic, more beautiful.

Among those rehearsing that evening was someone who has spent nearly his entire adult life as a member of that chorus — a small but crucial piece of an immense whole. Stephen Wall, a tenor who turned 73 this month, first sang in the Seattle Opera Chorus in 1982, during one of the then-regular productions of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle. He has since appeared in 117 productions with Seattle Opera, most of them in the chorus but occasionally in supporting roles. He’s also taken part in numerous performances with other companies over the years. But “Tosca” — Wall’s seventh Seattle Opera “Tosca,” by his calculations — will be his final performance at McCaw Hall before his retirement, ending what Seattle Opera staffers say is among the longest singing tenures in its history.

It’s a rare and unusual achievement, according to Seattle Opera chorus master Michaella Calzaretta. “The role of a chorister is not an easy one,” she said. “To be able to balance the intense needs of many productions with the rest of your life is a big task … to stick it out for that long, for the love of the job, is really impressive.”

His voice, she said, is also remarkable. At Wall’s most recent every-two-year audition (required of every chorus member), she remembered, “he sang the flower aria from ‘Carmen,’ and if I would have closed my eyes, I would have guessed that he was somewhere maybe in his late 40s. His voice was still in that good shape — he practices diligently, and he teaches a lot. It’s a really beautiful voice.”

If Wall’s name is familiar to you, even if you’ve never been to the opera, it’s because he — like so many superheroes — has another identity. During the pandemic, he was known as Ballard Opera Man, performing concerts from his front yard as a way of distracting and entertaining his neighbors during a difficult time. Those performances started “as a lark,” Wall said, but quickly became a lifeline, both for him and his audience. Beginning as an every-weekday event in April 2020, the concerts moved to just Fridays that May and continued weekly through September 2021, though many took place on Facebook Live after even socially distanced outdoor gatherings were discouraged during the height of the pandemic. The concerts attracted national attention, and Ballard Opera Man eventually printed up T-shirts and made CDs, which were sold to benefit the Ballard Food Bank.

“I think I pretty much sang every song I ever knew,” said Wall this month, in an interview at the Ballard home he shares with his wife Ginna Wall, who served as tech support and co-conspirator for the concerts, and cat Rudy, who made a memorable appearance in a video of Wall performing “Nessun dorma.” (Rudy, for the record, is now 16 years old and extremely friendly to visiting journalists.) The outdoor concerts, Wall said, sometimes drew as many as 200 people, even though the address of his house was never shared publicly. Things ended, appropriately, with concert number 100, which took place on the Friday before Seattle Opera returned to in-office work the following Monday. “One hundred,” he said, “seemed like a nice round number.”

Wall, who grew up in Connecticut and remembers attending the Metropolitan Opera as a child (“It was a million miles away! Like a flea circus! In Italian! I didn’t know what was going on”), fell in love with opera as a college student, dazzled upon seeing one of his teachers perform in a production of “Pagliacci.” Talking about the memory, Wall lit up, describing “the excitement of that, of feeling like you were even in a small way part of it because you got to watch it.” He went on to study opera performance in graduate school, receiving his master’s degree from the Hartt School of music at the University of Hartford in 1979. That same year, he followed Ginna to Seattle, where she was attending graduate school in nursing at the University of Washington. “I figured I’d just come out here for a while, we’d figure it out, maybe we’d stay here, maybe we wouldn’t,” Wall said. Things did work out; they married the following year.

At the time, Seattle Opera was less than 20 years old, and still under the direction of its founder, Glynn Ross. “It was a great place to be on your way up,” said Wall, who was 30 when he began singing there in 1982. Though Ross “knew the value of bringing star singers,” and Wall remembered being dazzled by some visiting Metropolitan Opera artists, the organization was then much smaller — “more of a mom and pop” and rehearsal space was tiny. He remembered rehearsing “Götterdämmerung” in the old rooms at Seattle Center Armory. “They told us, when we get on stage, you can take two steps instead of one. We had to scale it down.”

Wall has now sung through five different general directors of Seattle Opera, including the long reign of Speight Jenkins (who led the organization from 1983 to 2014). Favorite productions include Chris Alexander’s lavish 2000 production of “Boris Godunov” (“It was cosmic!”), the 1994 “Lohengrin” with rising star Ben Heppner, and the opera’s last “Ring” cycle under Jenkins, in 2013. That production “was Speight’s swan song,” Wall said, “and it was just fantastic. He really got the casting.” His most frequent opera? “Götterdämmerung,” in the “Ring” cycle (the only one of the cycle’s four operas with an onstage chorus), which he performed 10 times.

Being a member of the Seattle Opera Chorus is a part-time job, and a large time commitment. Wall, who serves as chorus personnel coordinator, says that most of the choristers have other full-time jobs, such as his own work as a longtime singing teacher and coach. He still teaches three days a week, and has no plans to retire from that, believing that it’s helped his vocal longevity. “A lot of people will say, once you start teaching, you won’t be able to sing anymore, you’ll be ruining your voice demonstrating,” Wall said. “I’ve found it to be exactly the opposite.” Though he still feels good about his voice, retiring from Seattle Opera now feels right, and will give him more time for teaching, for other kinds of music (Wall, proficient on piano and string bass, wants to play more jazz), for traveling.

But he’ll miss having “the best seat in the house” and experiencing “the drama of watching the whole process unfold” through the rehearsal process. Each opera is something to be filed away in memory, “like collecting stamps or coins” — and so many bring some memorable detail. In a Seattle Opera production of “Carmen” years ago, Wall remembered being on stage as the tenor playing Don José created an electric moment, making a sudden but gentle contact with the soprano playing Micaëla and then walking away, not breaking eye contact. “I get chills just thinking about that,” said Wall. The nuance might not have been visible to the audience, but it’s the detail that exists on stage, only seen by those standing close by — the smallness in the vastness of an opera.

And while he’s enjoyed playing occasional leading roles in other companies (a favorite role: Rodolfo in “La bohème,” on multiple occasions), he’s found great meaning and purpose in being part of the chorus at Seattle Opera for so many years. “The chorus is the society that observes and cares about the story,” he said; it is, in a sense, the audience’s gateway into this larger-than-life art form. On that Monday evening in the rehearsal hall, Wall’s voice blended with so many others to create that heavenly sound — one artist among many, creating something beautiful together.