Baritone Finds Romance : Opera: Erich Parce, who has title role in “Passion of Jonathan Wade,” says tenors aren’t always the best lovers.

SAN DIEGO —  Weary of portraying villains and sympathetic brothers, baritone Erich Parce is elated to sing the romantic title role in the San Diego Opera production of Carlisle Floyd’s “The Passion of Jonathan Wade,” which opens Saturday at the San Diego Civic Theatre.

“I love being the romantic lead,” Parce said. “I think that baritones are better romantic leads, anyway.”

Over lunch between rehearsals, the easygoing singer with a Midwestern twang recited a typical baritone’s litany of complaints against operatic convention, which, at least since the early 19th Century, has assigned romantic hero roles to the tenor voice. No matter how little verisimilitude the typical tenor may exhibit to the dashing young lover, operatic sopranos regularly cast their affections on the tenor, while the baritone either looks on passively or is cast as the villain.

“That’s the main reason I’ve done so many shows like ‘Desert Song’ and ‘The Vagabond King,’ ” Parce explained. “You’re not spending the night barking at somebody or being a father. You get to sing real lines.”

A native of Bellevue, Wash., Parce gives his age as “thirtysomething.” He grew up in South Dakota and pursued his vocal studies in Santa Barbara. He won the Western Regional Metropolitan Opera auditions in 1978, but made no headway in the finals in New York City.

After that disappointment, Parce decided he had more to learn about opera and, for about a decade, divided his time between singing opera and musical comedy. Four years ago, when he was performing in San Francisco Opera’s “Billy Budd,” he cast his lot with opera and turned his back on musical theater.

“I was asked to sing George in ‘Sunday in the Park with George’ after Mandy Patinkin on Broadway. They wanted a year’s commitment, which I couldn’t give because of several upcoming opera contracts. At that point I decided I couldn’t pursue both. It’s like a weightlifter who has to decide whether he wants to be a power lifter or repetition lifter. I had to choose.”

Parce arrived in San Diego last week fresh from singing the Jonathan Wade role for the Greater Miami Opera, where the critic for the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel praised both his vocal ability and the “matinee-idol quality” he brought to the role of the dashing, but ultimately tragic Union Army officer in

Floyd’s post-Civil War grand opera. As part of the Miami company’s second cast, Parce took over the role from Dale Duesing, who premiered it for Houston Grand Opera in January. Because “Jonathan Wade” is a work in progress with the composer directing each production, Parce has been forced to keep up with Floyd’s many alterations since the opening night in Houston.

“We are at a huge advantage here, because we’re not constantly changing. For every single performance in Houston, Floyd was still rewriting, and the difference between each show was amazing. Sometimes the singers had to learn 10 pages of new music in two days. That can be fun, but not in a show this difficult. In Miami, they put some of the (deleted) music back in, and here we put even more music back.”

Keeping track of the composer’s changes was one challenge, but Parce was equally concerned that he not inadvertently copy Duesing’s interpretation of the Wade role.

“I saw Duesing do a whole show just once. The second time I went and just listened to the opera. When you sing a role, you need to have your own motivations, and I didn’t want to absorb his patterns and movements. It’s also a compliment to Carlisle Floyd that he was willing to allow each singer to go his own way through the opera.”

Accustomed to singing standard repertory Italian operas and the occasional tuneful operetta, Parce initially found Floyd’s musical idiom in “Jonathan Wade” daunting.

“At first I was uncertain about the music. It took me about two weeks working with the music to see how powerful it is. The style is unlike 12-tone (serial) style, but it is also unlike a lot of Floyd’s earlier operas. Until you get the leitmotifs ingrained in your memory and get a handle on the musical vocabulary, it’s hard. He composed to match speech patterns, which can take some work to get into the voice. It’s certainly not Puccini.”

Floyd’s music for “Jonathan Wade” may not sing like Puccini, but Miami Herald critic James Roos detected clear harmonic affinities between “Jonathan Wade” and Puccini’s final opera “Turandot.” On the other hand, Floyd’s idiom struck the ears of Houston Post critic Carl Cunningham as “finely balanced dissonant harmony that pays tribute to time-honored 20th-Century practices.”

Stylistic analyses aside, most of the critical reaction to “Jonathan Wade” has been favorable, although Floyd, who wrote both the libretto and the score, has been taken to task for his less than heroic characterization of the title character. According to Houston Chronicle critic Charles Ward, Jonathan Wade is a confident individual who fails to grasp the political consequences of his authority in the conquered South of 1865. This failure, then, diminished the officer’s tragic demise and the martyrdom implied in the opera’s title.

Parce agreed that the criticism is warranted, at least in part.

“At every step, Wade is undercut--his power is taken away every time he turns around. My problem is finding how to make that work dramatically. Carlisle and I have time to work it out, though. But, in defense of Col. Wade, I don’t think he would be as sensitive a character if he didn’t have that problem. It’s a risk you have to take.”

“The Passion of Jonathan Wade” will be performed at the San Diego Civic Theatre on Saturday, Tuesday, April 19 and 21.