Sound bites.

John Matz admits that his career path may seem a tad circuitous. The twenty-six-year-old tenor, who spent the 2003-04 season winning praise for his Pinkerton in Los Angeles Opera's Madama Butterfly and Alfredo in Washington National Opera's Traviata, already seems to have gotten the breaks that augur the making of an honest-to-goodness star. The first break, oddly enough, may have been a shoulder injury that sent the six-foot five-inch, 280-pound Matz packing from the University of Miami football team at the age of nineteen. With athletics no longer an option, Matz began studying with character tenor Cesar Ulloa and went on to take first prize at the Licia Albanese-Puccini Competition. At twenty-one, with a scant year-and-a-half of formal vocal instruction under his belt, he won a place in the Met's Lindemann Young Artist Program.

Matz relishes the fact that he does not fit the typical tenor stereotype. The erstwhile bouncer and bartender for several West Palm Beach night clubs recalls with a laugh, "One of the last clubs I worked at before coming to the Met was called 'Nessun Dorma.' The owner didn't even know that I was studying until after I told him that the English translation to the entire aria written out on the club's front ...