From his boyhood, Michael Ballam was certain he would be an opera singer.
"It didn't cross my mind to do anything else," he reflected in a recent interview.It's a dream he has fulfilled, having sung on every major operatic stage in the world. But for a boy growing up in Logan in the 1950s and '60s, it was a unique ambition. Needless to say, not everyone took him seriously. In junior high school, a vocational guidance counselor asked him to choose from a list of occupations.
"My chosen field was not on that list, but I said I wanted to be an opera singer. He said, `You can't; it's not on the list. Now choose something that's on that list.' So I went through and nothing looked appealing at all, so I said, `But I don't want to do any of this stuff.' "
Finally, the counselor selected an occupation for him: traveling salesman.
"I guess, in some respects, that is what I have become, a traveling salesman, but of art instead of brushes and vitamins," he said.
A member of the Cliffside 1st Ward, Brother Ballam has largely given up the professional limelight. He now devotes his irrepressible energy and theatrical polish to promoting ideas and dreams to which he is passionately committed and which stem from his fervent belief in the gospel.
Does the incident with the guidance counselor carry a lesson?
"Well, I've never liked lists since that time," he said, "except the one that's spelled L-I-S-Z-T [a reference to the famous composer.] I don't like parameters that people have to fall into. I don't think God created us with lists in mind. I believe He saw us as individually unique people who are striving to be like He is. And as soon as we start limiting people, we hinder them in accomplishing what their divine destiny could be."
Young Michael never allowed himself to be categorized. "I didn't know it was impossible to be an opera singer," he recalled, "though it was almost impossible, statistically, to do what I did. Given where I came from, what part of the country, what my opportunities were in those days, it was nigh unto impossible. Statistically it would have been easier for me to become
Utah Jazz's all-star guardT John Stockton than what I did, because there are more opportunities to become John Stockton, more programs to get you to that point in junior high, right straight through college to the professional world, if you have the gift. That's not true in the opera industry."
Michael defied the statistics and succeeded. But as many do, he ended up taking a path he had not anticipated.
"In the early part of my career, I told the Lord what I was supposed to do, and He assisted me for a while," he said. "But ultimately our job is to find out what He has in mind for our talents, because after all, He gave them to us. And if we can find that out early, I think we will go farther, as long as we don't try to supersede Him."
For Brother Ballam, the discovery began after he became very ill while in South America for a performance. He was living in New York at the time, but the illness, thought to be fatal, brought him back to his hometown of Logan, where he eventually recovered.
Meantime, he found that the city's legendary Capitol Theater, the third-oldest building in the county, a sister to the theater of the same name in Salt Lake City, was about to be torn down. "I didn't think that was OK," he said.
As a 16-year-old he had envisioned what the building could be if restored to the glory it had when built in 1923. "I performed on that stage for the first time as a kid, and since then I've sung on every major stage in the world. I kept thinking, this is as beautiful as any place there is; all it needs is some love and a few miracles."
He persuaded the owner to donate the building to the city. He enlisted money and labor, much of it from members of the Church who are by and large not patrons of the arts. It was restored to the present Ellen Eccles Theater, valued at $23 million.
"There's no reason this building should be here, except through a series of miracles," he said."
One of the miracles, he said, was its survival of a fire when that ignited in an adjacent building, and destroyed the lobby area of the theater as it was under construction, "a fire that should have destroyed all of South Main."
"The fire chief said, `I've never seen flames like that.' They were not arcing to the side, which would have gotten the theater, but were going straight up in the sky."
Today, the theater is home to Brother Ballam's Utah Festival Opera Company and a base for a movement he hopes will begin to accomplish what prophets have said must be the destiny of the Latter-day Saints when it comes to art.
"We have all the ingredients here in Logan," he said, adding that the pioneering spirit still exists to a great degree in the community. "I felt inspired to come home, putting it simply. If the Lord is with you, if He sanctions the dream it will happen."
Part of the dream is to have Latter-day Saints achieve a level of excellence that will cause the world "to look at us and say, `Who are these people, the Mormons?' " to see the light of the gospel manifest through that excellence and be led to glorify God. (See Matt. 5:16.)
"Orson Whitney and President Spencer W. Kimball and President Ezra Taft Benson gave some pretty strong prophecies about arts in the latter days," he said. "We have not been good stewards in the Church in bringing those prophecies to fulfillment."
As an example of what Church members could be doing in terms of excellence in the arts, he points to the Jewish culture, which has produced the likes of Itzhak Perlman, Isaac Stern, Beverly Sills and Cecil B. DeMille.
"The greatest of the great in the arts have been Jews for centuries," he said. Part of the reason has to do with patronage and support.
"There were a lot of wealthy Jews who said, `Let's put our people in a position where they can be viewed favorably by the world, and maybe the world will stop killing us. Let's put somebody out there who's great like Eddie Cantor, Al Jolson, Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hammerstein. Let's get them out there where the world can see that we're good folks."
The Jewish artistic heritage stems partly from religion, he noted, adding that Moses' writings contained musical notation in order to put the proper nuances on certain phrases and avoid misunderstanding.
"Music has been a way of communicating their devout belief in God. When they were being abused and annihilated, they could still sing, they could still write, they could still act, so art was a way of expressing their devotion. Some of the Latter-day Saints have caught that spirit. They did when they wrote the hymns. William Clayton understood it. Brigham Young understood it when he built the Salt Lake Theater and saw it as a place where people could learn solutions to life's problems without having to experience them themselves."
Excellence is not foreign to Church members, he pointed out, adding that Latter-day Saints have distinguished themselves in the fields of business and athletics and thereby brought credit to the Church. "But we are uneasy about the arts, for some reason."
Could the reason be that the arts have been misused so often for evil purposes?
"They have been," he responded, "all the more reason why we need to get in on the act" to use them to bring to pass righteousness. He noted that President Benson had spoken of a day to come when great playwrights and composers would convey the Book of Mormon to the world in an artistic setting. But, Brother Ballam, added, excellence is necessary to accomplish that.
"I want to create a place where Mormon artists can come and grow, because they've got a lot of growing to do."
The growing has to start early, he added. He told an incident from the experience of his opera company's chorus mistress Elvera Roth. She sought the opportunity to teach music to prison inmates. Working long and hard, she taught them to blend their voices in a single chord. When they finally achieved it, some wept because they had never had the experience of creating harmony.
"That's what God sent us here to be, an orchestra," he commented, "a chorus in life where each of us brings a note and together we create harmony."
For the inmates, the discovery came tragically late in life because no one had channeled their creativity positively, he said.
"That's why we're remodeling this building behind the theater."
A dance hall in earlier days, the 40,000-square-foot building served for many years as a factory for women's apparel. Brother Ballam envisions an auditorium that will be the new home of the Utah Opera Company and will nurture the creativity of children.
"For three months, we'll be putting on grand opera. But for the other months, this will be filled with children, whom we will be bringing in. We're not going to teach them how to create, they'll teach us how to create. We'll do it exactly backwards. They're going to write the stories, the music, they're going to play in the orchestra, they're going to create the sets. They'll do it all from their perspective, not ours. We'll have professionals there to facilitate them, to help them, but they're not going to say, `You can't go from F to C. If they want to go from F to C, they can do that.
"And I think maybe that way, with a generation that we can train from the ground up with no `lists' and no categories they have to fit into, we might be able to facilitate those Miltons and Shakespeares that Orson Whitney and Ezra Taft Benson envisioned. That's our role."