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called. For the past five years, Holma has been engaged with the Hamburg State Opera, but he has also made regular guest appearances with the Finnish National Opera and at the Savonlinna Opera Festival. His role three years ago as the Marquis de Posa in Verdi’s Don Carlos made him a darling of Finnish opera audiences. The heroic baritone seemed to be following in the footsteps of Tom Krause and Jorma Hynninen straight to the top of the international scene. He was courted to play the role of Count Almaviva in the Marriage of Figaro at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, one of the world’s leading opera houses. But it was not to be.
    “Early last summer I started noticing that my voice was getting tired faster than normal and that it was starting to ‘leak,’ as we say. Late in the summer I played Scarpia in Puccini’s Tosca at the Salzburg Music Festival, and the final performances were pure torture: my voice simply wasn’t working.”
    A voice therapist diagnosed Holma with severely loosened vocal cords, apparently a result of overexertion. The initial treatment called for rest, so Holma took a leave of absence. After nearly a year’s sabbatical, his baritone still isn’t back to normal, so now the future may call for surgery.
    “No one can promise me that surgery will bring my voice back,” Tapio Holma says calmly. “That’s why I’m still not sure yet whether I’m going to take the risk. But I have to make a decision soon, because in this world it only takes a couple of years to be forgotten. The competition is really fierce.”
    At the same time his voice was giving out, Tapio Holma also experienced another crisis, but the worst pain of that is already behind him now. For ten years, Holma was married to the German soprano Suzanne Holtzinger. On the opera stage the baritone usually pursues the soprano in vain, like in Tosca , in which Suzanne Holtzinger played the lead role in Salzburg. In the opera, the depraved Scarpia attempts to make Tosca give herself to him in exchange for the life of Tosca’s beloved, the tenor Cavaradossi. Tosca pretends to agree but then kills Scarpia. In reality the baritone also lost the soprano to the tenor. Holma’s wife fell in love with the singer playing Cavaradossi.
    “Our marriage had been on the rocks for a while, so my wife’s decision wasn’t really that much of a surprise. Of course two big life changes at the same time was an ordeal. There’s no denying that.”
    A change of scenery helped ease the crisis. Tapio Holma returned to his hometown of Espoo. Bird-watching, a hobby since his childhood, has kept his spirits up.
    “Even if I can’t sing myself, I can enjoy the songs of the birds. Especially early in the summer, nights in Finland are remarkable. The nightingales along the shore . . . Luckily the road construction hasn’t destroyed all the nesting trees.”
    A new love interest is also at Holma’s side, Riikka Merivaara, a twenty-year-old university student. Holma is mysterious when he says that when he met Riikka, he literally had to step into the role of a hero, but he refuses to say anything more about the incident.
    “Our age difference doesn’t bother me. Riikka is a very wise young woman. She’s taught me a lot and made me think more about my life, for example about the importance of proper nutrition in a person’s overall health and well-being. We’ve been trying to figure out if there might be some sort of alternative therapy for my voice problems. And even if I don’t get my voice back, life still feels worth living. Every day you can hear the song of a bird, even if it’s just a seagull or a crow,” Holma says.
     
    In the photo accompanying the article, Holma looked out at the sea through binoculars. There was a slight smile on his lips: all his trials hadn’t robbed the valiant baritone of his faith in life.
    “That’s quite a story,” I said to my mother-in-law as she spooned raspberry-blueberry porridge into Iida’s mouth. “They