By Mike Levin

I always thought that men with really deep singing voices on stage had to be at least six-foot-two, with barrel chests and diaphragms made of titanium. Their voices resonate through your skeleton, adding depth to a musical score that allows the tenors and sopranos to skip wherever they want.

On Stage - better late than never. Courtesy of Thomas Franzky

Then in walks Thomas Franzky, short and slender, the unexpected bass who can move his vocal chords from opera to Broadway and still look like your ex-roommate’s younger brother. He’s just finished an eight-day run in Opera Lyra’s Lucia Di Lammermoor. On May 21 he’ll take the low road when the Ottawa Classical Choir performs Giuseppe Verdi’s Messa da Requiem at the National Arts Centre and then sing the part of Morales for two nights at the end of the month in Pellegrini Opera’s Carmen.

And he never thought he’d be a singer.

Franzky explains the strange path from a non-musical childhood to his singing today in the gentle voice of the software-engineering project manager that represents his day job. He got into high-tech in a round-about way as well, yet there are times when it keeps him sane, like when he has three classical roles in less than a month.

He sang in the school choir from Grade 2 to Grade 6. “I had no idea how that happened, but I had this high voice and that wasn’t cool, so I quit.” The rest of his academic career was consistent with an engineer father and a family life that didn’t pay much attention to creative tendencies.

Franzky also danced as a youngster, but mostly he focussed on school, ending with a degree in physics from the University of Toronto. He got a job in manufacturing and then a position with Nortel in Ottawa. He’s too polite to say the job didn’t stimulate him. He picked up photography in 1989, and continues it today, but something was still missing.

“I always suspected I had an ability with voice, so (in 1995) I was looking at some night courses, found singing classes and figured, why not?” Some of his co-workers had a band, so when they found out Franzky was taking vocal lessons, he was drafted.

After two years in front of a microphone he auditioned for  Orpheus Musical Theatre Society and joined several of its Broadway-style shows, including Anything Goes in which he had the lead role. He also took voice lessons with Ottawa soprano Maria Knapik, and when she created the Ottawa Classical Choir, Franzky was asked to join. It led to a wider performing role in operatic singing.

“I’m glad I had the courage to come back to singing. It saved my life.” What he means is that the transition from Nortel grunt to singing internationally, with Knapik, is finally filling in some of his blank spaces. “The relationships I’ve made, the travel; well, life is a lot more interesting when you go down a path and it leads somewhere, like singing Ave Maria in Polish at a funeral in Poland. It amazes me.”

He left theatre for classical because it seemed more of a challenge. Now he wonders if he should go back because there are more opportunities (and very few men) in musical theatre.

As he approaches 50, Thomas Franzky is still learning that in singing many rules are made to be broken: like the one about a bass voice having to inhabit a hulking body, but also that if you suspect you love doing something, it might to turn to be the thing that saves your life.

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It’s taken until now for someone to dive deeply into the story of the Rideau Canal – not just the building of it but the whole story. Ed Bebee’s Invisible Army: Hard Times, Heartbreak and Heritage gives the context that has been missing. He’ll talk about his newest book May 21, from 1 – 4 pm. at Collected Works at 1242 Wellington St. W.