Steve Goodman, MD, MHS, PhD, Baritone

Making a mid-career move is often difficult. There are friends and family to consider, the loss of familiarity, the whole matter of uprooting. For some, there are passions that must be put aside, as in a move from ski country to the deep South or from a vibrant social scene to a cultural desert. Luckily for Steven Goodman, MD, MHS, PhD (professor of medicine and of health research & policy and associate dean of clinical and translational research), there are opportunities to pursue his passion for singing at Stanford and in the Bay Area even though they’re somewhat different from performing with the Baltimore Opera Company.

Although his singing talents are known to his friends, most in the department were surprised to see a recent Department of Medicine newsletter linking to his performance of the national anthem for the San Francisco Giants this last August. Five years into his Stanford career he agreed to look back at how he learned to unlock his rich, resonant baritone and what he then did with it.

From Clarinet to Opera

Steve Goodman started out as “a moderately serious clarinetist first, not a singer. The problem with the clarinet is that, to be in an orchestra, you have to be one of the top two wherever you are, and I wasn’t.  So I joined the Harvard Glee Club, which was a serious musical group, but I wasn’t that serious about singing.”

What changed Goodman’s trajectory was hearing a college production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute in English when, “for the first time I understood the theater part of opera. Once I made the connection between the music and the meaning, I became an opera fan.” Although he couldn’t sing serious opera, in his final semester at Harvard he sang in a Gilbert & Sullivan comic opera, The Yeoman of the Guard. Despite that, he says, “If anyone asked me if I was a musician I would say ‘yes, a clarinetist,’ but never  ‘yes, I’m a singer.’”

And then came medical school in New York at NYU, where there was no time to sing but lots of opportunity to hear more opera. That was followed by pediatrics residency at Washington University in St. Louis.

Then he went to Johns Hopkins to get a masters in biostatistics and a PhD in epidemiology. And there, he says, “I got more and more interested in singing seriously. They had a medical campus chorus, and I heard one terrific student who was taking singing lessons, so I decided to take lessons with her teacher to see what would happen. My goal was just to sing in an opera workshop or something.”

Refining His Talent at the Peabody Conservatory

One of the nice things about Hopkins is its Peabody Conservatory, and Goodman decided to try to take advantage of its offerings. “I called to see if I could get into the opera workshop. And they mentioned that there was a production of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, and I could audition for that, too. I had no operatic repertoire, so I auditioned with the Pirate King song from Pirates of Penzance, which in retrospect was ludicrous. But they were nice, and I was cast, as a doctor, appropriately.” (The pompous Dr. Bartolo.)

“To start singing opera by doing Marriage of Figaro was a dream. It is very human, funny and poignant. The first rehearsal is still burned into my brain; I couldn’t believe I was being given the privilege of hearing and singing that glorious music, for  hours at a time, with such a supremely talented cast; I was the only one not enrolled in the conservatory. The score felt to me like a bible.  But the lead soprano, who later became a friend, kept telling me, ‘you don’t know what you’re doing. You have no idea how to sing.’ She was right; I was singing with very little attention to vocal production and consistency of sound, things that opera singers are very conscious of."

“After that I found a teacher at Peabody, a famous baritone,” he says, “and he somehow got through to me that the voice that sounded good to me in my head sounded bad outside, and the voice that sounded bad to me in my head sounded good outside. When I finally sang with the voice he wanted, he shouted, ‘That’s money!’ And he was right, literally; just weeks later I auditioned for small solo roles at the Baltimore Opera, who had turned me down for a place in the chorus just months before.” After hearing his new voice, Goodman reports, “they gave me the choice of any role I wanted.”

He chose a role as Lady Macbeth’s doctor, and while he didn’t cure her, his opera career had started. He sang in multiple productions over the ensuing years, often side by side with major stars, like the Metropolitan Opera’s James Morris and Jerome Hines. “I sang either big roles with small companies or small roles with big companies. I also performed virtually every baritone role that Gilbert and Sullivan wrote, and did a fair amount of concertizing as well. I sang twice on Baltimore Symphony programs, and I did some national anthems for the Baltimore Orioles.”