His life could be an opera. Ryan Speedo Green once screamed his lungs out in a juvenile lockup. Put there because he was so angry and violent, he was deemed a danger to his family. But a few caring people held onto him long enough for him to find himself. Today, the former juvenile delinquent’s lungs belt out the most demanding and famous bass-baritone roles in opera houses around the world. Scott Pelley profiles the young and unlikely opera star on the next edition of 60 Minutes, Sunday, December 9 at 7 p.m. ET/PT on CBS.
“Being in this cell was the lowest point of my entire life,” Green tells Pelley of that time in solitary. “When I got out of here that was my motivation to never end up in a place like this.”
The first critical influence on him was a caring teacher who took an interest in him and tamed the anger be brought from his abusive home. He wound up in the detention center after pulling a knife on his mother and brother. He was 12. The teacher called him at the lockup. “Don’t let this moment define you,” he said the teacher, Elizabeth Hughes, told him. “You can be better. You can do better.”
Priscilla Piñeiro-Jenkins made an impression on Green, too. The caseworker experienced his anger first hand at the detention center, bearing the brunt of his verbal assaults. But instead of deflecting him, she listened. “He’s a child. He’s not [mad] at me,” she remembers thinking. “You can’t just say no to someone and shut them out when you know they’re desperate to figure out…Who will love me? Who will care for me? Will you stand by me even if I’m cussing you out?”
“I had a lot of issues and a lot of anger problems,” Green says of the youth who once threw his school desk at Hughes. “A lot of explosions of anger, frustration that was going on at the time,” says Green. But when he got the concern he wasn’t always getting at home from Hughes, Piñeiro-Jenkins and a psychiatrist provided by the state of Virginia, he began to change.
The seeds planted in him by these caring adults took root when he entered a new school in another town soon after getting out of juvenile detention. It was a clean break and he made new friends. After school activities including football, Latin Club and chorus changed his life, especially chorus. He could sing. When a class trip to the Metropolitan Opera in New York City found the 15-year-old Green marveling at the African-American opera star Denyce Graves, a new star was born.
“The title role was a person who looked like me, was a person of color. It completely just shattered all my preconceptions of what I thought opera was,” he tells Pelley. “I fell in love with opera that day.”
Several academic degrees and singing contests later, the 32-year-old Green is now a member of the Vienna State Opera and sings in many languages to audiences around the world.
© 2018 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.
