Music's ministers.

Byline: FRED CRAFTS The Register-Guard

WHEN CAROL ANN Manzi first met Robert Ashens 10 years ago, she was an aspiring opera singer and he a rising conductor.

"She didn't like me at all," Ashens says, recalling their backstage introduction after an opera he had just conducted in Clinton, Conn. They had been brought together by a mutual friend, but they seemed to be operating on different wavelengths.

"I said to Robert, `Would it be all right if I called you?' meaning, `May I call and come audition for you?' ' Manzi says. `And he said to me, `Well, really, if you don't mind, I'll call you.'

`And I took that to mean, `Don't call us, we'll call you. I'm really not interested in you.' '

She left, convinced she had blown it. Imagine her surprise, then, when Ashens phoned the next day to ask her out to dinner.

However, the course of true love did not run smoothly. He was late for their first date, in August 1991. His car broke down on the way.

"I had two cars in those days," Ashens remembers, "so I got the other car and drove down, but that car didn't have air conditioning, and it was the hottest day of the year. She was absolutely soaked from perspiration. I think we got a mile from her house on the highway, and that car died."

Ashens spent the next hour running back and forth between a service station and an auto parts store, trying to get the car fixed. Manzi says she liked the way he worked.

"He never lost his cool. He never cursed. He was a complete gentleman."

When he couldn't get the car fixed, Ashens called a taxi and they went to dinner. However, worried about getting her home, he spent much of the time on the phone trying to get the car fixed. At last, Ashens called a friend, who rescued them.

The story would be sweeter if the couple immediately fell madly in love, got married and lived happily ever after - but that's not the case. Nothing clicked.

"She was wearing a wide-brimmed hat and dark-tinted glasses," Ashens says. "My first thought was, she seems to be hiding behind that hat and glasses.'

`I was not attracted to him at all," Manzi says. "I always went for the Italian stud kind of guy."

So they dated other people. But under the surface, something was bubbling.

"If I was out with someone else, I was constantly finding myself thinking, `Hmm, I wonder what that Robert is doing tonight,' ' Manzi says.

Their second date came six months later, in January 1992, on the coldest day of the year. This time, they had a flat tire. But car troubles - and the way they handled them - seemed to draw them together. The romance blossomed.

Manzi found Ashens "always interesting, always charming, always fun, a complete gentleman to the nth degree, knew how to court a woman, took me to the best restaurants, to the ballet, opera, plays, opened the doors. ... We were never at a loss for things to talk about. And we're still not.

"That's the wonderful thing about our relationship. It's interesting."

They were married on June 12, 1993. He composed the music for the service.

SINCE THEN, their individual careers have taken off. He has conducted at Connecticut Opera, Opera Idaho, Augusta Opera and Shubert Opera, among others. She has sung at Sarasota Opera, Opera Maine, Opera Carolina, Santa Barbara Grand Opera, Toledo Opera, Lincoln Center and elsewhere.

Sometimes they perform as a husband-and-wife team (for service clubs and the like); mostly, they go their own ways. They will be together professionally for only the second time since the wedding this week (they did "La Boheme" in 1997) for Eugene Opera's "La Traviata." He is the opera company's artistic director and conductor; she is the opera's star.

"What marks success for us in our relationship and our being able to work together is, we spend a lot of time talking about the process of our lives," explains Ashens, 46.

Manzi, 37, jumps in: "The foundation of our life together and our marriage is definitely our spiritual foundation. Without that, in a business where you're traveling constantly and you're away for months at a time, you can be in big trouble.

"I just feel like our relationship is rooted in all of the right things. There's incredible respect and admiration and fun and wit."

Those qualities carried them through the dark days three years ago, when Manzi discovered she had cancer.

"I had breast cancer, complete with extensive surgery, chemotherapy, the whole thing," she explains. "I know that I would never have gotten through that experience and come out on the other side in such a wonderfully positive way had it not been for the fact that Robert has had a huge influence on me spiritually."

Coming from an Italian family, Manzi had been brought up as a Roman Catholic. Ashens, with Scottish heritage, was raised as an Episcopalian.

Manzi continues: "When you pray together, and when you seek God in your problems and all of the aspects of your life, it keeps you together. It puts a gentleness around your relationship that I think is missing in a lot of people."

Manzi was diagnosed with cancer in October 1998. She had a mastectomy and was just about to undergo chemotherapy when she was offered the role of Magda in "La Rondine" at Sarasota (Fla.) Opera. She would have turned it down, she says, had her husband not insisted that she go.

"I felt that she could do the role, if she had just the right push, but her fear of the future was just enough to make her question it," Ashens says. So he packed her clothes and mailed them to Florida, then flew with her to Sarasota, settled her into an apartment, helped her find an oncologist and rented a car for her. Only then did he return home.

Although it was difficult, Manzi soared: "I was down there for three months and sang nine of the best performances of my life and career, while on chemotherapy."

SINCE THE onset of cancer, Manzi often has made speeches in which she shares with women how they "can thrive - not just survive - in the face of any situation."

Ashens observes that "the kind of energy and devotion that she devotes to that message is also infused in her artistry as a singer, and it reads very palpably, very clearly and strongly. That's the kind of artist we want to see on our stages here - the person who is so committed in their whole being that they are not just about singing the high notes, but about the art form."

Next year, Manzi will sing in April at the Creative Center for Women with Cancer in New York City, in May at the Susan G. Komen Foundation's Sing for the Cure conference in Charlotte, N.C., and in June at the Breast Cancer World Conference in Vancouver, B.C.

When Ashens got the Eugene Opera job, he and Manzi sold their possessions back East (he was with Connecticut Opera at the time) and moved to a high-rise apartment in downtown Eugene, about two blocks from the opera's offices. They've been too busy attending to musical and spiritual matters to restock their furnishings; their living room is bare.

Since they moved to Eugene a year ago this month, both have become lay Eucharistic ministers through St. Mary's Episcopal Church. Ashens often plays a role in church services on Sunday. Manzi takes the sacrament to Episcopalian patients at Sacred Heart Medical Center on Wednesday.

Manzi also serves in the church's soup kitchen on Saturday, takes part in Volunteers in Medicine Clinic on Friday and frequently works as a Reach to Recovery volunteer with the American Cancer Society.

Both say the connections between religion and music in their lives are stronger than ever.

"The music business can be very harsh at times, and it can be very competitive and very political," Manzi says. "We always seek to be on the other side of it and to look on what we do as a way of reaching out to people.

"We just do what we do because we love what we do and because we think it is our gift and our ministry to touch and move people. Our goals aren't to sing at the Met, conduct at the Met, sing at La Scala - we don't think in those terms.

`If our love for what we do, and our talent, takes us there, that's great, but I think at the core of what we do is a sense of ministry."

Working together on "La Traviata" has its blessings and its downsides. All the pressures of the rehearsal hall get transported home. At that point, the roles (conductor and star, husband and wife) can get jumbled.

"It's my job to be supportive of her, as I would any other singer," Ashens says in a soft, soothing voice. "Just be an ear for her. I have to be the priest or the minister.

`Again that ties us back to the church - a sense of pastoring or nurturing that hopefully keeps people calm enough to do their best."

Arts reporter Fred Crafts can be reached by phone at 338-2575 and by e-mail at [e-mail].

LA TRAVIATA

WHAT: Giuseppe Verdi's opera focuses on Violetta, a Parisian courtesan who runs off to live with Alfredo in the country, where she finds that love doesn't come cheap. To make ends meet, she has to sell her possessions. Alfredo's father persuades her to unburden his son and family from her reputation. She agrees and flees to Paris, where Alfredo tracks her down and they have a blowout argument. Later, after learning that she is suffering from tuberculosis, they get back together. Too late - she dies. "La Traviata (The Lost One)," which anchors Eugene Opera's 25th season, will be sung in Italian with English supertitles. Soprano Carol Ann Manzi is Violetta, tenor Richard Sanchez is Alfredo and baritone Constantinos Yiannoudes is Alfredo's father, Germont. Ronald Luchsinger is the director. Robert Ashens conducts.

WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Monday and Friday and 2:30 p.m. Jan. 6

WHERE: Silva Concert Hall, Hult Center, Seventh and Willamette streets

HOW MUCH: $12 to $75 through the Hult box office, 682-5000

NEW YEAR'S EVE PARTY: A post-premiere party (themed "The Girls Just Wanna Have Fun') will begin at 10:30 p.m. Monday in the ballroom of the Downtown Athletic Club, 999 Willamette St.; tickets are $40 through the club, 484-4011

CAPTION(S):

Robert Ashens, who will conduct `La Traviata,' rehearses his wife, Carol Ann Manzi, the operatic lead.