Ample Leonard

U.S. opera last week got a new Falstaff--from The Bronx.

The great Giuseppe Verdi's only well-known comic opera, written when he was 80, based on Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor, has long been regarded by many critics as his best. But ever since its first performance in 1893, with the late great Baritone Victor Maurel in the title role, it has tended to be a flop at the box office. The reasons are several. As drama Falstaff is sketchy, gentle, lacking in emotional intensity. As music, Falstaff is a tapestry of lacy subtleties, so fragile that only the finest opera companies can perform it without tearing it to tatters. But perhaps the most important reason for Falstaff's neglect is the scarcity of baritones who can make its central figure a living character instead of an overstuffed clown.

The finest was Victor Maurel. Since he introduced the role at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera, it has also been sung there by the late Antonio Scotti and by Lawrence Tibbett. Last week the Met presented its fourth Falstaff: big, pudgy 33-year-old Leonard Warren, whose suave baritoning was the hit of last summer's opera season at Buenos Aires' Teatro Colon (TIME, Aug. 30).

Critics did not compare him with Maurel. But they did admit that vocally Warren had an edge on Tibbett's now rather threadbare version, and that the newcomer made Shakespeare's amorous fat man a likable and believable character. It looked as though the Met's fourth Falstaff might reign for some time.

What Could He Lose? Leonard Warren reversed the usual U.S. operatic procedure and changed an exotic name to more familiar syllables. He was born Warrenoff in The Bronx, where his Russian-born father ran a fur shop. After graduating from Evander Childs High School he helped with his father's fur business, studying advertising at Columbia on the side. He also took some singing lessons. They might have remained a hobby but for the depression which crimped the fur business.

Leonard got a job in the chorus at the Radio City Music Hall. He started studying singing in earnest. A few months later, armed with a repertory of exactly five operatic arias, he entered the 1938 Metropolitan Auditions of the Air. "I thought they were fixed," he said later, "but what could I lose?" Much to his surprise, he not only won the auditions but also a $4,000 check from George A. Martin, president of the Sherwin-Williams Co., sponsors of the program. With the check he went to Italy to study. In six months he was singing at the Metropolitan.

For a comparative novice, Leonard Warren has already sung a great deal, has mastered at least a dozen important roles. His private life is as notably unoperatic as his Bronx boyhood. A quiet, imperturbably good-natured man, he lives with his attractive blond wife (whom he met on his trip to Italy) in a four-room apartment on Manhattan's Lexington Avenue. He has two avocations: miniature railroad trains and tropical fish.

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