The Basso's Lot

"I still am czar!" sang the basso, glaring at his counselors like a wounded lion. Then he half rose from his throne to take the most spectacular fall in opera--pitching forward on his left shoulder and rolling down the stairs to lie dead on the marbled Kremlin floor. The basso, who had studiously practiced his fall in a neighborhood gym, was Chicago-born Giorgio Tozzi; his part was the title role in last week's NBC-TV version of Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov. For both Tozzi and the NBC Opera, the production of Boris was a fine climax to the season.

The Foe Will Come. The NBC Boris was whittled down to two hours from two hours, 45 minutes. Inevitably, a great many scenes suffered: the garden scene, with its stately polonaise, now consisted of a hurried procession of guests who appeared to be on their way to a cookout. The television camera could not encompass the crowd effects that are so important to Boris; and the Idiot at opera's end had only a thicket of birch .trees, rather than a forest, in which to sing his prophetic curtain song:

Soon the foe will come

And the dark will fall . . .

Cry, cry, Russian land,

Hungry people, cry.

Nevertheless, most of the cutting was skillful, the quickened pace and the camera closeups generated their own kind of dramatic tension. Above all, the production had, in Tozzi, a magnificent Boris--one who was able to suggest in his handsomely haunted voice and maddened eyes the tragedy that Mussorgsky saw in the convulsions of "blind Mother Russia."

It Ain't No Sin. Scoring a triumph in his first television opera--and in a role that he had infrequently sung before--was about par for Tozzi. He made his Met debut only six years ago; since then, he has thrown his big bronze voice into 27 different Met roles--including King Phillip in Don Carlo, Fiesco in Simon Boccanegra, Padre Guardiano in La Forza del Destino--and in the process has become one of the world's great bassos.

Son of an Italian-born laborer, Tozzi, 37, was introduced to music at home on a phonograph stacked with Caruso and Tetrazzini records and with contemporary pop hits (one favorite: "It ain't no sin to take off your skin and dance around in your bones"). Although he took voice lessons, he majored in biology at Chicago's DePaul University. But jobs were scarce when Tozzi got out of the Army in 1945, and he took to singing wherever he could--in the WGN Theater of the Air chorus, with Skitch Henderson and his orchestra at a local nightclub, at local women's clubs. A role in Benjamin Britten's short-lived Rape of Lucretia took him to Broadway, and from there he went to London to star in a musical comedy about a prizefighter who danced about the ring beating the stuffing out of his opponent while his leading lady warbled:

Samson, my knight,

Are you all right?

I cannot stand to see the heavy blows,

But they are necessary I suppose.

Even opera was better than that, and Tozzi went to Italy to study. With the help of his teacher, he changed from baritone to bass, a decision he never regretted, although in basso roles he rarely gets the rafter-ringing aria or the girl. He admits to some annoyance when a tenor or soprano "who has been singing lousily all evening gets up there and hits a high note and brings the house down." But on balance, he will stick with the kings, priests, inquisitors and assassins who fall to the basso's lot. Being the villain, he finds, helps him "get rid of a lot of anxiety," and besides, a basso's roles are more convincing dramatically. "Can you imagine," he says, "having to make something out of a character as stupid as Leonora? I'd feel a perfect fool!"

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.