The Golden Tenors

"Don't you know that a tenor is a being apart, who holds the power of life and death over the works he sings, over the composers and consequently over poor devils of players . . . He is not a denizen of this world, he is a world in himself."

Perhaps. But as Composer Hector Berlioz himself acknowledged in another passage of his Evenings with the Orchestra, the all-powerful tenor is anything but a hardy breed. Tenor voices are comparatively rare: in one study, made in Germany, more than three-quarters of the male voices were naturally baritone or bass. And the tenor must sing much of the time toward the top of his range and volume, subjecting his vocal cords to cruel and unusual punishment. Small wonder that tenors are almost always in short supply and often have king-sized egos ("Good," "Marvelous," Caruso used to write below his name as he endorsed his Met check for each performance).

In today's short supply, the best tenor singing is an American. Richard Tucker--stocky (5 ft. 8 in., 185 Ibs.), barrel-chested and plainly middle-aged (47)--was this week commanding the stage of the Metropolitan Opera (in Tosca, with Leontyne Price). Merely scheduling, his appearance promised one of the Met's truly distinguished evenings. The promise lies in Tucker's consistency: other tenors may match him on a given night, but no other tenor maintains his steadily high average of performance (a fact that prompts Tucker to say, with some exaggeration: "I've never given a completely bad performance, and I don't want to give even a 10% bad one"). In recent years, the Met's stage has known four other high-priced performers (up to $2,000 or so an evening) who rank just behind Tucker as the outstanding tenors of the day. They are Nicolai Gedda, Jon Vickers, Mario Del Monaco, Franco Corelli.

All four came to the Met after distinguished triumphs abroad. Tucker arrived in 1945 after several appearances with a small opera company, a feat equivalent to a baseball player's joining the New York Yankees after a couple of weeks of sandlot ball. But Tucker had honed his voice as a member of his synagogue choir on the Lower East Side, later as a cantor (he still forgoes all performances to officiate at services during the fall High Holy Days and the spring Passover).

That early training, Tucker feels, helped him to catch on at the Met, mastering 25 major roles as he developed from a lyric tenor to a lirico spinto (midway between lyric and dramatic). He is not identified with any single role, but ranging between the romantic bel canto flights of Lucia di Lammermoor and the more declamatory style of Turandot or La Fanciulla del West, he has created some memorable characterizations: Don Jose in Carmen, Rodolfo in La Boheme, the Duke of Mantua in Rigoletto.

He has done so with no real flair for acting, for it is truer of Tucker than of al most any other tenor that, in the Italian phrase, "the opera is in the throat." What emerges from Tucker's throat is a warm and sensuous voice, vibrant with emo tional fervor, capable of a lyrical legato or a ringing fortissimo. Tucker uses that voice with precise intelligence, lightening and darkening his tone to convey a whole range of feeling. Among the roles that he has not yet sung at the Met are two that contributed to Caruso's fame: Canio in Pagliacci and the old man Eleazar of Halevy's La Juive, which has not been given at the Met since Martinelli sang it in 1936. Explains Tucker: "Pagliacci tears every fiber of your body. I'm still growing. When I'm 50, I'll be ready. The pinnacle of my career will be Eleazar, but it's got to be done right. Too many people have been waiting for me as Eleazar."

NICOLAI GEDDA, 36, is as much admired for his dramatic ability as he is for his crisply controlled lyric tenor. Although he was born in Sweden, his clear enunciation of English has delighted Metropolitan audiences unaccustomed to understanding a word from the stage. It was partly

Gedda's English, in fact, that got him his big break in 1958, when he created the role of Anatol in Samuel Barber's Vanessa at the Met. Son of a baritone in the Don Cossack Chorus, Gedda was a clerk in a Stockholm bank when he decided to make singing his career, soon landed a spot with Sweden's Royal Opera, was invited to La Scala. In the course of singing about Europe and at the Met, he has picked up over 70 operatic roles, many of the non-Italian wing, including Grigori in Boris Godunov, Tamino in The Magic Flute -- and most notably the title role in Gounod's Faust. His voice is not par ticularly large, but it is passionate, beau tifully placed, and as finely responsible to the shape of the music as any in opera.

JON VICKERS, 35, has the build of a pro fessional wrestler (5 ft. 9 in., 215 Ibs., chest 47 in.) and a dramatic tenor voice of appropriate size. Canadian-born, he sang in various church choirs and in am ateur operetta productions (Naughty Marietta}, but planned on a business career. He had worked up to tool buyer for the Hudson's Bay Co. department store when the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto heard of him and gave him a three-year scholarship, starting a career that led him at last to Covent Garden and a stunning success as Aeneas in Berlioz' The Trojans (TIME, June 17, 1957). A firm believer in the equal importance of acting and singing. Vickers is passionate and convincing as Otello, Don Jose in Carmen, Florestan in Fidelio and Siegmund in Die Walkure. His big, shining voice, surging over the orchestra, would seem ideal for Wagner, but Vickers is in no hurry to become a Heldentenor. "I love Wagner," says he, "but I want to sing for 25 years, not ten. German exploits the voice." Many of his colleagues apparently share his feeling: no truly great Heldentenor has appeared since Melchior retired (although the Hungarian Sandor Konya shows high promise).

MARIO DEL MONACO, 42, has, over the years, built an unwholesome reputation succinctly summed up by Soprano Joan Sutherland when she recently canceled a performance with him. Del Monaco was, said she, "far too noisy a tenor." It is true that Del Monaco, who began his singing career in the Italian army and made his big-time debut at Covent Garden, likes to shout down the opposition, and that he is often tight and rasping in the middle and lower registers. But his top register can be glorious, and he often makes up in sheer strength and virility for what he lacks in sensuous sound or vocal finesse. He is at his best in such stentorian roles as Manrico in // Trovatore and the title role of Ernani, and his brilliant Otello is one of the great interpretations of present-day opera.

FRANCO CORELLI, 37, has risen so rapidly that in Italy he is nicknamed "the Sputnik Tenor." One reason is that he has a classically handsome head set on a 6-ft.

2-in., 185-lb. frame (his other Italian nickname is "Golden Calves"); another is that he can sing superbly (withdrawal from the Met spared Del Monaco the challenge of sharing the house with him).

Trained as a naval engineer, Corelli did not start studying singing until he was 24, learned most of what he knows by listening to recordings of famous singers. His professional career was begun "by pure good luck" when he got the chance to sing opposite Maria Callas in Spontini's La Vestale on a La Scala opening night.

For a while Corelli's extracurricular antics--he punched a spectator he thought had insulted him, stabbed Basso Boris Christoff with a stage sword--drew attention away from his sizable gifts as a singer. His large, solid dramatic tenor is darker than most, has almost a baritone's quality; at his best Corelli uses it with an animal vitality and drive that leave no audience bored. In Italy bobby-soxers periodically mob him at the stage door, and there is every evidence that he may do for tenors what Ezio Pinza did for bassos. Says he: "I attract mostly young, very beautiful girls."

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