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Continuing with corrections, admonishments on spurious opinions, etc.
peters159-1 - "....he had only 18 minutes of voice. He could not sustain it in a full scale opera" is absolute nonsense. He had already sung in complete opera performances (THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR and MADAMA BUTTERFLY), done some 80 cross-country concerts with the Bel Canto Trio (with George London and Frances Yeend), and for the last several years of his life gave concerts that would have included a minimum of about 60 minutes of singing (more than in most tenor roles in the standard opera repertory), one of them the Royal Albert Hall concert that was issued by RCA Victor while he was still alive. Even worse is this reviewer's allegation that Lanza was killed by Mafia types. This has long been discredited, and had no basis in even suspicion to begin with; just someone making up a new 'hook' with which to sell a book. Lanza was extremely sick with half a dozen ailment, the worst of which was a bad heart. Given the way he lived, you could almost justify a claim that he unknowingly committed suicide. But he was NOT murdered by the Mafia or anyone else!
Neil Doyle - Schubert's "Ave Maria" is hardly rendered in "ringing tones". In fact, just the opposite.
TheLittleSongbird - Actually, the OTELLO Monologue is not at all very heavy stuff for Lanza to take on. The first half is mostly done in half-voice on the same note, the aria never rises beyond B-flat, and it is actually quite easy to sing except for the very end. (The whole role lies low, which is why so many famous Otellos - Zenatello, Zanelli, Melchior, Schmedes, Guichandut, Vinay to name a few - had successful professional careers as baritones before switching up to tenor to be able to sing the relatively low-lying Otello and/or the Wagner tenor repertoire, most of which lies similarly low; indeed, every second Wagnerian tenor in history seems to have had a second career in OTELLO.) The hard part of it is getting the proper emotion into those semi-parlando passages, and Lanza manages to do this pretty well without being in any way outstanding when compared to the great Otellos. It is not to denigrate him when I say I could easily name 30 or 40 equal or superior versions while still liking his. But to hear a Martinelli Met broadcast of this piece, or Melchior's German-language performance, or Zenatello's Fonotipia recording and comparing any one of them to Lanza's would be as unfair as would be comparing Olivier's King Lear to one by John Wayne.
artzau - "His music was marginal, his phrasing and articulation shoddy" is pure nonsense - possibly received opinion from snobs. There was nothing marginal about his musicality (which is, I assume, what was meant), and his phrasing and articulation were excellent in Italian, French and Spanish, and damned near miraculous in English. Indeed, his clarity of diction in the English language far surpasses that of any other classical-trained singer I know of, even John McCormack's (who was a paragon of virtue in this respect, but managed to sing all languages with a brogue!). His only equal in this respect is Eileen Farrell, but she had to dispense with her legitimate soprano voice and assume a completely chest-based popular singing style that seems as much modeled on Judy Garland's as on any other pop singer who comes to mind. But when Farrell sings English in classical song or in the few opera excerpts she ever did in English, she is not at all clear in her enunciation. Some other classically trained singers come close - like Robert Merrill - but there is always something about their sound, even in popular music, that sounds 'classical'. When Lanza sings Kern or Rodgers or Berlin or Herbert, we hear a full operatic tenor voice that makes the lyrics totally clear in plain, old-fashioned, non-rolled 'r' and broad 'a' pronunciation, so that it still sounds like a popular or Broadway song, and not a piece being done by some opera singer who is slumming (think Richard Crooks). Kathy Jurado never existed. If you mean Katy Jurado, she did exist, but was not in this film. I won't argue opinions, except to say that your comment about "how bad he was as an opera singer" was not and is not shared by the many opera singers he sang with - George London, Frances Yeend, Lucine Amara, Dorothy Kirsten, and especially Licia Albanese and Elaine Malbin. I see Ms. Malbin every three months at the quarterly Mario Lanza Luncheon, held at Patsy's Italian Restaurant (Sinatra's favorite go-to place in New York City); she still raves about him, as did both Lucine Amara and Licia Albanese, when they used to attend the luncheons.
Well, that's it, and I hope I haven't hurt anyone's feelings in expressing my own. But the subject of Opera is a vast one, and often you really do have to submerge your life into it to really understand that vastness. One can call Lanza this, that and the next thing, but what does it matter if one's standards of comparison are incomplete? Leo Slezak (father of Walter) was the greatest Middle-European tenor of the first 30 years of the last century, holding a place there fully equal to that held by Caruso in this country. Caruso was not all that popular in Italy and rarely sang there after coming to the Met. Melchior is universally regarded as the greatest Wagnerian tenor of all time, but if your exposure to him is only through M-G-M films, you haven't even started to
understand his greatness. You may have heard Caruso and Melchior, but probably not Slezak, so what's the point of pontificating on who was the greatest tenor of the century until you have. And then there are about two or three hundred other tenors I might mention. The point is, don't worry about it, and just go about enjoying Lanza for what he was - to my mind, possessor of the most beautiful lyric tenor voice America has ever produced.
As for the film, well, if you seen the dozen or more films made by both Beniamino Gigli and Richard Tauber, and the half-dozen or so made by Jan Kiepura and Joseph Schmidt, it will enable you to more easily appreciate what M-G-M gave us from the Eddy/MacDonald era through Grayson to Lanza, and ending with INTERRUPTED MELODY, and what Warners at least tried to give us in their Grace Moore biopic, SO THIS IS LOVE and with SERENADE, maybe America's last gasp at including Opera in America's standard screen culture.
score 7/10
joe-pearce-1 7 August 2018
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw4273479/ |
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19-4-2021 18:06:09