by Robert Kotlowitz, Harper's Magazine, June 1968
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*Comment on Facebook*The fragile ego:
"I mounted myself and taked my public." Enrico Caruso, in a letter to his wife, October 26, 1919.
On a bitter Sunday in late February, a tenor named Franco Corelli entered the crowded wings of the Ed Sullivan Theater in mid-Manhattan to wait his turn in the lineup of that week's Ed Sullivan Show. During the hour, Mr. Corelli had been preceded by George Chakiris, Jane Powell, Paul Mauriat, and a group of hand dolls called the Muppets who ended their routine by throwing hundreds of faked dollar bills around the stage. Through most of this, Mr. Corelli had rested in an overheated dressing room upstairs, patiently undergoing the application of pancake and eye makeup, listening like a movie-struck adolescent as "Jahn Powell" warmed up in her dressing room next door, trying with a certain amount of anguish to warm himself up and ending only in despair. This he expressed by rolling his eyes, weakly trying a few calisthenics, clearing his throat endlessly, producing hawking noises, and complaining in whispers about a cold he had caught, he swore, upon awakening that morning.
Standing in the wings, Mr. Corelli - dressed casually in sports clothes - rubbed his hands together, as though he were freezing. One of the show's cameramen began to massage his shoulders while over Mr. Corelli's face crept a strange, glazed look, that look of sleepiness - full of yawns and half-lidded eyes - that comes from terror. Then, as the Muppets threw their last dollar bill in the air, Ed Sullivan announced Franco Corelli as the next attraction, looking miserably unhappy at having the tenor on the show. The tenor himself turned to the crowd in the wings - stage crew, aides, stars, their wives in furs, managers, dancers, photographers, Wackenhut guards - and showed them an enormous and unexpected smile. The curtain went up, revealing a faded Neapolitan garden, and Corelli was on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdP2CIxreWQ
He sang a simple tune called "Tu lo Sai" - "You Know It." At the very end, not quite three minutes later, he slowed the tempo almost imperceptibly and slid into a high B flat, opening up his voice to its full volume. He held the note then for about seventeen seconds and when he cut it there was the crack of mass bravos from the audience. Coming off the stage after a bow, he held out trembling hands to the crowd in the wings.
That night - since what he had undergone was merely a rehearsal - Mr. Corelli returned to the Sullivan Show to repeat this performance, with only the barest variation, for a new studio audience as well as thirty million additional people sitting at home in front of their televi sion screens.
It is not certain whether Franco Corelli is the best tenor in the world, the most popular, or both. Certainly, he is the highest paid. His voice ranges from a low F to a high E flat, a note he once actually sang on stage in a revival of Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots [he did not]. The voice, which is produced easily, is a perfect size to handle the big dramatic roles of the later Verdi operas, although it is at home, too, in the more lyrical roles of the Puccini repertoire.
For years critics complained that Mr. Corelli had too great a fondness for belting an aria; he would always try, they said, to knock an audience dead with thrilling sound. He still will, at times. Every successful tenor knows that the surest, most direct and powerful means of communication is the human voice; so they are always susceptible to charges of artistic demagoguery. But, in recent years, there has been a noticeable attempt on Corelli's part to sing a role as its composer created it, to respect the musical line and phrase accordingly, and to act the drama with some basic psychological sense. Some of this undoubtedly comes from maturity; Corelli is now in his early forties. But even more important, such tenors today as Carlo Bergonzi and Richard Tucker know how to extract the last ounce of musical meaning from their roles with a suavity and modest intelligence not traditionally associated with tenors; and both Bergonzi and Tucker are Corelli's chief competition. Recently, in a new recording of Aida, Corelli sang the final note of the aria "Celeste Aida" with the diminishing soft note Verdi asked for and rarely gets. Such delicacy and respect came as a shock to some critics. One even accused the tenor of splicing the note onto the recording after he had first recorded it in his old go-for-broke style. Corelli's response is to shrug, balefully. He knows he has one of the most beautiful tenor voices in the world; his own ear tells him and so does everyone else. Carlo Bergonzi may sing with more subtlety. Richard Tucker may have a more dramatic edge to his voice. But Corelli's tenor is bigger than both, more clarion in sound; and he also knows that, standing six-feet-two, he is, by far, the most dashing of the three onstage.
Two Saturdays after the Ed Sullivan Show, Corelli was scheduled to sing the role of Don Alvaro in Verdi's La Forza del Destino at the Metropolitan Opera. Forza is neither the best of Verdi's operas nor the worst. It is, however, among the most flawed, set to a dark and gloomy libretto whose scenes can be interchanged chronologically - and some times are - without making much dramatic difference; at the Met it is done in three acts, at other houses in four. It's hard on the singers, too; the soprano, for example, disappears off stage for two hours, after dominating the first act, and when she returns she has to sing one of the opera's most difficult arias.
Corelli as Manrico (Il trovatore, 1962 Salzburg) The only photo scanned from Harper's Magazin, June 1968
La Forza del Destino is about vengeance and the inescapability of fate, which nineteenth-century librettists often confused with simple coincidences; of coincidence in Forza, there is no end. What is being avenged is the honor of Leonora, the soprano, and the murder of her father by Don Alvaro, the tenor. The avenger is Leonora's brother, Don Carlo, the baritone. There are also racial overtones: Don Alvaro is socially unacceptable to Don Carlo because he is half-Inca and unworthy of Leonora's pure Spanish blood. That's the kind of story it is. But as it wanders from one mistaken identity to another, the opera makes long, invigorating stops for vocal broadsides that can set an audience on fire. Leonora has hers, Alvaro and Carlo each have theirs, and together the tenor and baritone have several duets in which Verdi entwined the two voices in great arching melodies. Whatever its faults, it is a big work for big voices and at a Saturday matinee performance it makes for a long working afternoon, three hours and twenty minutes, to be exact.
Corelli arrived at the Met that afternoon only twenty minutes before curtain time, in a swashbuckling camel's hair coat, maroon scarf, alpine hat with a tiny green feather, and a black tie. He has worn only black ties since his mother's death fifteen [18] years ago. As usual, he was not feeling well, having awakened at eleven o'clock in the morning - "wanting to shoot myself" - after only three hours of sleep. All night long he had stalked his apartment, looking for courage.
Once in his dressing room he sent out for enough honey to last the afternoon mixed with hot tea; eighty-nine cents' worth would make it through La Forza del Destino. He had not touched food, he said, since the night before, even though his wife had prepared a raw, chopped steak for him in their apartment. (In New York, the Corellis live in six rooms on Manhattan's East Side; in Milan, the home of La Scala, they have ten rooms, including a private recording studio, while in Rome they own a five-room apartment. Beyond all this, there is a family villa, in which many other Corellis live, in Ancona, on the Italian Adriatic. Corelli also keeps five sports cars to make the travelling easier between his Italian homes.)
As Corelli began to dress for Act I, Rudolf Bing, the General Manager of the Met, came in to offer encouragement. Outside, another tenor, James King, calmly stood by in case of disaster. "Anything I can do for you?" an aide asked Corelli. "Yes, sing for me." Five minutes before the announced curtain time (broadcast performances always start a little late), the conductor, Francesco Molinari-Pradelli, entered the opera house, talking happily in a flurry of Italian. James King spied an Austrian soprano backstage and began to chat with her in German. A quiet announcement for Act I stage positions came over a loudspeaker. Soft chimes rang, once, twice. Robert Merrill, who was to sing the avenger, Don Carlo, entered his dressing room, exuding a kind of invincible self-confidence, joking with everybody who crossed his path. Corelli caught sight of him through his own open dressing-room door. "Beato lei," he called morosely. "Lucky you!"
Franco Corelli as Don Alvaro from Verdi's La forza del destino (Photo by Louis Melançon, Met Archives)
A few minutes later the chimes rang again and Corelli came out of his dressing room in costume. He wore a mauve blouse, brown cape, black tights, and thigh-high boots with a pistol romantically stuck in one. A gold earring hung from his right lobe: the perfect progeny of an Inca princess and a Spanish grandee, an outcast with a glorious voice. At the moment, he was wringing his hands. Then, followed by his wife and an aide, he strode the half-block to the Metropolitan's stage, which in its several imaginative combinations is nearly as big as a football field.
The first-act setting of a room in the palace of Leonora's father was in place, musty russet and brown canvas walls billowing in the backstage draft. Behind it stood a church, the set for the second scene. Only three stagehands were at work. Leontyne Price walked onstage in a royal-blue dress. "Ciao," she said to Corelli. "Ciao." Without another word, they began to pose like silent screen stars for the company photographer, Louis Melançon. Corelli stood a little behind Miss Price, his hand on her shoulder, her hand on his hand: Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. Melançon snapped his pictures as dim applause came from the front of the house, on the other side of the curtain. On the backstage television screens, Maestro Molinari-Pradelli could be seen entering the orchestral pit and taking a shy bow. The stage was suddenly clear of everyone except Miss Price and Louis Sgarro, who was to play her father, doomed to be murdered within twenty minutes. There was a smile from Miss Price, a last, energetic working of her mouth and throat muscles, a yawn or two, and then, with a great electronic whisper, the curtain went up.