by Rex Reed, The New York Times, September 17, 1967
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*Comment on Facebook*SPAGHETTI SIMMERED ON THE STOVE. But Franco Corelli, age thirty-eight [46], exhausted from rehearsing twelve hours a day for his appearance as Romeo, age eighteen, in Gounod's Romeo and Juliet at the Metropolitan Opera, was not thinking about food. Sipping his favorite drink (creme de menthe and milk) from a crystal goblet, he slumped in his easy chair, played with his tie, occasionally burst into a rapturous arpeggio, then brooded like Heathcliff. Offstage, the opera tights of ancient Verona replaced by a powder-blue tailored suit, he looks like an Italian Rock Hudson. His fans call him the greatest tenor since Caruso. The bravo-shouters follow him around like the coming of a new Messiah. Impresarios pay him as much as $10,000 a performance to grace their stages, making him the highest-paid tenor in the world. Women throw roses onstage when he appears. To them all, he says "Pooh.”
It is what Corelli thinks that matters. When he hits those high C's, he carries them all to the top of the ceiling. He knows that. He is called the king, but underneath there is the throbbing urgency of a little boy wondering, after every triumph, if he can do it again. He is torturedly self-critical. "I have many demeriti," he says. "I have nightmares of music. I sleep music. I see notes in my dreams. I never rest, because I am always trying to improve myself. If I have three months of absolute freedom I use them to project my technical instrument. Without that, I am nothing. Now I worry about Romeo. I have too big a stomach. Today I had a little coffee and no lunch. I spent eight hours standing. I am very tired. Even when I take an hour to rest, I study the score. French is not my language. I must also look right for Romeo. I refused to wear a blonde wig. Where does it say Romeo must be blond?"
Franco Corelli and Mirella Freni, the ill-fated lovers in the new production of Gounod's "Romeo et Juliette" at the Met Tuesday. "My Romeo will be hopelessly romantic. He explodes one moment, cries the next. Just like me."
"Franco, I like you as a blonde," says his wife, Loretta, the power behind the throne, the one who can handle him when nobody else can.
"No, non molto buono. Leslie Howard was a blond in the movie. No good." He has seen the movie five times and even invited Norma Shearer to his opening. "Also, they tell me I'm too old. Youth has nothing to do with it. Now Zeffirelli makes a film with teenagers playing Romeo and Juliet. That is too young. This is a story for all ages It's also a true story. For the feeling of it I went to Verona to visit the Capulet house. I took many photos. The house is all covered with vines and there is an enormous amount of tourists. You have to stand in line to see Juliet's tomb and then the tomb is empty. But I'm glad I went. Now I will play Romeo my way. Everybody sees him differently. Perhaps you think Romeo looks like Lex Barker. Gounod saw him noble and romantic. My Romeo will be hopelessly romantic because the music is sweet, like sugar, and also because I too am hopelessly romantic."
True? "Oh yes," says Loretta, smoking a pipe with imported Dutch tobacco, "very romantic." "Romeo explodes one moment, cries the next," says Corelli, "just like me. When I told people in Italy I was coming here to do Romeo, they gasped. They see me as interpreter of more violent roles because they think of me in real life as violent."
Small wonder. In the short fifteen years he has been singing, he has developed the reputation of a monster. He once leaped off a stage in Naples and raced to a loge box to beat the hell out of someone who booed him. Annoyed onstage in Rome, he burst into a rage and drew a sword on fellow singer Boris Christoff, and not long ago, during a Met tour of Turandot, he bit Birgit Nilsson in the neck because she held a high note longer than he did. Nilsson wired Rudolph Bing the next day: "Cannot sing in Detroit. Have hydrophobia."
Similar stories flourish wherever he plays, yet mention the word "temperament" and the massive Corelli hands jut out like a director, framing a scene. "I give so much time to my career, to giving the ticket payers their money's worth, that if someone is rude to me I am rude back. Then I get the bad reputation. Why is this? I don't smoke, or drink, or go to nightclubs. I sacrifice everything. Some singers grow up with a fantastic voice. Not me. I had never thought of singing until I was twenty-three. Singing was a hobby. My father was a shipbuilder for the Italian Navy and in Italy it is a custom that the son does the same work as the father, so I was studying to be an engineer. There were four [3] children. Nobody in my family was musical. I sometimes heard Caruso on the radio, but I wasn't crazy about opera. Then one day I went in the car to Florence with a friend who was to audition in an amateur contest. As a joke, he entered my name too, and when they heard me sing for fun they offered me thirty dollars a month to stay and see what I could accomplish. I didn't learn anything but I went to Spoleto and sang 'Celeste Aïda' and won the biggest competition in Italy. Even then my family don't want. 'Many beautiful voices in the world singing for pennies,' said my father. The technical requirements for Aïda were beyond me, but I still won over all the other tenors in Italy. So I knew it was my destiny."
(This photo is not part of the original article, this one appeared in a 1962 issue of Teletutto magazine)
Three months later, he was starring at the Rome Opera and the following year he was appearing opposite Maria Callas at La Scala. Today he is on top and the friend who entered his name in the amateur contest is a government employee in Italy. And he has done it all without a lesson. "I avoided voice coaches, because everybody told me they would ruin my voice. So I learned to sing with friends and listening to records. I have people to teach me the scores, but everything else I teach myself. I did not choose or look for this life. It was fate. I have the eternal feeling that I am never prepared because I was not prepared in the beginning and I have no training. It is a great responsibility I have. My own specialty is that I can hold high notes a long time. They come to see me perform and I can see them in the audience timing the notes with their watches. They want the maximum from me. They come to my dressing room and say 'You held the last note ten seconds shorter tonight than usual, what's wrong?' Forty-eight hours before a performance I am completely alone. I speak to nobody. I watch TV. I live in hell because I am so aware of the need to live up to what they require of me. And still I get the bad reputation.
"Critics? Ridiculous. When I began, I had many faults, but they loved me. Now that I am much better they criticize every move I make. They even write that my fan clubs disrupt my performances. I have no fan club. I have never tried to romance the public. I have never paid a claque to applaud. Caruso spent two hundred dollars a night for paid applause. The greats do not pay [?]. But when the claque of one of my divas boos me because she has paid them, I get very mad. Then I lose my temper. In Italy it's even worse."
Singers are crucified there. If a diva cracks on a high note in Italy she has to apologize publicly in the papers for creating un scandalo! Corelli grew up in those opera houses and he is afraid. "The tragedy of opera is that every singer thinks he is the best singer in the world. This makes socializing difficult and jealousy is everywhere. After a glorious career of forty-two years, one of the great tenors, Giacomo Lauri-Volpi, told me, "There is no glory in singing.' He spoke of many singers, old and new, none of them were friends. You can't have a big Otello and a little Otello who are friends, because nobody wants to be the little Otello. Many say the voice is a gift of God. But too many opera singers think they are God. There lies the problem. When another famous singer gives me a compliment, I clap my hand over his mouth because I know the praise is insincere. I do not go to see other tenors."
But other tenors see Corelli. He has opened more seasons and played more roles in more opera houses than any other tenor. At La Scala in 1962 there was an eighteen-minute standing ovation after his duet with Joan Sutherland [Giulietta Simionato] in Les Huguenots, something which had not occurred there in thirty-five years and has never happened at the Met. Next season he will open La Scala with Verdi's Ernani [sadly it did not happen in the end] and the Met with Adriana Lecouvreur-making him the only tenor in the world honored by opening the same season of both houses twice in one career. And still he needs to be constantly reassured, even during intermission. Nobody is better equipped for this job than Loretta. "Don't interview me, I just cook and make his bed," she protests. But she is always by his side, taping his voice for errors, photographing him for his album covers, holding a mug of water in the wings. "I know one tenor's wife," she says, "who turns on all the water faucets backstage to drown out the sounds of her husband's voice. Santa Maria! I would rather suffer in the theater than suffer at home."
When he isn't working or studying, Corelli goes to the movies. He loves Bette Davis, is dying to meet Melina Mercouri. Joan Fontaine is one of his biggest fans. ("I told her she could have him for one week,” winks Loretta, "and I guaranteed she would send him home in two days.") He likes some American pop music, "but not rock and roll. My records could never outsell Nancy Sinatra." He has never sung an opera in English, but once recorded "O Holy Night" for the Firestone gas stations across the country and sold a million copies. "I will never perform in a contemporary opera. About as modern as I get is Prokofiev's War and Peace and that was derived from the eighteenth century, so it isn't modern. But that does not mean grand opera can't be modern. A big two-hundred-pound woman standing in the center of the stage singing Traviata is to me ridiculous. Opera is changing because we have the movies. We are going soon to the moon. Why should opera be the only thing old?"
He would like to make movies (he starred in the screen version of Tosca and after his Met debut was offered a Hollywood contract), but it "depends on how well I learn English and none of my friends will help me." As for the future, "I ask nothing. There is no need for illusions. Some live for the applause. Not me. If the day comes when the public does not respond with applause I will not feel any different. I don't want it if I'm good or not, only if I'm good. There is no glory in singing. When the strain gets bad over the years, a singer's career stops. Even now I go onstage and my hands turn to ice, I tremble and my knees give way. A man can get eight or ten more years out of a career than a woman. Some tenors sing up into their sixties, but sopranos never. Caruso and Gigli both died with their voices still strong. I know now when I am good and I know when I am bad. I also hope I will know when to retire."
Dinner was served, but Corelli's mood was somber. "I stay out of drafts, I don't go with women. That was the ruin for many singers, not me. For five years I've been very good and still I get the bad reputation. I think now I will start being bad and see what happens."
Bristling uncomfortably at the horror of such a thought, everybody ate in silence. Then, as quickly as it had been summoned, the storm cloud passed over his face and the Phantom of the Opera seemed, once again, just like any other happy Italian-passionately attacking his bowl of spaghetti.
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