by Joan Downs, in “The Tenors” New York: Macmillan, 1974, ed. Herbert Breslin
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*Comment on Facebook*Franco Corelli speaks very little English. The homeliest words ride the edge of consciousness, beckon seductively, finally elude him. His conversation is a cryptic Anglo-Italian mosaic that translates imperfectly in either tongue. “Stupido,” he denounces himself over and over as his right foot taps an impatient tattoo against the table leg. But on a pale winter afternoon as Corelli sits in the shadows relaxing in his favorite chair and listening to a recording of Caruso singing “Di quella pira,” his foot grows still, his eyes begin to shine, and a shy smile plays at the corners of his mouth. When the music stops, the words tumble out, in lucid, lyrical, very nearly grammatical profusion.
“I don’t say I am an artist. That would not be modest. But I can say that I feel like an artist, I suffer like an artist.”
“I don’t say I am an artist. That would not be modest. But I can say that I feel like an artist, I suffer like an artist. I remember the first time music opened her doors to me. I was ten and visiting a church in a neighboring town. It was very still and when the organ’s sad voice began to resonate through the silence, I could hear such suffering trapped inside the melody I felt myself go empty inside. Sometimes, in the opera house, I can forget myself and go inside a role. It happens on a night when the conductor hypnotizes the orchestra so that they feel only his eyes and arms. On that night they play with a mighty sound and the music goes inside me. I can feel it pierce my heart. My eyes fill with tears. In that moment I am absolutely fragile, and when I sing my heart is full of melody.”
By any standards, Franco Corelli is a superstar. He has a large robust voice of exceptional power and splendid timbre that can flood a theater, thrilling the audience with a sensuous grace that is entirely masculine. He is also a man addicted to western films because cowboys are the only men in America who are strong enough to cry, a man who despite critical rebuke cannot choke the sob from Rodolfo’s voice as Mimi gasps her final breath. Critics may chide his Italianate sob and lingering highs; audiences adore him. Operagoers, quick to spot a phony, recognize in Corelli’s unabashed outpouring of emotions a man whose definition of himself is indivisible from his music.
Photo courtesy of Christian Steiner/Angel Records
It is a success story unprecedented in the history of opera or in any press agent’s fairy tale. Virtually self-taught, from the germ of a start winning a local amateur singing contest and with scarcely any indulgence in trial runs with minor roles in secondary opera houses, Corelli blazed a trail, sensational as a comet, straight to the top of international opera. Less than two years after his opera debut, he was singing opposite Maria Callas, then prima donna del mondo. Twenty years later Corelli has opened more seasons and played more roles in more opera houses than any other tenor in his time. At a reported $10,000 an appearance, combined with the fruits of his knack for investing—his tax consultant annually demands four weeks of his time— Corelli’s income hovers in the middle six figures and he is quite possibly the richest tenor in the world.
There is little doubt that his career was facilitated in the beginning by the powerful extramusical advantage of enormous good looks, Provocatively clad in clinging velvet tights, Corelli’s shapely legs earned the accolade “Coscia d’Oro”—“Golden Calves”—from Milanese opera buffs. Soon enough he would plead with critics to forget about reviewing his legs and concentrate instead on his music—“It’s hard enough to keep your voice in shape without having to worry about your figure,” he would say—but in fact the protest which he registered for many years was often sotto voce. In the early years in Italy when Corelli sang Pierre Bezukhov in a San Carlo production of War and Peace, the role called for a fat man wearing spectacles. Following two days of persuasion Corelli consented to make up properly for the role—but once he got onstage he slipped the glasses into his coat pocket. In the United States before the Metropolitan Opera’s revival of Turandot, Corelli amused his colleagues by complaining that Cecil Beaton’s costumes did not taper sufficiently at the waist. In truth he rarely missed an opportunity to capitalize on his comely appearance.
Who could blame him. Puccini’s most winsome melodies could not disguise the overstuffed reality of Bjoerling’s smile wreathed in chins or the comical shadow cast by Caruso’s squat frame. Corelli’s tall (six-feet-one), dark presence had an electrifying effect on audiences. For the first time they could believe that here was a man worthy of the devotion of the haughty Oriental Princess Turandot or the beauteous Ethiopian slave Aida.
The leading ladies were hardly more immune. Callas, grateful to find one singing partner she did not tower over, frankly told Corelli that one strong argument favoring his selection to appear with her in La Vestale was that he had the proper physique for a Roman centurion. “When I have a fat little tenor next to me,” sighed Antonietta Stella, “obviously I cannot get inspired. In Trovatore when I sing ‘Sei tu dal ciel discesco’ [‘Have you descended from heaven’] with Franco, one really feels he has descended from heaven. Most of the other tenors could have dropped down from anywhere.”
Even at the executive offices at the Metropolitan, commenting on the aphrodisiacal powers of a tenor, then General Manager Rudolf Bing said, “The tenor with a secure top exerts a sexual fascination on people, not just women, men too. The best tenor has a quality, a timbre, that’s essentially a sexual stimulant—that is why they are so highly paid.”
Bing was so convinced of a tenor’s importance to the success of an operatic production that, according to Corelli, during one especially severe epidemic of multiple cancellations, the steely autocrat of the Met was literally brought to his knees. Determined to fill yet another vacancy in his evening lineup of heroes, Bing unexpectedly appeared at Corelli’s midtown Manhattan apartment one morning where he was admitted by a maid. His host was still asleep. Hearing a rap at his bedroom door, the unsuspecting tenor arose and, still in his rumpled pajamas, opened the door to the astonishing vision of the future peer of the realm kneeling prayerfully at his feet. Only when Corelli had consented to sing at five consecutive performances did Bing rise. Later, the crisis past, Bing remarked, “Nobody is irreplaceable in the opera house. But,” he conceded, “Franco is more irreplaceable than the others.”
Corelli embarked on an intensive do-it-yourself program. He bought every book he could find on singing and opera — he estimates a thousand — countless recordings by reigning tenors of the past, and, perhaps the most valuable investment of all — a tape recorder.
Nevertheless, a romantic aura cannot sustain a singer’s place in opera’s panoply of superstars. The era is past of the opera house as a showcase for ladies dewy in diamonds preening among the bright plumage of French silks and sumptuous brocades. At $20.00 for a seat in the orchestra, to most people an evening at the opera can no longer be a familiar pleasure, but one for which they prepare themselves to receive a grand reaction. A tenor’s longevity is directly linked with his effectiveness in producing emotion in the listener. Gorgeous sound is what they come to hear: Corelli’s bold old-fashioned brand of vocalism with its penetrating low tones and full clarion C’s that evoke the lyrical simplicity of Puccini and that make the triumphal scene of Verdi’s Aida a definition of triumph.
Inevitably there was an occasional snag to mar the fledgling artist’s bounding success. In a 1957 performance of Pagliacci in Milan he sang so poorly the exasperated conductor flung down his baton and buried his face in the score, abruptly abandoning the novice tenor to his own devices. With the opera’s fatal closing words “La commedia è finita” — “the comedy is ended” — the curtain descended in a blizzard of whistles. The next morning scooping up his tattered pride the crestfallen young singer tried to cancel all his remaining contracts. Wisely, the opera house refused.
“I was so ashamed,” Corelli winces. Then the excuses begin: “I ate some salami and late in the afternoon I began to have a pain in my liver. That night my head began to spin and my stomach—” he pauses, then resumes, his jaw set firmly. “It was a bad performance,” he admits quietly. “I was one bar ahead of the conductor all evening.
Every moment I was afraid. When I was at the start of my career, do you know what thought ran through my mind the moment I stepped onstage? I hoped I would arrive at the end of the opera. I prayed that I would have the strength to sing every note, that I would be onstage when the final curtain fell.” Only when he became confident that he would give a complete performance could Corelli concern himself with interpretation of the score. And then a new problem arose. “I discovered where the music said mezza voce—sing softly—there was an uneasiness in the middle of my voice. Until my voice was educated, I could not carry out the score’s instructions. For me, negotiating the E-F passage can still be tricky.”
In the early years he aimed at swelling volumes and little else, Corelli confides, and the result was often monochromatic and inexpressive. He thinks at times he may have fooled the audience, but never himself. “Many mornings I woke up depressed. I would work for fifteen days on a score and on the sixteenth day my voice would stumble again in exactly the same passages. When I sang Poliuto I had a great deal of difficulty, and one day when my voice refused to go any further I became so frustrated, I lost all control. I began screaming and before I knew what I was doing I had smashed the music rack on the piano. One of the hardest lessons for me to learn was that the muscle cannot be forced, the throat is commanded by the brain.” It took nine years of vocalizing for Corelli’s throat to become flexible and his ear to grow keen enough to place the voice properly. Two-thirds of that time was on-the-job training. In a matter of three years, recalcitrant center and all, his voice had catapulted him from first honors in a spring music festival, in which he sang “Celeste Aida” (the only aria he knew), to the stages of the world’s major opera houses. “I said to myself, you don’t know much about singing,” he recalls with a sheepish smile directed at youthful understatement.
Determined to learn everything, despite his family’s un-sympathetic attitude regarding his musical aspirations, Corelli embarked on an intensive do-it-yourself program. He bought every book he could find on singing and opera — he estimates a thousand — countless recordings by reigning tenors of the past, and, perhaps the most valuable investment of all — a tape recorder. “My friendly spy,” he calls it, “it always tells the truth.” Since 1955 Corelli has taped all of his performances and rehearsals, analyzing them meticulously the following day. “I began to know the worst about my voice,” he grimaces, “and to learn to think about singing.”
For Corelli the major defects of his instrument were an inability to sing pianissimo and to project tones that were round as well as ringing. Oddly enough, one deficiency that did not particularly worry him was an initially narrow range. In fact he sang for several years before he had a high C, a rather singular handicap for a musician rapidly gaining in reputation as one of the world’s leading tenors. But if Corelli knew little about molding a phrase, he understood very well his own physical capacities, a legacy of the days when he was a superb athlete. “I did not have the complete extension of my voice,” he says, “and I didn’t force it. I knew that would be the beginning of the end of my voice. After six years the high C came.”
Today Corelli’s three-octave range extends from C below middle C to high C. At home when he vocalizes sometimes he can touch high E-flat and, for the record, when he and Joan Sutherland sang Les Huguenots (in Italian at La Scala) he sang a D-natural. [It wasn’t in Ugonotti, but in Poliuto (1960), according to his earlier interviews.] “At the end of the first act of Trovatore, I could take a C-sharp, but I always put on the D-flat,” he allows himself a brief display of pride. “On a piano they are the same note. But with the voice, as with any stringed instrument, they are two different sounds. D-flat has an extra vibration—you can hear it and the singer can feel it. For the repertory I sing, however, the top note I need is C.”
No stranger would ever guess from hearing Corelli’s speaking voice that he earns his living as a singer. Although no longer concerned about the once elusive high C, the fiery cape-and-sword adventurer of the stage lives in fear, endlessly worrying about his vocal condition. As a result, offstage his voice resembles the male equivalent of a Jackie Onassis whisper, although sometimes it takes on a thin granitic quality that makes one long to request that he clear his throat. (On other occasions he clears his throat dozens of times in the space of an hour until it seems certain he must have grated his tonsils raw.) However, he has one of the healthiest larynxes in the business: since 1954 he has had to suspend fewer than a dozen performances.
“Some day it will all be over. I will get up and know that the voice is no longer beautiful. I will stop. Never will I present an audience with a moment of pity…”