Singing at the Metropolitan Opera

Metropolitan Opera; who, me? (A trimmed and somewhat rewritten excerpt from Three Stages)

A very significant event occurred during the South Pacific run in Mount Gretna the summer of 1966. Muriel Greenspan’s opera coach, Sam Morgenstern, came down to see the show and we went to the local piano bar afterward. I sang Maria (Westside Story) complete with high b-flat and Sam had a “religious experience”. He was a physically small man but intellectually and emotionally he was a force of nature. Sam Morgenstern was going to turn me into an opera singer. Period. No argument. No demurral. No protestation. No shit!

The first thing I did when I got home was to call Sam. The pay in Mt. Gretna had been woefully sparse and I was broke and living on unemployment insurance but Sam was so certain of my inevitable success in Opera that he extended me unlimited credit. While I had extensive experience and repertoire in Oratorio, I knew but one operatic aria, Vesti la giubba from Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci and Sam said that was not “right” for my voice. He started my training with Recondita armonia, an aria from Puccini’s Tosca and one from Mozart’s Magic Flute, Dies Bildnis ist bezaubernd schön.

But first there were the exercises to help rid me of my bad vocal habits. I’m tempted to go into technical details but relax, I won’t. Suffice to say that Sam gave me vocal exercises that were unique and difficult but improved my technique enormously.

After several months of work in the spring of ’67 Sam got me an audition at the Met and I was hired on the spot for the Metropolitan Opera Studio, their “farm team” as it were. I did several paid gigs with them as Mario Cavaradossi, the leading tenor in Tosca. We did highlights of the show in schools.

In late spring or early summer (’68) the Met Studio was holding a workshop for several young conductor/pianists from all over the US and Tosca was the opera they were going to work. They asked me to sing Cavaradossi. This was an opportunity not to be missed.

I worked diligently with Sam on the parts of the opera I hadn’t learned and on the appointed day at the Met I was ready to boogie! I arrived at the rehearsal room to find Dr. Schick, (Rudolph Bing’ right-hand man) seven or eight young pianists and the rest of Tosca’s principal cast, all Met Studio members. It worked like a rehearsal with rotating pianists who were conductors and coaches as well. (About half of them were arrogant jerks.)

We started from the beginning of the show and sang our way through with occasional comments from whichever conductor was playing at the time. Sometimes Dr. Schick would comment. It proceeded that way more or less as an actual rehearsal until we finished the opera. Then we broke for lunch, came back and did it again. This continued for three or four days.

Opera singers work under the traditional illusion that, like pitchers in baseball, they can only go “full out” two or three times a week. It’s no doubt true for pitchers but not for singers and I was laboring under no such illusion. It’s my experience that if you really know how to sing you can do an opera eight times a week. (Bob Weede did Happy Fella eight times a week and said it was tougher than Rigoletto.) Having been relegated to mostly character roles in musicals I was really enjoying singing the hell out of Puccini and I went at it full bore every time. This did not make me popular with the other singers, who were “marking”. I could not have cared less, I was having the time of my life and singing my ass off!

At the end of Cavaradossi’s first big aria, Recondita Armonia (my audition piece) there’s phrase, “Tosca, se tu”. The word “Tosca” is three notes, To-oo-sca with a high b-flat (my money note) in the middle. Most tenors take a breath after that syllable but, as an actor, that seemed wrong to me. So after the fortissimo high note I feathered down to a pianissimo on the last note of the word and went into “se tu” without a breath. One of the jerks stopped me and “corrected” my phrasing. I explained to him that it was a sentence, “Tosca, it’s you” and should be performed as such. He turned to Dr. Schick and said, “Why does he do that?” Dr. Schick looked at me, smiled and said, “Because he’s an actor and he can.”

That was the proudest moment in my brief career as an opera singer. If you’d like to hear the formerly famous high b-flat it comes at the end of this video.

More tales of theatrical and Metropolitan Opera shenanigans will be found when you click here and get Three Stages.

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