My teacher and I had yalked about it and I had expressed my intent to go and sing the audition with MY voice and MY idea of how mozart should be sung: At full voice and with plenty of support and add the dinamis prescribed. I wanted to sing the poetry and the feelings of the aria, more than just sing it like every other tenor would.

Well, I was given the role. The entire casting committee bitch and moaned about the fact that every other tenor had sung Mozart with a pee-pee voice; then a but was raised Lindoro didn’t. The casting committee’s reason to give me the role was that I was the only tenor in the school who showed up singing Mozart with his full voice and nuanced it from within the limits of my instrument.

That’s the reason why I can not stand Daniele de Nise’s Mozart and many of the current crop. Add to that Handel singers too. Handel contracted the best singers available for his operas, the big divas and divos of his time, they were not these undernourished singers that walk around like they are about to pass out due to lack of breath. For me, the last truly great Handel singer was Sutherland. These days Laura Claycomb seems to be doing quite well in it and let’s not forget David Daniels…

Would we have warned Corelli that he was singing too loudly too early? “He should sing Ernani, not Pollione and Calaf!” And would we have predicted that Nilsson was going to burn out within five years?

You just can’t predict who is going to be Rysanek versus who is going to be Voigt…who is going to be Leontyne versus who is going to be Susan Dunn or Roberta Knie…who is going to be Dimitrova versus Elena Souliutis or Ursula S-F.

It’s not unreasonable to say “So and so should be singing Mozart in small European houses, not Verdi at the Met.” We’ve all read about so many singers who burned out early. I think a lot of this is just concern and worry on our part, not a desire to become casting agents.

If a Richard Tucker (or any other big-voiced tenor) walked into a rehearsal today, the very first thing he would be told is, “Stop screaming! This is Mozart, not verismo!” And then the coach or conductor would proceed systematically to coerce the tenor to sing as far off the voice and off the breath as he could manage. Because, after all, the public attends Mozart operas to hear the exquisite woodwind solos, not some big bellowing (ugh) vocalist!

Then, when the performance finally arrived, the tied-into-knots tenor would launch into his ppppp attempt at “Il mio tesoro” or “O wie ängstlich” only to find that the conductor has decided on the whim of the moment to take the aria at half the rehearsed speed, only occasionally kicking the orchestra to double the rehearsed tempo when there was a bit of coloratura the tenor constantly had trouble with during rehearsal and asked several times if the maestro could give him just a fraction of a second to breathe there.

The “balm” of Mozart will therefore leave our tenor voiceless, exhausted, and angry, with every bad vocal habit imaginable routined into his body. That plus he’d have to read dismissive reviews the next morning about how nowadays singers don’t master technique, and how they should sing only Mozart until they are at least 50.

having done a show with him, where he was singing a spinto role, I agree with you about David Pomeroy. He has a pretty lyric tenor voice and he is singing some repertoire that is bigger than healthy for him. I have no idea how old he is, so it’s not about that. I think he would be good in Mozart, and that is not at all to say that Mozart is for small voices. In fact, it used to be that Tamino, Ottavio, and Belmonte were the training grounds for heldentenors. And I own the recording of Richard Tucker singing Cosi, and it is truly wonderful (even in English). Some voices are better suited for Puccini or Wagner than Mozart, but I think everyone should strive to be able to sing Mozart. Like another poster said, he teaches you to sing.

But, all ‘problems’ aside, this could be the best way for him to make the best possible sound he can make, and it’s a good sound, so I’ll take it. If he figures out a way to make a better sound later on in his career, kudos to him, but for now I’d see him in many roles.

Wait, you do mean that he smokes cigarettes, right?