“Anything you can be I can be greater / Sooner or later I’m greater than you!”
On this day in 1961 Leontyne Price and Franco Corelli made their historic Metropolitan Opera debuts in Verdi’s Il trovatore.
Harold C. Schonberg in The New York Times:
Miss Price has sung here before, but more recently she has been having a triumph in opera houses throughout Europe. She has matured into a beautiful singer. Her voice, warm and luscious, has enough volume to fill the house with ease, and she has a good technique to back up the voice itself. She even took the trills as written, and nothing in the part as Verdi wrote it gave her the last bit of trouble.
She moves well and is a competent actress. But no soprano makes a career of acting. Voice is what counts, and voice is what Miss Price has. And it is not all florid singing on her part. In the convent scene she took some fine-spun phrases in a ravishing pianissimo. And her top is exceptionally secure. She does not lunge for notes, attacking them from underneath and sliding into them.
As for Mr. Corelli, in one respect he goes against the law of nature that decrees all tenors must be short. The Metropolitan includes, among his statistics, the fact that he is 6 feet 2 inches tall, and he weighs 180 pounds. He tops off this physical appearance with a handsome head-something of a cross between John Barymore and Errol Flynn.
Can he sing, too? Well, it is a large-sized voice but not an especially suave instrument, and it tends to be produced explosively. It has something of an exciting animal drive about it, and when Mr. Corelli lets loose, he can dominate the ensemble. . . . The guess here is that Mr. Corelli could develop into an exceptional tenor, but his art does need some refining and polishing.
Tell us: What was the best of 2025?
Parterre Box concludes the thrilling first year of Talk of the Town by inviting your lightning rod opinions on several more categories of operatic argumentation.
