"I hope you're not looking for glamour," Richard Tucker once warned a reporter, "because I'm just not the glamorous type." Short, squat and built like a football lineman, Tucker hardly suggested Rodolfo. Not that it mattered. A ringing, luminous sound, fueled by Tucker's majestic belief in both music and the voice he felt that God had given him, was embellishment enough for the legions of operagoers who came year after year to hear Verdi and Puccini melt in his mouth.
Last week, on the eve of his 30th anniversary with New York's Metropolitan Opera, Tucker at 60 collapsed and died of a heart attack in Kalamazoo, Mich., where that night he had been scheduled to sing a joint recital with his friend, Baritone Robert Merrill. Among Met tenors only Giovanni Martinelli outlasted Tucker, with 32 seasons.
Nearly every seat was taken at Tucker's funeral, held on the Met stage. The only previous funerals in the Met (in its old, Diamond Horseshoe home before the move to Lincoln Center) were those of Conductor Leopold Damrosch 90 years ago and General Manager Heinrich Conried 66 years ago.
It was Met General Manager Rudolf Bing who declared in the early '50s: "Caruso, Caruso, that's all you hear! I have an idea we're going to be proud some day to tell people we heard Tucker." Last week the current general manager, Schuyler Chapin, said: "When the annals of opera history are written, Tucker will rank among the golden dozen." He sang 32 leading roles, appearing in 503 Met performances. Tucker himself claimed sovereignty over but a single role: "Of course I can sing it better than anyone else," he said with disarming candor about his portrayal of the clown Canio in Pagliacci. "There isn't another tenor in the world who can equal me just singing it."
There were very few dissenters. In 1962 TIME called him "the greatest tenor singing today." His voice had almost unique evenness of tone and quality from top to bottom and was celebrated for its diamond-hard focus. At the same time it was infused with a sweetness and warmth more usually heard in singers from Naples than in tenors from Brooklyn, where Tucker came from.
Born Reuben Ticker of Rumanian immigrant parents, Tucker began his musical training at six when he sang alto in the choir of the Allen Street Synagogue on New York's Lower East Side. He intended to be a cantor but took a job first as a runner on Wall Street and then in the garment industry. Until several years after his marriage at 22 to Sara Perelmuth, the sister of Tenor Jan Peerce, he had never seen a Met performance. Inspired by the example of his prominent inlaw, Tucker, who was then a fur coat-lining salesman and cantor, began studying with Wagnerian Tenor Paul Althouse. According to Althouse, "Tucker just came for his lesson, took off his hat, sang, put his hat on again and went." Tucker was permanent cantor at the Brooklyn Jewish Center when he auditioned for the Met in 1944. The next year, on Jan. 25, he made his debut singing Enzo in La Gioconda—on a two-month leave of absence from his synagogue. He never gave up his role of cantor, and since 1961 had participated yearly in High Holy Days services at Chicago's Park Synagogue.