"Don't you know that a tenor is a being apart, who holds the power of life and death over the works he sings, over the composers and consequently over poor devils of players . . . He is not a denizen of this world, he is a world in himself."
Perhaps. But as Composer Hector Berlioz himself acknowledged in another passage of his Evenings with the Orchestra, the all-powerful tenor is anything but a hardy breed. Tenor voices are comparatively rare: in one study, made in Germany, more than three-quarters of the male voices were naturally baritone or bass. And the tenor must sing much of the time toward the top of his range and volume, subjecting his vocal cords to cruel and unusual punishment. Small wonder that tenors are almost always in short supply and often have king-sized egos ("Good," "Marvelous," Caruso used to write below his name as he endorsed his Met check for each performance).
In today's short supply, the best tenor singing is an American. Richard Tucker—stocky (5 ft. 8 in., 185 Ibs.), barrel-chested and plainly middle-aged (47)—was this week commanding the stage of the Metropolitan Opera (in Tosca, with Leontyne Price). Merely scheduling, his appearance promised one of the Met's truly distinguished evenings. The promise lies in Tucker's consistency: other tenors may match him on a given night, but no other tenor maintains his steadily high average of performance (a fact that prompts Tucker to say, with some exaggeration: "I've never given a completely bad performance, and I don't want to give even a 10% bad one"). In recent years, the Met's stage has known four other high-priced performers (up to $2,000 or so an evening) who rank just behind Tucker as the outstanding tenors of the day. They are Nicolai Gedda, Jon Vickers, Mario Del Monaco, Franco Corelli.
All four came to the Met after distinguished triumphs abroad. Tucker arrived in 1945 after several appearances with a small opera company, a feat equivalent to a baseball player's joining the New York Yankees after a couple of weeks of sandlot ball. But Tucker had honed his voice as a member of his synagogue choir on the Lower East Side, later as a cantor (he still forgoes all performances to officiate at services during the fall High Holy Days and the spring Passover).
That early training, Tucker feels, helped him to catch on at the Met, mastering 25 major roles as he developed from a lyric tenor to a lirico spinto (midway between lyric and dramatic). He is not identified with any single role, but ranging between the romantic bel canto flights of Lucia di Lammermoor and the more declamatory style of Turandot or La Fanciulla del West, he has created some memorable characterizations: Don Jose in Carmen, Rodolfo in La Boheme, the Duke of Mantua in Rigoletto.