‘Tancredi’ Features Two Specialists of the Bel-Canto Repertory : American Tenor’s Career on the Rise

“I don’t have the beauty of voice of a Pavarotti,” the American tenor Chris Merritt--a specialist in the bel-canto repertory--admits with startling candor.

He quickly adds: “My voice has a beauty of its own, but it’s not like his.”

Merritt, who sings the role of Argirio in Los Angeles Music Center Opera’s “Tancredi,” opening tonight at Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, commands an essentially lyric sound of impressive size, according to enlightened observers.

He may not have the voice of a Pavarotti, but physically he is fast approaching the Italian tenor in size. “I intend to diet,” Merritt says resolutely.

During a recent free afternoon in New York, Merritt speaks frankly about his fast-rising, only 3-year-old career--and he has arrived at this point without singing more than a handful of performances in the States.

Merritt comes along at a moment in operatic fashion when the operas of the bel-canto period, especially those of Rossini, are being mounted all over the world. And if there is one thing those operas need, it’s a tenor with flexibility and a free-ranging top to take on the D-flats and D-naturals dotted throughout the scores.

The 35-year-old Oklahoma native takes it in stride.

“I studied at Oklahoma City University. Academically I was just average, but I had always sung, first as a bass when I was very young, then as a tenor.

“I could get some musical scholarship help, but not enough. My family didn’t have much money. My father was a postal employee, so my mother went to work to help get me through. I owe them everything.”

After apprenticeships in Santa Fe and Wolf Trap and being a finalist in the Metropolitan Opera Auditions in 1976, Merritt went to Europe in 1978.

In Salzburg, Beverly Sills heard him and offered him four performances of “Puritani” at New York City Opera in 1981.

Then, after Merritt first sang with Marilyn Horne, she became another of his mentors.

Impresarios, critics and the public in Italy began to take notice of the tenor when Claudio Abbado tapped him for a revival of Rossini’s “Viaggio a Reims” during an off-season performance at La Scala in 1985. After that the offers rolled in, and soon he was singing in major Italian houses with top conductors.

Merritt has now added Covent Garden, Vienna and the Paris Opera to his successes. He is sanguine about these halcyon days.

“Not all my reviews have been great. The British Opera Magazine trashed me, much like the New York Times did recently, in reviewing my recording of bel-canto arias.” (Will Crutchfield, reviewing “Tancredi” in the N.Y. Times in January, singled out Merritt as a “particularly graceless shaper of musical lines.”)

That may be, but the majority of notices have been positive. Particularly unusual is the depth of his success in chauvinistic Italy.

There are some Italian old-timers who grumble because the Merritt sound is not suavely beautiful as Giuseppe di Stefano’s, for example, was.

True or not, Merritt was the first American tenor to open the Scala since Eugene Conley did 39 years ago. In December he sang in a new production of Rossini’s “Guillaume Tell” and had his usual glowing reviews.

Next season he will open La Scala again in “Vespri Siciliani.”

This season America gets the chance to hear the tenor at some length. He sang “Tancredi” at the Chicago Lyric, and “Maometto II” in San Francisco. His Metropolitan debut will be in 1990-91 in “Semiramide.”

“I refuse to be pigeonholed,” says Merritt. “If a part interests me, I will do it, if only for a limited, select few performances.”

Whether his flexibility has contributed to his income is debatable, but it certainly hasn’t hindered him. In Italy, at least, Merritt just might be the highest-paid tenor. He receives $35,000 a performance at all the houses there, save La Scala, where his fee is $22,000. The official top at the Metropolitan at present is $9,000.

He has little competition in his current repertory. Still, one wonders why the Italians pay so much more when they know what he gets elsewhere?

“I don’t know,” the tenor says, smiling innocently, “We ask for it and they say yes.”