Tenor’s Life Was a Tragedy, Not a Joke

The small, two-story building at 636 Christian St. is only a 15-minute stroll from the corner of Broad and Market streets, the intersection sometimes considered the heart of Center City Philadelphia. But to take that walk is to venture into a different land.

From Christian Street, the Philadelphia skyscrapers loom like glittering steel sentries, as distant and unreal as the Emerald City must have seemed to Dorothy from her poppy field. South Philadelphia is a world unto itself, where houses are modestly scaled yet meticulously maintained, where Ralph’s Restaurant still serves the heaping plates of spaghetti pomodoro that have been its specialty for nearly a century, where the accent is overwhelmingly Italian.

It was in an upstairs bedroom at 636 Christian St. that Alfredo Arnold Cocozza bellowed his first on Jan. 31, 1921. If you are lucky, you may still find somebody who knew the Cocozza family, who shopped in the tiny grocery they operated below their cramped apartment, who joined the neighborhood celebrations on those uproarious occasions when young Alfredo returned home in triumph, after he had become world-famous as Mario Lanza.

Four decades after Lanza’s death, the tenor’s name (adopted from his mother’s side of the family) is still celebrated--and not just in Philadelphia. There have been half a dozen biographies by now, the most recent (and most authoritative) by Roland L. Bessette, published this year by Amadeus Press. Lanza’s recordings generate more than $100,000 annually for his estate, a staggering sum for a classical or semiclassical musician who has been gone so long. Such Lanza films as “The Great Caruso” are still staples on late-night television.

Tenor Placido Domingo has acknowledged that that movie exerted a particular influence on his career. Luciano Pavarotti, according to biographer Bessette, “pinpointed his early aspirations to a sense of awe at hearing ‘Be My Love,’ ” Lanza’s greatest hit, as a teenager. “Third Tenor” Jose Carreras has gone even further: Lanza’s “wonderful voice and the charismatic appeal of his personality had a profound effect on my life, and I decided there and then that I too would one day sing the great operatic roles.”

And last summer in Chicago’s Grant Park, some 12,000 people showed up to hear tenor Richard Leech narrate and sing a tribute to Mario Lanza.

Obviously, a lot of people are still out there listening.

Yet Lanza is rarely taken seriously by classical music aficionados. You will search in vain for his name in most of the critical histories of recorded opera, although he recorded many of the best-known arias. He is often dismissed as a vulgar bawler--or, at best, as a calculated creation of big money and bigger hype.

Still, other unquestionably important musicians held Lanza’s gift in awe, among them conductors Serge Koussevitzky and Julius Rudel, and soprano Licia Albanese, who recorded with such legendary tenors as Beniamino Gigli and once said Lanza had “a greater voice than Caruso.”

Lanza himself had no doubts that Albanese’s assessment was correct. “Caruso?” he once said. “You study that ridiculous legend? That guy could not even whistle properly.”

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This last quote may provide a clue to the reason Lanza’s star imploded when it should have been forever established in the firmament. Lanza could be a lazy, strutting, arrogant and undisciplined jerk. He had an insatiable appetite for food, liquor and women, all of which he abused with shocking insensibility. He could barely read music, and refused to learn. He would balloon up to 250 pounds in the middle of making a film, sometimes delaying production by months. Bessette acknowledges that Lanza is “a strong contender for the title of the most truculent, morose, demanding star in the history of Hollywood.”

After being fired by MGM, when he was hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, Lanza drank his way through an extended Las Vegas engagement that might have quickly restored his solvency but resulted in a devastating lawsuit. On Oct. 7, 1959, at 38, he died in Rome from what was diagnosed as a heart attack. As with the case of jazz musician Bix Beiderbecke, it might be better said that Lanza really died from “too much of everything.”

In the long run, the shortcomings of Mario Lanza the person will be forgotten. But what of Mario Lanza the artist, as immortalized in his films and recordings?

Such early films as “That Midnight Kiss” (1949) and “The Toast of New Orleans” (1950) show a spirited, affable and charismatic young man who seems born to sing. These are light romantic comedies based loosely on Lanza’s own life--the poor but plucky boy with a terrific voice who rises to the top of society and gets the girl. Fifty years later, we can still understand Lanza’s immediate appeal. The postwar era was one of rapid and profound democratization, and Lanza seemed a “normal guy” with none of the supposed elitism generally associated with opera.

“The Great Caruso” (1951) was more problematic. Here Lanza was actually setting himself against Caruso, in some of the most celebrated arias in the repertoire, and here the young man’s shortcomings began to show.

For Lanza had never received either the training or the seasoning that might have placed him among the important opera singers. He was offered the training--he worked with a number of vocal instructors, most of whom ultimately threw up their hands at his lack of discipline and unwillingness to practice. But he had no time to grow; he appeared only a few times in operatic roles, for the simple reason that he became a star so quickly, through his concerts and radio appearances. After Hollywood had enfolded him, he elected to lose himself in the ready-made Satyricon available to handsome celebrities rather than in the service of a noble art.

And so what we hear, again and again, throughout Lanza’s films and recordings, is magnificent and tragically unfulfilled promise. The voice was an extraordinary one--immediately distinctive in its sound, full of sun and ardor, lyrical yet immensely powerful, all combined with what was, onstage, at least, an exuberant and winning personality. Lanza always seemed to sing directly from the heart, from one person directly to another--which has eluded many better-trained artists.

But he often displayed a tendency to sob and shout, as if to overwhelm the listener even when nothing of the sort was called for. He brought a desperate urgency to such masterpieces of bel canto as Donizetti’s “Una furtiva lagrima,” which should spin out naturally, as if an inward reverie.

There is no way to assess Lanza’s career as anything but a tragedy. He was yet one more victim of the ferocious struggle between talent and self-destruction that has so often plagued American music, from Stephen Foster through Jimi Hendrix and beyond. If his artistry had kept pace with the sheer abundance of his gifts, Mario Lanza might be remembered as America’s leading tenor.

Still, out of the chaos and disrepair of his life, Lanza left us a number of recordings and motion pictures that are still heard with appreciation and affection throughout the world. All things considered, that’s not a bad legacy.