Word: tenore
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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After 36 years in Europe and private U.S. salons, a little-known group portrait of Baritone Titta Ruffo, now 71, the late Tenor Enrico Caruso and the late Basso Feodor Chaliapin turned up in a spot where U.S. opera lovers could get a look at it-the lounge of Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House. In 1912 fast-painting Portraitist Tade Styka had herded the three together, daubed away between impromptu arias, somehow managed to catch the highstrung trio in a portrait that all but played its own temperamental mood music...
Veteran singers who for years have been getting by on their voices alone nervously consulted their dressing-room mirrors, daubing on brown face paint (their usual bright red doesn't televise well). To look his best, Tenor Ramon Vinay turned up in the purple burnoose that famed Actor Edwin Booth wore as Othello...
When the great gold brocade curtains parted, the two audiences could see & hear for themselves that the Met hadn't really changed its ways. The opening storm music that the Met's best conductor, Fritz Busch, whipped out of his pit orchestra was only faintly furious. Tenor Vinay sang powerfully, and what top notes he couldn't sing he shouted. But Booth's burnoose could not disguise his lurching, hand-wringing acting. Like most Met stage lovers, he more often sang of his passion to Conductor Busch, at whom he stared fixedly, than to Desdemona...
...ability. As the week wore on, critics found some things to applaud more heartily: the season's first Götterdammerung, the sound and spirit of Conductor Wilfred Pelletier's orchestra in Mignon, Cloe Elmo and Jussi Bjoerling's Il Trovatore, and the excitement of Tenor Ferruccio Tagliavini's L'Elisir D'Amore...
...Tenors Needed. A big 1948 weekend, say Jones & O'Riley, costs the college man anywhere from $35 to $60. Williams, like Dartmouth, is a skiing college: "You'll eat in ski pants, dance in ski pants, and if you ever get to bed, you might just as well sleep in ski pants." Amherst parties "are definitely of the beery, spur-of-the-moment variety"; a Holyoke girl once complained that "all they ask you for is to sing tenor in some quartet." Princeton parties are held "in rooms that seem no larger than a small station wagon...