Throughout practically the entire history of singing, tenors have been the butt of jokes and innuendoes, most of them related to the alleged mental deficiencies of the breed. An Italian adage lists the degrees of comparison — stupido, stupidissimo, tenore. How can tenors produce such golden, ringing tone? Because of all that empty space between their ears.
Many of these jibes can be traced to the envy of operatic colleagues. Traditionally tenors have enjoyed the greatest social prestige and financial success, not to mention female adulation. “Tenors,” wrote James Joyce in “Ulysses,” “get women by the score.”
But there is also a purely aesthetic sensation behind the tenoral mystique. The frisson a great tenor voice can create as it peals forth in clarion majesty at the top of its range cuts across the widest spectrum of listener taste, whether it’s a suburban housewife cooing over Michael Bolton, or a Lyric Opera boxholder leaping to applaud the stratospheric feats of Placido Domingo.
Throughout its infancy during the 1950s, Lyric Opera prided itself on the strength of its tenor roster. And who could blame it, with Richard Tucker, Giuseppe di Stefano, Mario del Monaco, Jussi Bjoerling, Carlo Bergonzi and Leopold Simoneau filling the plum male roles?
Tenors bridge the chasm between serious art and popular entertainment as do no other classical performers. On a purely musical plane, they can be the most expressive of voices, cradling a lyrical phrase or sending a high note through the roof. At the commercial level, they inspire the jingle of cash registers that is music to the ears of promoters and managers.
Take The Three Tenors. (Please.) Since their historic first concert in Rome in 1990, which played to roughly 800 million TV viewers and generated the best-selling classical recording of all time, Jose Carreras, Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti have brought their three-ring circus to nearly every part of the globe. Each appearance and television rerun has pulled in the kind of numbers that convince non-classical music buffs there is life yet in an allegedly dying art form.
By now the Messrs. Carreras, Domingo and Pavarotti slog through these content-free spectacles, with their increased reliance on crossover glitz, with the cynical ennui of Las Vegas lounge entertainers hogging the microphone for no other reason than to take the money and run. Even The Three Tenors seem to realize the old cash cow ain’t what she used to be. Their act has degenerated into self-parody.
But a more serious concern for classical music is that The Three Tenors are fast approaching geezerhood: Carreras is 51; Domingo, 57; and Pavarotti a venerable 63. Who will succeed them in the affections of fans? Can anyone equal or surpass their magnetic hold on a public that urgently needs its fix of the tenor voice? It’s not only the sellers of tickets and recordings who are worried. Without tenors, there would be very little reason for opera houses to mount most of the operas composed between the birth of Mozart and the death of Puccini.
Which is why, every few years, a fuzzy-cheeked youth with bright tenoral promise is plucked from the Italian or French provinces and declared prince regent. We cross our collective fingers and wait to see how he will develop under the pressures of a music business that ironically prizes technical proficiency over the kind of seasoned artistry and individuality that made the great tenors of the past great singers.
Of these Pavarotti wannabes, the latest to show up on classical music’s radar screen is a 39-year-old Tuscan tenor named Andrea Bocelli. The European popular press has embraced the shaggily handsome singer — a former lawyer who sings concerts despite being blind since boyhood — with the kind of enthusiasm American tabloids usually reserve for pregnant nuns who were abducted by aliens.
Although Bocelli was singing in an obscure piano bar only six years ago, a huge marketing campaign has succeeded in turning him into an instant international superstar. His albums on the Philips label, as well as several PBS specials, have made him one of the biggest-selling singers in Europe and, now, America. Taking a leaf out of The Three Tenors’ notebook, this weekend he embarks on an 11-city North American concert tour that will make a stop at 8 p.m. Thursday in Chicago’s United Center.
The recordings make one wonder how long Bocelli, or any other bantamweight tenor “discovery” these days, will be able to wear the heavyweight crown that has been thrust on him.
Bocelli’s voice is that of a middleweight Italianate lyric tenor, pleasing and somewhat reedy in timbre but without the ping of Pavarotti’s bigger, more opulent instrument. The range is wide, and the high Cs and C-sharps at the top are achieved without strain. He achieves a refined mezza voce (literally, half voice), the subdued tonal emission with which singers color and enhance the expressive effect of words.
What undermines the enterprise is that most of Bocelli’s selections sound the same. It’s efficient, well-schooled, by-the-numbers singing, but there is a one-dimensional quality to it and it doesn’t cut very deep. Here the tenor’s physical inability to pursue a career in staged opera puts him at an obvious disadvantage, for there are interpretative possibilities a singer can only learn from having lived a part on the operatic stage.
His sudden celebrity is symptomatic of the larger problem of how singers are being sold in the era of The Three Tenors: When strident marketing can create superstars almost literally overnight, how can the average musical consumer distinguish art from hype? And what does this say about the state of our culture?
Of course, any star system that can produce such gifted, well-schooled and potentially durable tenors as Ben Heppner, Roberto Alagna, Jose Cura and Sergei Larin cannot be judged a failure. Heppner and colleagues appear to be smart enough to appreciate the dangers of trying to do too much, too soon, in too many theaters, that is the bane of today’s profit-driven music business. And their art rests on a firm foundation of schooling and experience.
But who is to protect the tenoral tyros, and other would-be divos and divas, just coming up? Classical music’s Boot Hill is littered with the graves of relatively young singers — not just tenors — who suffered vocal burnout because the system exploited them beyond their capacities by asking them to sing the wrong roles, or even the right roles at the wrong time.
The sobering truth is that few of today’s heavily promoted tenoral flavors-of-the-month could hope to sustain major careers comparable in duration to that of a Tucker, Melchior or a Beniamino Gigli. That wonderful Italian tenor parlayed a uniquely honeyed, fluent voice and spontaneous manner into a career that lasted more than 40 years. Then there is Alfredo Kraus, the elegant Spanish tenor who made his debut in 1956, when he was 29. He is still singing — beautifully, from all reports — at 71.
Andrea Bocelli should be so lucky.
