The Great Franco Corelli

The Great Franco Corelli

For me, Franco Corelli personifies Italian opera. The first time I went to the Met, in 1968, I heard Franco Corelli as Cavaradossi in "Tosca" opposite Birgit Nilsson. That's a cast that can't be bettered, especially with the fine singing actor Gabriel Bacquier as Scarpia, although a case could be made that only Corelli was appropriately cast. Certainly it was opera in the international style, with Italians beginning to thin out in the opera world, replaced by everyone else, especially former Soviets and Americans. Corelli is my favorite tenor. No apologies or excuses. Not the patrician Kraus, or the cool and elegant Bjoerling, the immaculate Bergonzi or the thrilling Vickers. Domingo will always be Corelli's understudy (unfair as that is to the endless achievements of one of history's greatest tenors), because the '69 Met strike robbed me of what would have been Corelli's last Manrico and gave me Domingo's in his place. Domingo is a sovereign artist, but he was never happy in "Di quella pira". Ask Schuyler Chapin. Pavarotti was a spectacularly gifted, heart-warming singer, but I'll let him speak for himself about Franco: "He was the greatest dramatic tenor who ever lived." But every great career moves in an arc, as the stupendous Italian baritone Titta Ruffo, rival of Caruso and Chaliapin in the early decades of the 20th century, expresses so poignantly in his autobiography, "My Parabola".

Corelli made his belated debut in 1951, the year before I was born, and arrived at the Met in 1961, with Leontyne Price in "Trovatore". Until his retirement in 1975, he was the Greatest Tenor in the World, apologies to Richard Tucker's many fans. He left too few commercial recordings, but still a dozen or so complete sets and a number of recitals, and a lot of live recordings, many of them thrilling. I heard him at his peak, in 1968, and 7 times more before he retired. In the next few posts, I'd like to examine his recorded legacy, and my experience of him in the theater.