Mario Lanza
Mario Lanza was an American tenor and actor. He was a Hollywood film star popular in the late 1940s and the 1950s. Lanza began studying to be a professional singer at the age of 16. After appearing at the Hollywood Bowl in 1947, Lanza signed a seven-year film contract with Louis B. Mayer, the head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, who saw his performance and was impressed by his singing. Prior to that, the adult Lanza sang only two performances of an opera. The following year he sang the role of Pinkerton in Puccini's Madama Butterfly in New Orleans.
His film debut for MGM was in That Midnight Kiss with Kathryn Grayson and Ethel Barrymore. A year later, in The Toast of New Orleans, his featured popular song "Be My Love" became his first million-selling hit. In 1951, he starred as tenor Enrico Caruso, his idol, in the biopic The Great Caruso, which produced another million-seller with "The Loveliest Night of the Year". The Great Caruso was the 11th top-grossing film that year.
The title song of his next film, Because You're Mine, was his final million-selling hit song. The song went on to receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song. After recording the soundtrack for his next film, The Student Prince, he embarked upon a protracted battle with studio head Dore Schary arising from artistic differences with director Curtis Bernhardt and was eventually fired by MGM.
Lanza was known to be "rebellious, tough, and ambitious". During most of his film career, he suffered from addictions to overeating and alcohol, which had a serious effect on his health and his relationships with directors, producers, and, occasionally, other cast members. Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper writes that "his smile, which was as big as his voice, was matched with the habits of a tiger cub, impossible to housebreak." She adds that he was the "last of the great romantic performers". He made three more films before dying of an apparent pulmonary embolism at the age of 38. At the time of his death in 1959, he was still "the most famous tenor in the world". Author Eleonora Kimmel concludes that Lanza "blazed like a meteor whose light lasts a brief moment in time".
Early years
Born Alfredo Arnold Cocozza in Philadelphia, he was exposed to classical singing at an early age by his Abruzzese-Molisan Italian parents. His mother, Maria Lanza, was from Tocco da Casauria, a town in the province of Pescara in the region of Abruzzo. His father, Antonio Cocozza, was from Filignano, a town in the province of Isernia in the region of Molise.By age 16, his vocal talent had become apparent. Starting out in local operatic productions in Philadelphia for the YMCA Opera Company while still in his teens, he later came to the attention of longtime principal Boston Symphony conductor Serge Koussevitzky. In 1942, Koussevitzky provided young Cocozza with a full student scholarship to the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood, Massachusetts. Reportedly, Koussevitzky later told him "Yours is a voice such as is heard once in a hundred years."
Opera career
He made the first of his few appearances in opera as Fenton in Otto Nicolai's The Merry Wives of Windsor at the Berkshire Music Festival in Tanglewood on August 7, 1942, after a period of study with conductors Boris Goldovsky and Leonard Bernstein. During this time, Cocozza adopted the stage name Mario Lanza because of its similarity to his mother's maiden name, Maria Lanza.The performances at Tanglewood won Lanza critical acclaim, with Noel Straus of The New York Times hailing the 21-year-old tenor as having "few equals among tenors of the day in terms of quality, warmth and power". Herbert Graf subsequently wrote in Opera News, "A real find of the season was Mario Lanza He would have no difficulty one day being asked to join the Metropolitan Opera." Lanza sang Nicolai's Fenton twice at Tanglewood, in addition to appearing there in a one-off presentation of Act III of Puccini's La bohème with the noted Mexican soprano Irma González, baritone James Pease, and mezzo-soprano Laura Castellano. Music critic Jay C. Rosenfeld wrote in The New York Times of August 9, 1942, "Irma González as Mimì and Mario Lanza as Rodolfo were conspicuous by the beauty of their voices and the vividness of their characterizations." In an interview shortly before her own death in 2008, González recalled that Lanza was "very correct, likeable, with a powerful and beautiful voice".
Lanza's aspiring operatic career was interrupted in World War II when he was assigned to Special Services in the U.S. Army Air Corps. He appeared in the wartime shows On the Beam and Winged Victory. He also appeared in the film version of the latter. He resumed his singing career with a concert in Atlantic City, New Jersey, with the NBC Symphony Orchestra in September 1945 under Peter Herman Adler, who subsequently became his mentor. The following month, he replaced tenor Jan Peerce on the live CBS radio program Great Moments in Music, on which he made six appearances in four months, singing extracts from various operas and other works.
Lanza studied with Enrico Rosati for 15 months and then embarked on an 86-concert tour of the United States, Canada, and Mexico from July 1947 until May 1948 with bass George London and soprano Frances Yeend. Reviewing his second appearance at Chicago's Grant Park in July 1947 in the Chicago Sunday Tribune, Claudia Cassidy praised Lanza's "superbly natural tenor" and observed that "though a multitude of fine points evade him, he possesses the things almost impossible to learn. He knows the accent that makes a lyric line reach its audience, and he knows why opera is music drama."
In April 1948, Lanza sang two performances as Pinkerton in Puccini's Madama Butterfly for the New Orleans Opera Association conducted by Walter Herbert with stage director Armando Agnini. Reviewing the opening-night performance in the St. Louis News, Laurence Oden wrote "Mario Lanza performed... Lieutenant Pinkerton with considerable verve and dash. Rarely have we seen a more superbly romantic leading tenor. His exceptionally beautiful voice helps immeasurably." Following the success of these performances, he was invited to return to New Orleans in 1949 as Alfredo in Verdi's La traviata. But, as biographer Armando Cesari wrote, Lanza by 1949 "was already deeply engulfed in the Hollywood machinery and consequently never learned role."
At the time of his death, Lanza was finally preparing to embark on an operatic career. Conductor Peter Herman Adler, with whom Lanza previously had worked both in concert and on the soundtrack of The Great Caruso, visited the tenor in Rome during the summer of 1959 and later recalled that " was working two hours a day with an operatic coach, and intended to go back to opera, his only true love." Adler promised the tenor "all possible help" in his "planning for his operatic future." In the October 14, 1959 edition of Variety, it was reported that Lanza had planned to make his return to opera in the role of Canio in Leoncavallo's Pagliacci during the Rome Opera's 1960–61 season. This was subsequently confirmed by Riccardo Vitale, artistic director of the Rome Opera. Variety also noted that preparations had been underway at the time of Lanza's death for him to participate in a series of complete opera recordings for RCA Victor to be recorded in Rome by RCA Italiana.
Film career
A concert at the Hollywood Bowl in August 1947 had brought Lanza to the attention of Louis B. Mayer, who promptly signed Lanza to a seven-year film contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The contract required him to commit to the studio for six months of the year, and Lanza initially believed he would be able to combine his film career with his operatic and concert appearances. In May 1949, he made his first commercial recordings for RCA Victor. Lanza's recording of the aria "Che gelida manina" from that first session was subsequently awarded the prize of Operatic Recording of the Year by the National Record Critics Association.''The Toast of New Orleans''
Lanza's first two starring films, That Midnight Kiss and The Toast of New Orleans, both opposite top-billed Kathryn Grayson, were commercial successes, and in 1950, his recording of "Be My Love" from the latter became the first of three million-selling singles for the young tenor, earning him enormous fame in the process. While at MGM, Lanza worked closely with Academy Award-winning conductor, composer, and arranger Johnny Green.In a 1977 interview with Lanza biographer Armando Cesari, Green recalled that the tenor was insecure about the manner in which he had become successful and was keenly aware of the fact that he had become a Hollywood star before first having established himself on the operatic stage.
Had been already a leading tenor, if not the leading tenor at the Met, and come to Hollywood in between seasons to make a picture, he would have had the Met as his home," Green remarked. According to Green, Lanza possessed "the voice of the next Caruso. had an unusual, very unusual quality... a tenor with a baritone color in the middle and lower registers, and a great feeling for the making of music. A great musicality. I found it fascinating, musically, to work with .
''The Great Caruso''
Lanza portrayed Enrico Caruso in The Great Caruso, which was MGM's biggest success of the year. At this time, the tenor's increasing popularity exposed him to intense criticism by some music critics, including those who had praised his work just a few years earlier. His portrayal of Caruso earned him compliments from the subject's son, Enrico Caruso Jr., a tenor in his own right. Shortly before his own death in 1987, Enrico Jr. wrote in Enrico Caruso: My Father and My Family that:I can think of no other tenor, before or since Mario Lanza, who could have risen with comparable success to the challenge of playing Caruso in a screen biography... Lanza was born with one of the dozen or so great tenor voices of the century, with a natural voice placement, an unmistakable and very pleasing timbre, and a nearly infallible musical instinct.