Mario Lanza: An American Tragedy.(Book Review)

by Armando Cesari Baskerville Publishers, 350pp. $45

The subtitle of this book--the seventh in the "Great Voices" series by Baskerville Publishers, which has included volumes on Renara Tebaldi, Franco Corelli and Giulietta Simionato--is an indication of its content. Author Armando Cesari, an Italian-born Australian with "semi-professional" singing experience, and an avid student of Mario Lanza lore, claims that he has written an objective life story of the tenor, but his thesis, formulated during twenty-eight years of research, is clear flour the start. To Cesari, Lanza was an amazing talent whose rise from South Philadelphia's Little Italy to inevitable operatic greatness was diverted by the lure of Hollywood, then thwarted by inadequate or self-serving advisers catering to the young star's worst appetites. The combination of frustrated artistic ambition and over-gratified compulsions drove Lanza inexorably to his early death, at thirty-eight, in 1959.

This might be dismissed as fantasy, except that the Lanza voice was indeed prodigious--in a 1942 OPERA NEWS article, Herbert Graf, who directed Lanza's debut at Tanglewood, as Fenton in Nicolai's Merry Wives of Windsor, called the twenty-one-year-old "the find of the season." The young tenor's promising opera-house career was subsequently sidetracked by the recording and movie stardom that made him a national celebrity before his thirtieth birthday.

The chief canard about Lanza has always been that he was a creature of the microphone, inaudible in person. Cesari offers convincing testimony to the contrary from scores of colleagues and audience members world-wide, ranging from George London, who toured North America with Lanza and soprano Frances Yeend as The Bel Canto Trio in 1947 and '48, to Licia Albanese, who sang with Lanza in the 1956 film Serenade, to ...