Most valuable player: Ira Siff pays tribute Robert Merill, the Met's champion baritone.

"Momma discovered I could sing the moment I let out my first cry. To my mother, my delivery was a debut." So quips Robert Merrill in his often hilarious and touching 1965 memoir, Once More from the Beginning. Born Moishe Miller in 1917 (and still going strong at eighty-six), Merrill had a miraculous odyssey to the Met, simultaneously a tremendous struggle and a walk in the park. Born to immigrant parents, young Moishe was an overweight stutterer who spoke only Yiddish until grade school. Painfully shy, he would sing for company at his mother's insistence, but only from behind a dosed bathroom door in their Williamsburg, Brooklyn, apartment. Dropping out of high school, Moishe endured a string of unbearable jobs, lucky to be working at all during the Depression. It was while he was rolling dresses on a rack through the garment district for his Uncle Abe that the young singer-to-be, pretending the dresses were costumes, wandered into the Met as some stagehands were loading in sets. Before the stage manager ejected him, Moishe had managed to observe Lawrence Tibbett (whose voice he knew from the movies) and Lucrezia Bori rehearsing the Act II Traviata duet. Already an unpaid local star on WFOX radio, Moishe Miller was now bitten by the bug that created Robert Merrill.

Merrill's mother, Lotza, a gifted but thwarted soprano and a stage mother who made Mamma Rose in Gypsy seem laid-back by comparison, managed to get her son voice lessons gratis from noted teacher Samuel Margolis. Such was the beauty of Moishe's voice that he acquired, in rapid succession, several agents, party work, theater and dub stints, Borscht Belt gigs in the Catskills, lucrative radio engagements and even an opera debut in New Jersey, as Amonasro in Aida with Martinelli as Radames, by the time the baritone was twenty-seven. In 1944, Moishe Miller, who had become Merrill Miller, settled on being Robert Merrill. His first stab at the Met failed when he auditioned with a glitzy "arrangement" of Figaro's aria from Il Barbiere di Siviglia that had brought down the house in the Catskills. But his second try at the Met Auditions of the Air resulted in victory--and a contract for the 1945-46 season.

Young, naive and incredibly ballsy, Merrill refused to learn the comprimario roles that comprised his contract, but Edward Johnson, recognizing vocal gold, decided to overlook the lack of discipline, rewarding and terrifying the baritone with a sudden debut, on December 15, 1945, as Germont in La Traviata. Merrill's vocal endowment was rapturously received, with reservations expressed only about his acting; despite his effusive personality and sharp sense of humor, the dramatic element was something he had to work at for his entire career. Toscanini, having heard Merrill's disc of Act II of Traviata, cast the young singer as Germont for his 1946 NBC radio broadcast. By this time, Merrill was a pop-singing giant, with the number-one disc on the Hit ...