Saturday afternoon live.(Coda)(reminiscences of an operaphile)

On Saturday afternoon, December 28, 1946, five of us--all but one aspiring opera singers--gathered in my college roommate's apartment on West Eighty-first Street in Manhattan to listen to Swedish helden-tenor Set Svanhohn sing Radames in Aida. I was a big fan of Svanholm's, and we had joined forces to record as much as we could of his performance on the Met broadcast. This was in the primitive era of the 78-rpm record, and the best we could do was pick up fragments of his powerful singing, but it was enough to delight me. I hadn't been able to get a ticket to go hear him in person that afternoon, so this broadcast performance was all I was going to get. The recording itself was pretty much a disaster, as we had no idea what we were doing, but i still remember that big metallic voice blasting out into the room where we sat enthralled.

I had gotten caught up in the Met broadcasts at the age of twelve, when I walked into my italian grandmother's room to find her sitting motionless on her bed listening to the most beautiful voice I'd ever heard, pouring out of the small radio on her nightstand. I stood there transfixed, not knowing exactly what I was listening to but overwhelmed by the beauty of that sound. It was Benjamino Gigli singing "Che gelida manina" from La Boheme. My grandmother had had to flee Fascist Italy to come and live with my mother and me in New York, but it didn't bother bet that Gigli was a big supporter of Mussolini. "Certainly he is a Fascist," she said, "but art does not know politics."

It wasn't until I was seventeen that I became totally booked on opera. I was in love with a girl named Lorraine, whose family had a box at the Met, and I had to rent a tuxedo to go with her to a performance of Tannhauser, in which Lauritz Melchior starred as the erring knight. Lorraine and her parents were bored stiff, but I was overwhelmed, despite the shoddy set and the spectacle of all these badly overweight people pretending to be youthful and attractive. It didn't matter, because they could sing and the music was glorious. After that, I'd go to the Met whenever I could, paying for a standing-room ticket, then bribing an usher a buck or two to move me into an empty seat at the first intermission. Best of all, as my school years and then service in the U.S. Army Air Force took me out of town, I could take refuge in those Saturday-afternoon broadcasts, which had the added advantage for me of allowing my imagination to picture the action and the events as the composer and librettist had intended them to be. This was the era, of course, ...