Ready for prime time.(singer Rene Pape; cancellation of opera television broadcasts through WNYE, New York)(Editorial)

Rene Pape is an artist who thrills his audiences with charisma, intelligence and a one-in-a-million voice: the luxurious timbre of Pape's supple, expressive bass is unmistakable, its velvety, dark-brown texture shot with ear-catching flashes of brightness. The beauty of his singing aside, there is a special pleasure in watching Pape, a true "stage animal" whose characterizations are charged with a sense of urgency. The bumptious antics of his Leporello are as persuasive and compelling as the noble spirituality of his Parsifal Gurnemanz. This month, Pape takes on a new role that seems tailor-made for him: Mephistopheles in Gounod's Faust.

Pape's Mephistopheles promises to be a performance that will take its place alongside those of his great predecessors at the Met: Plancon, Journet, Siepi, Ghiaurov, Ramey. These gentlemen, of course, were able to leave ample recorded evidence of their devilish mastery. One wonders whether Pape--who faces the challenges of a rapidly shrinking recording industry, as do all the singers of his generation--will ever be able to achieve a discography that reflects the growing breadth of his stage repertoire. In the past few months, the opera world has marked the passing of Robert Merrill, Victoria de los Angeles and Renata Tebaldi, legends whose magic lives in the recordings they made in the prime of their careers. For Pape and his contemporaries, prime time is right now. In twenty years, will we have any sense of how the current ...