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Above: a huge mural in Philadelphia honors that city’s native son, baritone Frank Guarrera, who sang Rigoletto in the first opera performance I ever attended.

People have often asked me about my earliest operatic experiences and how I became engrossed in this ‘exotic and irrational’ art form. Although it all began for me in 1959 when I chanced to see Renata Tebaldi performing excerpts from MADAMA BUTTERFLY on The Bell Telephone Hour, it was actually attending a performance in the theater three years later that got me hooked. And to this day nothing – not recordings, radio broadcasts, televised performances, HD theatercasts – can compare with being in an opera house and experiencing opera in its natural habitat.

I was a very unhappy boy, growing up in that small town and feeling totally out-of-sync with the people who lived there, and especially alienated from my peers. I had been stricken with rheumatic fever at age five, and was in a hospital bed (at home) for several weeks; I actually had to learn to walk again, and I sometimes think this had a profound effect on my development. On re-entering school, I was thououghly lacking in self-confidence, lonely and reclusive; and by the time I was ten I began to realize just how different I was from the other boys my age. 

Watching that Tebaldi telecast was such a revelation. From the brief narration I had only the vaguest grasp of what BUTTERFLY was about; but the effect of this large, handsome woman wearing a kimono and singing in a foreign language bowled me over. I knew instinctively that life changed for me during that half-hour. But once smitten, where could I turn?

My poor parents, how difficult it must have been for them having this weird child on their hands! My brother was a handful in his own way, though a typical late-1950s teenger: a James Dean-type who smoked, carried a switchblade, and sometimes brushed up against the local sheriff. My sister was popular, very involved in school activities, an all-American girl. But there was no instruction manual – especially in that neck of the woods – for raising an eccentric, introverted, feminine boy like me.

Going with the flow as best they could, my parents gave me a two-LP album of Verdi and Puccini arias sung by great RCA recording artists like Milanov, Albanese, Peerce, Bjoerling, Merrill, Warren and Tozzi. I wore it out in no time. Then I discovered the Texaco Metropolitan Opera Saturday radio broadcasts (Sutherland’s 1961 LUCIA was my first) and things moved to another level. No one was allowed to disturb me during those afternoons, and I had a big old reel-to-reel deck and used a microphone to tape the operas off the air. I played the tapes over and over: that’s how I learned the repertory. I subscribed to OPERA NEWS and sent fan mail to singers I heard on the airwaves. I still have the letters and signed photos they sent me.

So it only remained to actually attend an opera performance. Every summer at the end of June, my father would close the drug store he owned for two weeks and take us on a car trip. We went to Maine, Boston, Washington DC, Niagara Falls. My mother hated those trips: she loved sleeping in her own bed and usually found fault with the motels where we stayed. But it was my dad’s annual opportunity to get away from it all, and so – being a good wife – she obliged.

I had found out about the Cincinnati Summer Opera festival, held at the local zoo. As my father was casting about for a place to go in July 1962, I put forth the idea of attending an opera. He thought the venue might be interesting, and that we could combine the trip with an excursion to the horse farms of Kentucky. Opera tickets were ordered by mail, and at last we were off: on July 7th, 1962, in a production of painted flats and very traditional costumes and staging, RIGOLETTO unfolded before me.

The names and voices of the announced principals were familiar to me from hearing them on the Met broadcasts: Laurel Hurley, Barry Morell, and Frank Guarrera. A news item in the local paper had momentarily burst my bubble: Ms. Hurley was ill and would be replaced as Gilda by Nadja Witkowska. But by the time the conductor, Carlo Moresco, struck up the prelude, nothing else mattered: I was at the opera!

I remember that Ms. Witkowska produced exciting high notes, that Mr. Morell’s voice was clear and warm, with a trace of a sob here and there; and that Mr. Guarrera sang strongly and really moved me with his “Pieta, signori!” sung prone on the stage, his face an inch or two off the floor. Irwin Densen, a basso who had a very long career and who I would see many times in years to come, was Sparafucile. And a devilish-looking tenor in a black beard and wearing black tights and tunic gave me – sub-consciously – a sexual frisson when he apeared as Borsa. That was Andrea Velis, a prominent Met comprimario. Another Met stalwart, Gene Boucher, was Count Ceprano.

Barry Morell (above) sang the Duke of Mantua

After the performance I went backstage to meet the singers; oddly, I did not ask for autographs. I’ll never forget when Frank Guarrera came out to greet the fans: he had received a negative review for his prima performance, two nights earlier, from a woman named Eleanor Bell writing for the local newspaper. The crowd burst into applause and bravos when he emerged from the dressing room and as he began to sign autographs, he shouted triumphantly: “To hell with Eleanor Bell!”

I think my parents actually had a good time: they took me back to the Zoo Opera for the next two summer vacations. We saw Licia Albanese singing her 100th Violetta (with Morell and Guarrera) and we saw Adriana Maliponte as Massenet’s Manon (with Morell and Guarrera) along with a TROVATORE starring Martina Arroyo and Irene Dalis. And my parents also took me to the Old Met, where I saw the Eugene Berman DON GIOVANNI – the first of eight performances I saw at the Old House – just days after John F. Kennedy had been assassinated.

Finally, in late summer 1966, I was allowed to make my first solo trip to New York City to be on the first ticket line for the New Met. After that, there was no stopping me.