Mario Lanza: An American Tragedy (review)

Although some biographers have been accused of perpetrating hatchet jobs on their subjects (Robert Caro on Lyndon Johnson, Kitty Kelley on Frank Sinatra, ideologues of various stripes on their political enemies), I would imagine that few people who aren't grinding an axe spend years and even decades studying and writing about the lives of people they don't admire. Thus I wasn't surprised to learn, on the very first page of this new biography of Mario Lanza (1921-1958), that author Armando Cesari began researching his subject "in earnest" way back in 1976, four years after visiting Lanza's father at his Los Angeles home, and perhaps had been toying with the idea at least since 1962, when, presumably as a mourning fan, he had "exchanged correspondence" with the late tenor's mother. Cesari insists that he set out to write "a book that dealt with the singer's life in an objective and musical fashion." But Mario Lanza: An American Tragedy is clearly something of a corrective as well. For example, the author demolishes the myth that Lanza had worked as a piano mover and truck driver; all he did was play one in his first movie. Cesari also seems determined to prove once and for all a conviction that he declares in his book's second paragraph: that his vocal studies with A. C. Bartleman, "a baritone of some renown who had sung with the legendary Melba," "only confirmed what I had always known instinctively: that Mario Lanza was the possessor of a voice and technique far greater than was commonly acknowledged at the time" (p. iv).

Thus the book is rife with favorable comparisons of Cesari's subject with seemingly every tenor since Rubini and especially with Enrico Caruso, whom Lanza worshipped all his life and portrayed in his third and surely most famous film. Cesari declares: "While Caruso had worked extremely hard to create his undeniably great sound, Lanza started off with far [sic] more vocal equipment than his idol had ever possessed. Lanza's voice was complete from the very beginning. The dark velvety center and fearless high notes were already in place" when Lanza was twenty-eight and starred in his first movie, That Midnight Kiss, in 1949 (p. 99). James Melton, a tenor who (unlike Lanza) managed to sing at the Met as well as to make some movies, "praised Lanza's voice to anyone who cared to listen and was hailing him as a new Caruso" (p. 64). Soprano Licia Albanese, who sang Desdemona opposite Lanza's Otello in the 1955 film Serenade, said: "He had the most beautiful lirico spinto voice. It was a gorgeous, beautiful, powerful voice. I should know because I sang with so many tenors. He had everything that one needs . . . He was fantastic! I rank him next to Caruso. Next comes Di Stefano, then all the others" (p. 202). Actor Walter Pidgeon, "a classically trained singer who began his career as a baritone in several stage musicals before going to Hollywood," heard Lanza sing at a party in 1944 and told Tinsel Town gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, "Mark my words, Hedda, there goes the great tenor of the century" (p. 35). In his preface Plácido Domingo calls Lanza's instrument "one of the truly great natural tenor voices of the past century—a voice of beauty, passion and power!" (p. xvi), and bass-baritone George London, who toured with Lanza and soprano Frances Yeend in the Bel Canto Trio in 1947 and 1948, called it the greatest voice ever bestowed on a human being (p. viii). As further "proof" that Lanza was the true successor to Caruso's ten-ton mantle, despite the younger tenor's occasional protestations to the contrary,¹ Enrico Caruso Jr. presented him with the Enrico Caruso Award in Caruso's hometown of Naples during the filming of Serenade, and Lanza's friends and colleagues urged his widow to allow him to be buried next to Caruso in the Caruso family chapel...