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The Opera Quarterly 18.3 (2002) 329-376



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Aristocrat of Tenors

Susan Owensby Daguzan

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I FIRST met Alfredo Kraus in 1990, while working as music director and announcer/producer at WRR-FM in Dallas, Texas. Mr. Kraus was in town to sing The Tales of Hoffmann with the Dallas Opera, a theater with which he was closely associated for many years. Alfredo was a very good friend of my godmother, Rita Mammel, and when he sang in Dallas, he always stayed at her house. So I knew him in a half-professional, half-personal way.

During this run of performances, Alfredo had been sent a master dub of a recording he had just made for Saphiro, featuring popular songs from France, Italy, North and Latin America, Brazil, and Spain. Alfredo was a bit interested to hear what the recording sounded like, to say the least. This was the first time he had ever sung in English (Cole Porter's "You Do Something to Me," believe it or not!) and the first time he had recorded popular Spanish and Latin American music for many years. He told me he had actually had fun in the recording studio, which was a rare event for him. I can't remember what in the world was wrong, but throughout the entire house we couldn't get one single cassette machine to work, and eventually we all ended up in the car in the garage—the only working machine we could find. Kraus, as most people who were acquainted with him know, was a very elegant and reserved man, not given to effusion. Although always kind to me, he was still distant, until that afternoon sitting in the back seat of a car in a closed-in garage in Dallas, Texas. The recording was really beautiful, and he was happy and, in an Alfredo way, effusive. Don't roll your eyes . . . it was not an egoistic joy at the sound of his own voice but the joy of a man truly born to music. Anyway, we decided to make a radio program about the new recording. It was a lovely show, with the tenor picking the cuts he liked the most, introducing them, talking about why he picked the songs he recorded and how he approached them, and even how he felt about them, which is very [End Page 329] rare for a man who once said, "Emotion is a moment of the intelligence." He liked the show, too, and we stayed in touch a bit after that, through my godmother.

I then married an opera singer and joined the "circuit" myself as Chief Camp Follower. Although Eric Halfvarson is a Wagner/Strauss bass and hence doesn't share much of the same repertoire as Kraus, they did do a Hoffmann (Dallas) and a Rigoletto (Met) together. In fact, that Rigoletto was Kraus's final appearance in a complete opera at the Met; although he had, as usual, great success, there was unfortunately no ceremony attached to the farewell performance of one of the century's most elegant singers. I well remember the event. Alfredo was only days away from his sixty-seventh birthday, and although the voice was not that of a young man, what he did musically was so special that everyone in the house knew they were hearing the "real thing." "Parmi veder le lagrime" was so beautifully phrased that the house exploded, and Alfredo, in his wonderfully old-fashioned way, took a bow. The audience doubled their applause at that point—in homage to an era when opera was about singing, pure and simple. I bet Alfredo and his wife Rosa didn't leave the Met until dawn; the line of fans waiting to greet him snaked down the hall and out the back door. As it should have.

I subsequently gave up my radio career to travel with Eric. An opera singer's life is akin to that of a gypsy's (one year I traveled 305 days, and Eric 360!), and in order to have any marriage at all I needed to travel...

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