Two Home-Town Boys

It was just another night at the opera. The bill: those old double-yoked war horses, Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana and Leoncavallo's I Pagliacci. Performed more than 200 times at the Metropolitan Opera, they were now rounding out a season that had only two more weeks to run. The casts were studded with familiar names, and in the pit was Fausto Cleva, veteran of the Met's Italian wing. But on this routine occasion the audience was treated to a beautifully sung, splendidly paced evening for which much of the credit went to two middle-aged American singers named Warren and Tucker.

Twenty years or so ago, Bronx-born Leonard Warren (ne Warrenoff) was busy selling fur jackets and studying advertising at Columbia, and Brooklyn-born Richard (originally Reuben) Tucker was selling dyed silk linings to the wholesale fur trade. Baritone Warren turned to singing (he won the 1938 Metropolitan Auditions of the Air) when the Depression shrank the fur business; Tenor Tucker turned to singing when the outbreak of World War II shrank the silk supply. Both advanced quickly in the war-hobbled Metropolitan, both quickly became reliable, stock-in-trade singers. In recent years they have blossomed into spectacular first-rank performers. Tucker is now the best tenor in the business, and Warren grand opera's top baritone.

In last week's Cavalleria, from the moment Tucker's fervent and sensuous voice sounded offstage in Turiddu's precurtain love song, the audience was his. Dressed in a tinhorn gambler's dark shirt and the cheap Sunday suit of a Sicilian villager, Tucker swaggered about the stage in response to broken pleas from Santuzza (well sung by Veteran Zinka Milanov). He powerfully thundered forth his challenge to Alfio, husband of his mistress, and in the final great aria movingly sang his farewell to his mother, the sure delicacy of his voice topped off by his rough parting cry: "Un bacio, mamma, addio!" After the intermission, the other local man showed up in Pagliacci, costumed in disreputable red wig, striped T shirt and ill-fitting green jacket. Leonard Warren was, as usual, a powerfully resonant Tonio, alternately strutting and servile as he paced in front of the curtain and expounded Leoncavallo's advice to the audience that an actor is "a man with a heart like yours," and that "what he tells you is true." Playing Tonio with vacuous smile as a simpleton rather than a physical cripple, Warren shot the role full of pity which honed rather than blunted its edge of evil. In his great self-revelatory aria ("I know I'm deformed and ugly"), his mahogany-hued voice soared with a passion and authority that no other baritone today can top. Not even the beloved Vesti la giubba (sung by Italian Tenor Mario Ortica as Canio) got a bigger hand. All in all, last week's "routine" performances were perhaps a better measure of the Met's real stature than the thrills provided by such exciting visitors as Maria Callas, Renata Tebaldi and Mario Del Monaco. For an ordinary night at the opera, the Met is tough to beat.

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