Music: Still Very Good

In Manhattan’s Town Hall a few blocks from the Lombardos (see above), an older and more fabled musician was celebrating too. For 74-year-old Léon Rothier, whose bass had boomed through three decades at the Metropolitan Opera, it was just 50 years since his debut at Paris’ Comedie Française.

With 1,687 performances in 75 different roles at the Met to think back on (his most famed role: Mephistopheles in Faust), zestful, white-haired Basso Rothier had no fears about his anniversary recital. He was somewhat excited: “All my friends will be there to hear me and I will feel so at home there. My voice is still very good, you know, but it can’t compare with the golden voice I once had.”

He was full of memories. Enrico Caruso still seemed to him a “semi-god.” He also bowed to Basso Chaliapin : “What a stage personality! I would never undertake Boris [Godunov] after Chaliapin.” To Rothier, singers are different today, although since his retirement from the Met in 1939 he has tried to teach newcomers the old ways. “Nowadays,” says he, “there are very few great voices because everybody is in such a hurry to become a star. They win a contest by singing one aria — and they are stars before they are ready.”

On anniversary night last week, friends, students and long-remembering fans got to hear more than a remembrance of a great voice. Although he puffed a bit through his program of Lully, Berlioz, Debussy and Bizet, Basso Rothier proved he still had a voice as golden in its middle range as an old $20 piece and as round and sound at the bottom as a mahogany log. And when he finished up with Schumann’s The Two Grenadiers he also proved he could still bring down a house.