Music: The Great Basso

“I like to play parts,” Ezio Pinza once confided to a friend. “It is something you have or you have not. If you have, it’s easy.”

For nearly 40 extraordinary years, Basso Pinza had it. Blessed with a brawny, 6-ft.-1-in. frame, a handsome, dignified face and a flexible, powerful bass voice, he ranged through 82 operatic roles, singing and acting them in a style that had his admirers reaching far back into opera’s Golden Age for comparisons. When he left the Metropolitan Opera at 55 in 1948 to appear with Mary Martin in South Pacific, Pinza slipped into the role of Broadway matinee idol with such ease that many postwar fans were scarcely aware that he had ever done anything else. After a stroke forced him to give up singing last summer, he launched enthusiastically into other plans, hoped for a straight dramatic career on Broadway. But that chance never came.

Under the Shower. Pinza developed into one of opera’s giants with scarcely any formal musical training. At an age when some singers are already getting launched, he was working as a professional bicycle racer and a brakeman on an Italian railroad. The seventh child of a poor carpenter, he was brought up in Ravenna, considered a career in civil engineering before he turned to racing, in which he had only middling success. He was standing under the shower one day singing O Sole Mio when the cyclist in the stall next to him told him that he had a voice. Pinza prepped with a home-town voice teacher, was accepted by the conservatory at Bologna, made a whistle-stop debut with a small opera company, and departed for World War I.

Even before Pinza got out of the army at 27, he won a chance to sing the Count des Grieux in Manon in Rome. After that, his career picked up a dizzying momentum. Toscanini invited him to sing at La Scala, where he scored such a hit in Boito’s Nerone that in 1926 Metropolitan Opera Manager Giulio Gatti-Casazza signed him up.

Like a Ballplayer. A true basso cantante (singing bass), he had enough flexibility to invade roles often sung by baritones without losing the power that enabled him to reach the back row without straining. And with his big voice he had the elusive personal magnetism and the dignity that grand opera demands. For a whole generation of operagoers, Pinza’s Don Giovanni—in richly decorated doublet and single gold earring—was the virile embodiment of everything the role implied. Although Pinza could barely read music, he had a prodigious musical memory and a bone-deep sense of musical taste. He labored over makeup and stage business—he once spent hours hurling himself to the floor of the Met’s stage to learn how Boris Godunov should die. At a few hours’ notice he could move through any one of half a hundred roles with the reflex authority of a fine ballplayer.

Mostly barred from playing heroes’ roles, usually reserved in opera for tenors, he specialized in the buffoons, villains and patriarchs within his wide-angled range—Don Basilio in The Barber of Seville, Mephistopheles in Faust, Sarastro in The Magic Flute. Pinza uncomplainingly took minor roles, and his willingness to work made him one of the busiest and also one of the best-paid singers of his era ($125,000 a year). He was free of usual operatic temperament; his colleagues still recall the exceptional time he turned to a little boy sitting in the front row at one of his recitals and said with great patience: “Little boy, please stop to waggle your foot; it interfere with my tempo.”

Heartthrob. Even before he throbbed hearts with Some Enchanted Evening, Ezio Pinza had projected enough of his charm across the Met’s footlights to become a romantic idol. In recent years he settled down (with his second wife) to a suburban brand of domesticity, but for much of his life Pinza had a turbulent romantic reputation. This reputation he may have relished as much as his singing, but he modestly believed that, like his singing, it was the result mainly of good luck. More than any other male singer of his era, Pinza brought his audiences the color, the movement, the larger-than-life passions of opera. The Don, Boris, Mephisto and all their booming, strutting company seemed to shrink somewhat last week, when at his home in Connecticut ailing Ezio Pinza suffered his third and final stroke, in his sleep, nine days short of his 65th birthday.