Music: Opera’s Grand Trouper

The opera performed at the Metropolitan that evening was Verdi’s Falstaff, with an unknown “cover” singer filling in for the ailing Spanish Baritone Vincente Bal-lester in the role of the wealthy burgher Ford. In the second act Ford sang his famous monologue E sogne? a realta? and shortly made his exit. As the orchestra launched into the music of the act’s second scene, the audience began chanting an unfamiliar name: “Tibbett! Tibbett! Tib-bett!” Conductor Tullio Serafin waved his orchestra to silence and through the gold curtain stepped a slim young man with a putty-shaped nose to acknowledge an ovation that stopped the opera for 20 minutes.

That night in 1925 marked the beginning of Baritone Lawrence Tibbett’s operatic career—although for the rest of the season he was to continue in minor roles because he had not yet had time to learn major ones. A large (6 ft. 1 in., 200 Ibs.), imposing man, Tibbett had a big, bronzelike, dramatically eloquent voice that combined ringing power with remarkable agility, which he liked to demonstrate for friends by singing through entire operas, assuming not only the baritone but the tenor parts as well. Moreover, Tibbett was one of the few opera stars whose acting ability matched his voice; trained in stock (as a young man he toured with Tyrone Power Sr. in Shakespeare) and later in Hollywood, he brought an entirely new quality of professionalism to the opera stage, creating some of the most memorable characterizations in Metropolitan history.

Booming Voice. In a career that spanned more than a quarter-century, Tibbett ranged through more than 70 roles. He was never a leading Wagnerian, instead concentrated on the great baritone roles of the Italian repertory: lago in Otello, the elder Germont in Traviata, Scarpia in Tosca, Amonasro in A’ida. For Tibbett the Met scheduled rarely performed operas such as Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra, and it was Tibbett, a longtime champion of English-language opera, who created the baritone roles in such contemporary American operas as Deems Taylor’s The King’s Henchman and Peter Ibbetson. To the title role of Louis Gruen-berg’s The Emperor Jones he brought an eerie sense of terror, sending his great voice booming among the dwarfish, treelike forms that grew grotesquely on the Met’s shadowy stage.

Tibbett was that rarest of opera stars, a singer born and trained in the U.S., with no European experience. The son of a Bakersfield, Calif, sheriff who was killed in a gun battle with bandits, Tibbett grew up in Los Angeles, sang in the high school glee club, earned small fees singing at funerals. After serving in World War I, he embarked on a professional acting career, but soon found himself singing the musical prologues to silent films at Hollywood’s old Grauman Theater. On borrowed money he traveled to New York, auditioned for the Met twice before he was signed to a $60-a-week contract. He was just 26, and it was not until two years later that his name hit the headlines in Falstaff.

Box-Office Glitter. Tibbett always had a faint distrust of grand opera’s grand pretensions. The music of Jerome Kern, he used to argue, was as good as many an imported classic. When critics roasted him for including Old Man River in a program of operatic excerpts, he responded by including it in almost every recital he sang after that. He also laced his concert programs with popular tranquilizers—De Glory Road, Gwine to Hebb’n, At Dawning. Tibbett probably made more money than his contemporaries because he was the first to exploit the box-office glitter of the Met’s name in the world of show business—a practice that Rudolf Bing later frowned upon. He became one of the first U.S. opera singers to make a movie, The Rogue Song, followed it up with a string of schmalzy operettas: New Moon, Cuban Love Song, Under Your Spell.

While at the Met he sang on The Voice of Firestone, followed Frank Sinatra as the star of Your Hit Parade at $4,000 a week.

After he retired from the Met in 1950, Tibbett campaigned for more televised opera, explained that he wanted to cultivate a new audience for opera, unhampered by the kind of snobbery that was fostered in the boxes of the Golden Horseshoe. He had, in fact, created a new operatic audience long before television was born. When he died last week at 63, following head surgery, he was only a name to a whole younger generation of operagoers. But he left behind not only the echoes of a great voice but the memory of a performer who could feel equally at home with high art and popular entertainment, suggesting that there is a magical link between the two.