Music: Opera Comic

San Francisco operagoers were having more fun than a picnic. At first they giggled, then they laughed; soon they were standing up and screaming “Encore!” It was all because of a new basso no one had ever heard of before. “He’s wonderful,” cried a lady with a tiara. “Who is he?”

Last week, San Francisco was learning fast enough who Italo Tajo is. As Don Basilio in The Barber of Seville, his booming and clowning had stopped the show—”the kind of show-stopping,” wrote the San Francisco Chronicle’s Critic Alfred Frankenstein, “which makes an unknown artist a star . . . Like Feodor Chaliapin before him, Italo Tajo could easily take to the road with a company playing nothing but The Barber of Seville:’

A few nights later, when he played Leporello in Don Giovanni, the operagoers cheered again. Critics found Tajo a first-rate singer; audiences took to him because he was also a first-rate comedian.

Italo Tajo had sung Don Basilio only two days after arriving in the U.S., and after only one rehearsal. But he has been working up to it since he was 13. It was then that he heard Pagliacci in Milan. Before long, he was reading librettos behind his schoolbooks. His schoolwork suffered (“I was stupido”), but Tajo didn’t care.

When he was 19, he went to Turin to take his final examinations. He flunked, so he walked over to the opera house, asked for an audition, and got a contract.

When he got home, “I presented my father with the contract instead of my marks. He was delighted. He forgave me.”

Except for two years in the Italian army (“I don’t like the killing business. Me, I am afraid”), Tajo has been singing ever since—in Turin, Rome, London, Milan, and in 1946, briefly in Chicago. Now, at 33, he hopes to stay in the U.S., has. already signed with the Met. He is happy that he makes people laugh, but he wants to do more serious roles than Don Basilio or Leporello. Says he: “I do the comic role because I have the nerve. But I like Boris Godunov better.”