Wilson

This past weekend, I drove my nineteen year old son, Mario, and his friend from Durham, NC to Glenside, PA. to see Brian Wilson in concert at the Keswick Theater. My son has had a passion for the Beach Boys and Brian Wilson for years, the kind of passion I felt at his age for an opera singer named Mario Del Monaco, after whom my son is named, incidentally.

Wilson’s new album is Lucky Old Sun, and while I didn’t attend the concert, I have heard the album. How could I not? Mario plays it constantly. And in my own geezer fashion, I was drawn to it because Lucky Old Sun was one of my favorite Frankie Laine recordings way back when.

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Giuseppe Di Stefano.

The world is emptier and diminished with the death last week of the great tenor, Giuseppe Di Stefano. A patch of beauty has been taken from us. The circumstances of his passing are too tragic to contemplate — a beating by some thugs in Kenya years ago that put this wonderful man and tenor into a coma that eventually resulted in death.

That the final years of a man who brought so much pleasure was so unnecessarily painful is disturbing. We expect everyone to die sooner or later, but to die like this adds an urgency to our grief, as if we can’t grieve enough.

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As I’ll always remember him.

Time out for politics, rants and raves.

Another another light of beauty has gone out. Much will be written about him in the weeks following his death and there is little I can add except to express my own personal feelings about a voice we will never hear in person again.

In truth, that voice left him about fifteen years ago, but there was plenty left to sustain him, and us, during that time. Mostly with the Three Tenors and his scattered appearances in opera houses.

As a lifelong opera lover inspired by Mario Lanza, for whom my father tailored suits in South Philadelphia to Luciano, few singers achieved the purity of voice and sound that he possessed.

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Will Maintain Busy Schedule, Nevertheless.

The Opera World was stunned today to learn of the untimely death at 86 of the ubiquitous, renowned tenor, Placido Domingo, who suffered a fatal heart attack as he was signing contracts for appearances in the Republic of Chad while simultaneously conducting Cavalleria Rusticana and singing Pagliacci in Buenos Aires.

However, fans of the peripatetic and seemingly indestructable tenor will be happy to learn that despite his death, Mr. Domingo will fulfill all his contractual obligations, which extend until age 94, had he lived that long. The first on his dead to-do list is a complete recording of Tristan und Isolde, which he’ll channel from the hereafter. Isolde and other characters will be singing live so it will be a kind of Natalie Cole sings with dead dad Nat kind of thing.

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Who Could Ask For Anything More!

For all you afficianados of opera and baseball, I’ve been ruminating a lot lately about the tenors I have heard in my lifetime and thought I’d put them in a baseball lineup. If you don’t follow either opera or our National Sport, just skip this or you’ll be scratching your head.

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Luciano Vincenzoni, one of the writers who brought us such spaghetti westerns as The Good, The Bad and the Ugly and For A Few Dollars More is writing a film on the life of Puccini.

The following scene dramatizes a little known meeting between Puccini and Ruggerio Leoncavallo.

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Del Monaco

When my son, Mario, was three years old I heard a troubling raspiness in his voice, to me an ironic condition because his full Christian name is Mario del Monaco Boni, after the great Italian singer, Mario del Monaco, whose death almost twenty-five years ago on October 16 closed the chapter on that rare operatic creature — the heroic tenor.

My Mario had not yet been born when I visited his namesake at his villa in Lancenigo just four months before he died. There I discovered that in a small way I had touched the life of a boyhood hero who had touched my own so enormously.

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