Word: basso
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...fight! Couldn't make love to anybody! He was tied down. The whole orientation of psychoanalysis has developed out of the patient's recumbent position." Dr. Moreno punctuated his remarks with colorful gestures, and his gusto of delivery could qualify him for another role--that of basso buffo...
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...
...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...
...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...
This week, on CBS's We the People program, U.S. music-lovers were to hear for the first time how the great tenor sounded as a great basso. For, pleased with his prank, Caruso had made a recording a few weeks later. Only six prints had been run off and Caruso had ordered the master copy destroyed. Said he: "I don't want to spoil the bass business." But one of the prints had been preserved by Dr. Mario Marafioti, onetime Met physician and friend of Caruso, and Narrator Wally (Voices That Live) Butterworth had persuaded...