Honouring a Legend
Aubrey Malone profiles the hugely popular tenor Mario Lanza who achieved film-star status in the forties and fifties
There'll never be another Mario Lanza. People like Pavarotti and Placido Domingo and Jose Carreras are probably foremost on people's lips today when it comes to the subject of 'The Greatest Tenor of Them All' but to those of us who were around when Lanza was sending chills down people's spines with his soulful renditions of songs like 'I'll Walk with God', 'Night and Day' and countless others there'll only be one real contender for that accolade.
Lanza, like many larger than life performers, was like Haley's Comet - something that only comes around once in an era. But he also burned himself out, as comets tend to do. A mere 38 when he died of a pulmonary embolism, one immediately thinks of the parallels to one Elvis Presley, another iconic figure who ate too much (I once heard a rumour that Lanza used to have six eggs for breakfast) and paid the ultimate price for a life in the fast lane by dying around the same age.
Ironically, at the time he died he was on a weight loss programme. Maybe the sudden transition from bingeing to deprivation was what did him in. Or was he a heart attack waiting to happen anyway?
Elvis loved Lanza's voice. When he came out of the army in 1960 and had his image changed from leather-clad rocker to a more sedate crooner, one of the first tunes he chose to signal that metamorphosis was Lanza's 'O Sole Mio' which he released as 'It's Now or Never'. It flew off the shelves and ushered in the new 'mature' Presley.
This features in the tribute concert, as well as most of the classic Lanza standards - 'Serenade', 'Because', 'Ave Maria', 'Be My Love', 'Golden Days', the title song of the show and a song that's now almost synonomous with the aforementioned Luciano Pavarotti, 'Nessun Dorma'.
Lanza, like most great singers, could mix passionate strength with lyrical softness. This was his great talent - the ability to interpret a lyric so poignantly. It's a talent we often associate with another great admirer of his, Frank Sinatra. Elvis had it too.
Like Elvis, Lanza could sing in any genre. Bono once described Elvis as an opera singer. Both Lanza and Elvis could go from this to commercial music, which some purists would regard as artistic slumming. I prefer to see the quality simply as versatility. Lanza himself, however, felt he had in some sense sold out his purity to Tinseltown, not having been blooded enough on the operatic stage before the lure of the dollar (and a more instant type of fame) beckoned.
He also had chocolate box good looks, but the film career of the Italian-American who was born Alfred Arnold Cocozza - he took his stage name from his mother, whose maiden name was Maria Lanza - was of course cut short by his tragically premature demise in 1959.
Even so, he will forever live in filmgoer's memories for his roles in movies like 'The Midnight Kiss', 'The Toast of New Orleans', 'Serenade', 'Seven Hills of Rome' and 'The Great Caruso', a biopic where he played his hero and sometime mentor Enrico Caruso to international acclaim.
He should also have been in 'The Student Prince' but walked off the set after a typically diva-like blow-up with the producer. His voice was used but a miming Edmund Purdom ended up playing the role.
Not too many youngsters today will be aware of just how powerful a singer he was, which is why this show is an ideal opportunity for music lovers of all ages to take a trip down Memory Lane and re-live the magic that was Lanza.
Toscanini called him 'the greatest voice of the 20th century'. Hollywood sob sister Hedda Hopper said he was 'the last of the great romantic performers', but also alluded to his tamper tantrums when she said that his smile 'which was as big as his voice, was matched with the habits of a tiger cub, impossible to housebreak'.
His success was meteoric, but not without its pressures. World War 2 couldn't have come at a worse time for him and caused a major hiatus in his career when he was called up to serve in the Army Air Corps. Then in 1954, shortly after the debacle of 'The Student Prince', he ran into trouble with the taxman, receiving a bill for $250,000 which he was hard put to pay as his manager had invested his earnings in a string of dead-end projects. This crisis also caused him to stop singing for a time, andd almost made him declare bankruptcy. No wonder his blood pressure almost went off the scale.
In the end perhaps his tragedy was that he lived too literally the advice he gave in one of his most infectious melodies from 'The Student Prince': 'Drink, drink, drink...'
What he couldn't have forseen was that his wife and many of his children would also die young. His widow Betty only survived him by five months, a drug overdose being rumoured as the cause. Then one of his sons got a heart attack at 37, a daughter died in a car accident at 48 and a second son died two years ago of a heart attack at 55 - which almost sounds elderly by comparison with the others.
But the Lanza voice is timeless and now you have a chance to experience its wondrous range again in 'The Loveliest Night of the Year'.
