Basso Cantante

A tall, brawny Italian with a conspirator's felt hat last week kissed his wife good-by in suburban Mamaroneck, swung behind the wheel of a Clipper model Packard and drove to Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House. There he encased himself in the beard and trappings of an ancient czar. Exactly one hour after his arrival, Ezio Pinza, with a regal bearing that scattered stagehands right & left, stubbed out the butt of a lighted cigaret and strode through the wings as Boris Godunoff.

Ezio was playing Boris for the 50th time. For him, every groan and stagger of Modest Moussorgsky's doom-shadowed hero was an old story. But Pinza as usual sang and acted every line with half-crazed intensity, made the part so live that his audience could almost smell the sweat of medieval Moscow. Next day critics tried hard to find a new way of saying that Ezio Pinza is the world's greatest operatic basso, the greatest singing actor of his generation.

Pinza, who has been singing at the Met for 16 years, is the answer to an impresario's prayer. He can sing any of 55 operatic roles at a few hours' notice. He has no objection to playing minor roles, usually succeeds in making them seem major. No scene-stealer, he can be counted on to help inexperienced members of the cast. A wonderful example of what the Italians call a basso cantante ("singing bass"), he combines baritone agility with bass sonority and boom. That voice, at the Metropolitan and in concert tours, grosses between $75,000 and $100,000 a year.

Outside the opera house Basso Pinza looks like a prosperous retired bullfighter. He works over his roles as systematically as a strategist planning a campaign, ransacking Manhattan's libraries, boning up on history, costumes, manners. To make his Boris Godunoff fall dead with proper dignity, he practiced hurling his 191 lb. on to the Metropolitan's floor boards for hours, until he was so badly bruised he could hardly walk.

Seventh child of an Italian carpenter, Basso Pinza was born in Rome in 1892. His only youthful distinction was as a middling bicycle racer. The turning point came when he happened to sing O Sole Mio in the shower after taking second place in a local race. The man in the next shower told him he had a voice. Pinza was soon on his way to Bologna, where home-town folks chipped in to help him through the Rossini Conservatory. He scarcely had time for a jerkwater debut, when he was mustered into World War I.

The war over, Pinza spent a brief spell as brakeman on a railroad, then got a chance to sing King Mark in Tristan und Isolde at the Teatro Reale dell' Opera in Rome. Soon his reputation was made. Arturo Toscanini gave him a contract at Milan's famed La Scala opera house. There the late impresario Giulio Gatti-Casazza signed him for the Metropolitan. Last year, despite the fact that Basso Pinza had his first citizenship papers, the FBI got irritated at some patriotic Italian speeches he had made, interned him, but released him eleven weeks later.

Ezio Pinza of Mamaroneck lives a quiet life with his second wife (the former Doris Neal Leak, daughter of a Larchmont dentist) and their ly-month-old daughter in a rambling eleven-room house.

His fame as a singer he is still inclined to view as good luck rather than achievement. Says he: "I like to play parts. It is something you have or you have not. If you have, it's easy."

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