New Don from Dresden

When Ezio Pinza moved up Broadway from the Metropolitan Opera to South Pacific last spring, many a Met-goer was left wondering who would fill his shoes as the Met's most popular and winning villain, Don Giovanni. The answer came from Vienna--and it was not the only question that stocky Bass-Baritone Paul Schoeffler, 42, answered for the Met.

In his first Don last February, some missed Pinza's dash and derring-do; instead, Schoeffler gave them suavity and elegance. They also missed the ringing excitement of Pinza's voice. Schoeffler's lower voice seemed slightly gruff; but he covered the range with sureness and in finished style. He was impressive as Jokanaan in Salome, and critics crowed over his performance as, Hans Sachs in Die Meistersinger.

Sensual & Sinister. Last week, Baritone Schoeffler capped his first season at the Met with a crack performance of the sensual and sinister Scarpia in Puccini's Tosca. When he was onstage with his longtime Vienna State Opera friend, red-haired Soprano Ljuba Welitch (as Tosca), the audience saw and heard the kind of sure, smooth action and singing that make Vienna's ensemble just about tops in the operatic world.

Dresden-born Baritone Schoeffler has little taste for his usual role as an operatic "heavy." So far, he figures he has been stabbed or poisoned onstage at least 150 times. He would rather sing in such operas as Meistet-singer and Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, where "everyone comes away happy."

If Schoeffler really had had his way, he would have been a conductor, the role he was studying 20 years ago in Dresden when his teacher told him he had a career-making voice. He got his first break in opera that same year in Dresden from Conductor Fritz Busch; he was still singing with the company on the dark day in March 1933 when Hitler's hoodlums broke up Busch's performance of Rigoletto. Soon after Busch left the country, Schoeffler went to Vienna, where he sang throughout the war. Since the war, engagements at opera houses from Milan to Covent Garden have kept him on the move.

Paint & Poison. Married to an Englishwoman who works with the International Refugee Organization in Vienna ("a very important lady"), Schoeffler has homes in both England and Vienna. The Schoefflers' 17-year-old son Peter, a British subject, is studying economics at Oxford. He wants to be a singer too ("he has the same voice I do"), but papa Schoeffler is trying to say no--"This business of dressing up in a silly costume, putting on a wig and paint on the face and getting killed or poisoned or drunk every night, it is no good."

Papa Schoeffler himself is in for a good deal more of it next season at the Met. Thus far, he is scheduled to sing a Ring cycle, The Flying Dutchman and the " wicked Pizarro in Beethoven's Fidelia, with Kirsten Flagstad.

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