Despite an easy top and a resounding voice, equally impressive in Händel as in Verdi, American tenor Richard Tucker is often bypassed when the century's greatest are counted. Dr. Kurtzman pays hommage to the Met's leading tenor of the '50s and the '60s, perhaps the greates tenor the American continent has had to date.   J. Anthonisen.

“He has a beautiful voice, but he’s too noble.”

That was my seven year old son’s critique of Richard Tucker’s performance in Carmen; it was his first exposure to the great American tenor. Tucker had sung Don Jose in his customary style. Wonderful singing combined with ham (what my son meant by “noble”) acting. He had mastered every operatic cliché – fist on the breast, fist shaking, galumphing around the stage like Frankenstein’s monster. He could have run Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks. When Tucker performed with Zinka Milanov, which was often, they could have cornered the world’s prosciutto market. But what voices! The rest didn’t matter.

Tucker had a focused spinto tenor voice that was ideal for Verdi. It was perfectly produced, had flawless intonation, and handled the passaggio as well as any tenor of the last hundred years. Though his numerous recordings clearly reveal a great voice, they do not reproduce the visceral impact his voice had when heard live in the house. He was the opposite of his contemporary Jussi Björling. Björling sounds better on records than he did in performance – his voice was not as big as seems on his recordings. Tucker was best experienced in person.

I heard virtually all of the great tenors of the last half century in performance, but Tucker was the one I heard the most often. I would guess more than 50 times. I first heard him in 1955 at the Met as Verdi’s most neurotic tenor – Don Carlo. I soon heard him in the rest of his Italian roles then in the Met’s repertory. In November of that year I heard him sing French for the first time - Offenbach’s demented hero Hoffmann; a role he shortly thereafter dropped from his repertoire. Why I can’t imagine; he was the best Hoffmann I ever heard. I last heard him almost 20 years later in Chicago in a recital with Robert Merrill. Nothing had changed in the interval. His stage deportment was still goofy and his voice still glorious and untouched by age – he was past 60.

Tucker had a really big voice combined with the best technique and vocal agility I ever heard in a tenor voice of comparable size. He may have been guilty of lapses in taste, but never in technique. I never heard him off pitch – never. His vocal consistency was legendary among his colleagues as was his lack of nervousness. He was almost pathologically self assured. He never had the jitters unlike his friend and admirer Franco Corelli who gave up singing because of stage fright more than anything else.

His diction was perfect in both English and Italian. Listen to him sing Handel and you’ll easily understand every word. The vowels are clearly formed and not distorted; the consonants are firmly (sometimes too firmly) articulated. His Italian singing was so good he fooled fluent speakers of that language into thinking he was a Florentine – the highest possible compliment. Yet, he could barely speak the language. When Tullio Serafin asked him where he had learned Italian he replied Brooklyn.

The Saturday broadcasts from the Met feature a quiz during the second intermission. On one of the programs several years ago the contestants were asked to identify the tenors singing the same passage from an Italian opera. One of them was Richard Tucker. William Weaver, who lives in Italy and who has written a lot of good stuff about opera, had trouble identifying Tucker.

       “I don’t know who it is, but he sounds like a Florentine,” he said.
       “Yeah, a Florentine from Brooklyn,” said the quizmaster. And everybody laughed.