Robert Merrill: What a big, rock-steady, rich-sounding baritone, and one with the Italian language embedded in it as if by nature! And what an infuriatingly heedless, slovenly artist he could be, despite an inherent musicality, especially when this splendid instrument began to escape his grip! The attitude shows on the first page of his autobiography.^(I) “This is the lousiest baritone role ever written. You know that George, don’t you?” It would bring him no glory, no matter how well he sang it. But heck, he’d do it, this crummy part of Enrico Ashton in Lucia di Lammermoor, for the opening night of the 1964-65 season, as a big favor to Rudolf Bing (who’d once given him his walking papers for skipping the Met tour for a dumb movie, Aaron Slick from Punkin Crik), and to sing with Joanie. What a guy! And here he is, twenty-two years into his Met career, “doing” Amonasro. It’s still a big, rock-steady rich-sounding baritone, and the Italian is still pretty good, though now rather compromised to accommodate his imitation of the latterday “baritone snarl” to indicate sundry negative feelings. He does a fair amount of his “whooping” for emphasis on obvious key wordnotes, rushes through the higher-lying phrases, and altogether gives a cartoonish account of a part he’d often sung—shorter than Ashton, but I guess not as lousy.

Merrill recorded a lot, chalking up most of the plum roles of the Italian repertory, and on better behavior most of the time, putting him on an equal footing in the aural archive with the likes of Leonard Warren, Cornell MacNeil, Tito Gobbi, and Giuseppe Taddei. Jerome Hines, though, has nothing like the recorded presence of Cesare Siepi, Giorgio Tozzi, Boris Christoff, or Nicolai Ghiaurov, although he was for over thirty years as prominent on the Metropolitan’s roster as any of them. (Christoff, in fact, never did join the company after foolish visa restrictions occasioned by Congressional Commie Panic prevented his entry for the opening production Don Carlo, of Bing’s inaugural season.) Ramfis was a fine role for him, but earlier broadcasts find his handsome, long-ranged bass in fresher shape, sounding a little more important and a little less self-important. As I said, though, we’re in a different cosmos.

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NEXT TIME: The new-opera campaign at the Metropolitan has not gone very well. But elsewhere, there is lots of creative activity in progress, and I’ve been seeing assertions from opera professionals who ought to know that we are, at long last, compiling an American repertory of viable works. My inner skeptic asks, “Can this possibly be true?” No one would greet the confirmation of the tidings more enthusiastically than I, and while I cannot gad about the country as I once did in search of such verification, I can assemble some recent audio and video documentation for evaluation, and let you know where I come out. Since that project is open-ended, I cannot yet promise a posting date (my next Met tryst is with Fidelio in early March), but I’ll give you an advance heads-up.

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