The opera world is helpless against a love story, and it is now under the spell of a real one. On a spring day in 1996, Angela Gheorghiu, the dreamy Romanian soprano, and Roberto Alagna, the equally dreamy French-Italian tenor, skipped out of a rehearsal at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. They made their way to City Hall, where Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was delighted to pronounce them man and wife. They then hustled back to the Met for further rehearsal of La Boheme, one of the most romantic of operas.
At the next day’s matinee, the newlyweds basked in the cheers of their enraptured fans, and that evening in a televised gala they sang a Mascagni duet cheek to cheek — the bride looking transported, the groom looking slightly distracted (and in worse voice, thanks to allergies). The sighs of an international audience were all but audible.
Since then, the couple’s careers have been blazing. The musical press has described them as “opera’s dream team,” “opera’s sweethearts,” “opera’s golden twosome,” “opera’s hottest duo,” “opera’s Fred and Ginger,” “opera’s ten-hanky heartthrobs.” They are, as nearly everyone has remarked, all a publicist could wish for.
Music may be close to a meritocracy, but extra-musical charms are not irrelevant, particularly in opera (as Maria Callas discovered after shedding over sixty pounds). Gheorghiu is a jaw-dropping, traffic-stopping, ten-alarm beauty. Critics have not ignored her looks, and they should not. One writer from the London Evening Standard noted that Gheorghiu is “believable as a woman so sexy that men would kill for her, or die for her.”
Alagna is no eyesore himself, possessing a scruffy, working-class magnetism. The son of a Sicilian bricklayer, he grew up in Paris, singing for tips in cabarets. For a time, as he was trying to break into opera, he supported himself as an electrician. With no formal musical training, he is a natural, instinctive singer, touted as “The Fourth Tenor” (after the Big Three of stadium-concert renown: Luciano Pavarotti, Plaicido Domingo, and Jose Carreras).
Alagna says of his encounter with Gheorghiu, “It was love at first sight.” That was in 1992, when they were both already married to others: he to a woman who died two years later, leaving him with a young daughter; she to a Bucharest plumber, whom she apparently discarded in order to join Alagna (a detail that the publicity materials omit). Now in their early thirties, the pair enjoy the status of pin-ups, which is fine with Alagna: “The problem today in classical music,” he says, “is that it is seen as shameful to be visible, to make records, to be in the public eye. Why should pop or film stars get full-page articles and opera singers three lines?”
Just last month, the couple received one of the highest accolades music can bestow: “Album of the Year” from Gramophone magazine, the most important publication in the business. The award came for their recording of La Rondine, a seldom-performed opera of Puccini, which brims with influences from both his Boheme and Richard Strauss’s waltzy wonder, Der Rosenkavalier. If the opera has been known for anything, it has been for the soprano aria “Chi il bel sogno,” popularly called “Doretta’s Song,” which Leontyne Price has made her own for some fifty years now. Gheorghiu does not handle it especially well, failing to exploit the spine-tingling lilt of the piece and flatting on its glorious, sustained high C.
Elsewhere, though, she is superb, displaying a medium-sized, adaptable voice with a powerful top register and a dark, Callas-like lower one. In “Ore dolci e divine” — the opera’s second-best-known portion — she is playful and affecting. Her vibrato is excitingly quick and her articulation crisp. Her musical judgments are occasionally odd, but they are usually interesting and defensible.
Alagna, for his part, is arresting: virile, warm, and sturdy. He has a nice sense of the musical line, and his vocal production is simple, direct, and unforced. Voices, like people, have personalities, and his is charismatic — something no one can learn but everyone desires.
Another briskly selling disc is Gheorghiu’s collection of arias, released in 1996 as her debut album. She is particularly effective in the hit from Alfredo Catalani’s opera La Wally, made famous in the 1980s New Wave film Diva. Gheorghiu’s voice is lovely but, to her benefit, not sugary sweet; it has a bite to it, as though cut with vinegar. Her “Jewel Song” from Gounod’s Faust is winsome, showing Gheorghiu to be a persuasive French singer, with ample technique. With “Quel guardo il cavaliere” from Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, she establishes her bel canto credentials, exhibiting a refined sense of dynamics and weight.
Alagna, too, has made a recording of arias, whose accompanying booklet features perhaps more photographs than necessary. His timbre is similar to Pavarotti’s — the older man is something of a model — and his intonation is secure. He treats Donizetti robustly, lending a heft to lightish music. Yet there is some evidence of strain on his upper notes, suggesting that he ought to seek an adjustment in technique to protect his longevity.
In the well-loved “Pourquoi me reveiller?” from Massenet’s Werther, Alagna is sensitive — and it is refreshing to hear a tenor sing proper French for a change. His “E la solita storia” from Francesco Cilea’s Arlesiana is rightly haunting, but in his softer singing, his voice loses body and substance. His “Donna e mobile” from Verdi’s Rigoletto is both suave and exuberant, though it betrays his tendency to sing sharp (as he does here on his big, concluding B).
Alagna’s most recent album is Serenades, a bow to his southern Italian heritage. (Gheorghiu, too, plans to look homeward with a collection of Romanian folk songs.) In traditional favorites like Maria Mari, Torna a Surriento, and O sole mio (the Italian tenor’s calling-card), Alagna is accompanied by his two guitar-playing brothers. Sometimes, family loyalty can go too far in music — as Mstislav Rostropovich demonstrated when he had his daughter accompany him in recital — but, for the most part, the Alagna brothers pick and strum inoffensively. Strangely, Alagna’s singing in this recording lacks intimacy, though he has the songs in his bloodstream and performs with his family in the comfort of a small Venetian church. Pavarotti, to name only one, is far superior in this repertory.
Gheorghiu and Alagna’s greatest commercial success, unsurprisingly, has come with their album of duets — the cover showing them reclining in each other’s arms. Does it matter that the singers are married? They certainly think so. Alagna declares that “to sing love duets with the person you love is magnifique. We are natural together.” Gheorghiu adds, “We seem to breathe as one. There’s an extra energy and an extra charge to what we do. It’s impossible to explain the feeling.”
They are indeed convincing together, though perhaps mainly because of their musicianship. An appealing selection on their duets album is “Tonight” from Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story — their performance showing that the piece deserves to be known as a genuine operatic duet, alongside those from Faust, Don Pasquale, and La Boheme. The couple’s voices are not to everybody’s liking: Hers can take on a pillowed, Joan Sutherland-like quality, and her breathing is now and then shallow; he can be pinched, nasal, and ” covered.” But they invariably command attention.
Lately, some critics have been wearying of their act, and a bit of backlash has set in. The two have been reproved for petulance, high-handedness, airs — in other words, for behaving like opera stars. Alagna complains that “Angela and I have been put to siege . . . because of our position.” He has a point when he claims that they are the targets of envy and resentment: “People whisper, Will they live happily ever after? The critics are much harder on me now that I am so happy. I think they were kinder when I was this sad, poor guy going through a difficult time.”
Still, the world is throwing garlands at the singers’ feet, swooning over the obvious passion between them and hoping for the success of their marriage. (Opera’s two most famous marriages — Leontyne Price and William Warfield, and Robert Merrill and Roberta Peters — both foundered quickly.) Annoying as the hype may be, they deserve their celebrity, their wealth, the screaming, adulatory throngs. Why not? They are first-rate musicians — who happen to sparkle with glamour, as well.
Jay Nordlinger, associate editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD, writes regularly on classical music.
