It’s almost over.
The Christmas carols. This is not a bunch of bah, humbug, but seriously, how many times can one listen to “All I Want for Christmas is You,” or “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot like Christmas,” or “Last Christmas”?
All fine songs. But when you listen to radio stations or office Muzak all day long for 30 days, the ears begin to hear nails on the chalkboard.
And do they really get you in the Christmas spirit?
I’m no Grinch. Some of my fondest memories of childhood Christmases were the carols. The tree went up right after Thanksgiving. The Gurley candle village — complete with churches, carolers, orchestra members, angels, and Santas — were on my mother’s prized harvest table. They were great for my dollhouse. My mother and sisters made ornaments and other decorations, which were memorable in other ways: Those crafty Christmas trees, for example, were made from Styrofoam balls with toothpicks sticking out from all sides and flocked with fake snow. One was green. Its companion was orange. It was the ‘60s, after all.
But my favorite part of Christmas was when all the downstairs lights were off and the tree was fully lit — in highly dangerous and flammable big lights — and mother, or some other responsible persons, like my big sisters, put on the carols that we all must listen to today.
We listened to Eddy Arnold sing “Will Santa Come to Shanty Town,” Burl Ives’ “Silver and Gold,” and of course the crooners, Bing Crosby, Dean Martin, Perry Como. Good stuff all.
But nothing meant Christmas until we put on our favorites, O Tannebaum, a record (a 331/3) featuring Werner Mueller and a choir singing German Christmas music by the big guys, Mozart, complete with church bells pealing the glorious news.
But it was tenor Mario Lanza’s voice that really heralded the season.
My mother loved what she called “long-haired music,” or classical and opera. While my idol is Enrico Caruso, hers was Mario Lanza, which made sense: Lanza died in 1959 and Caruso in 1921, the year Lanza was born, oddly enough. She saw Lanza live in Toledo, and fell in love with his voice, and probably Lanza himself.
I can’t tell you how many times she’d talk about him and how Hollywood ruined him. He was very young when he died in October, 1959, leaving behind a wife, who died shortly after he did, four children, a raft or recordings and movies, and a bunch of conspiracies about how he died. Murdered by the mob? Overdose? A Hollywood hit job?
Lanza became an alcoholic, left a Hollywood that carped about his fluctuating weight and temperament, and left for Rome. It was there he died of an apparent pulmonary embolism.
Lanza was called the Second Caruso — every promising tenor before Pavarotti had been compared to Caruso, now the benchmark is Pavarotti — and gained superstardom by singing popular songs and arias, but performed as Pinkerton in Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly and La Boheme, and Otto Nicolai’s Merry Wives of Windsor. And that was it for the opera stage.
At times he was dismissed as an opera star, much in the way Andrea Bocelli is today by the purists. But while I‘m no expert, I must grudgingly admit that his voice has a heft to it that Bocelli lacks. His voice is ringing and powerful, a tenor without an annoying vibrato and technique that was exceptional. While it’s a shame that he didn’t perform in many operas, he brought opera to the masses in his popular films. And they were popular. And yes, Bocelli has been doing the same.
While I had seen his films, including the Great Caruso, ad nauseam because of my mother’s adoration, the arias and operatic re-enactments left me wanting more. In fact, when I sat down to really watch the Great Caruso, I wanted to find out more about Enrico Caruso. Indeed, Lanza was the only one to do that role, then and even now.
Listening to his carols, and even Songs of Devotion and Love during the runup to Christmas, take me back to my childhood and those Christmas seasons spent in the dark with the only lights the lit Christmas trees. I still listen to them now, as do my sisters. My mother, I’m sure, still watches Lanza movies today, thinking of the days long gone when she and my father saw Mario Lanza at Toledo’s Paramount Theater on April 12, 1951.
Merry Christmas to all.
In 2022, the slate of performances is full. Let’s hope the omicron variant of the coronavirus doesn’t erase that slate. As Zak Vassar, the executive director of the Toledo Symphony said in a recent interview, “I’ve always thought about the music that we perform is a kind of soul food on so many levels.”
So please be careful and follow the venue’s requirement concerning this still-lethal disease. We want to have plenty of food in 2022.
Send news of music to Heather Denniss at hdenniss@theblade.com at least one week ahead of your event.
First Published December 23, 2021, 3:00 p.m.
