Paul Potts is a gap-toothed singer from Wales, who sells mobile phones, and just won the Britain Has Talent competition.  An opera aficionado, he chose for his entry number the tenor’s aria from Turandot, Puccini’s incomprehensible and unintentional parody of the overblown opera. 

 

Yet, like not a few operas, it has sprigs of music so beautiful, otherworldly, and meshed so well with the sentiment of the lyrics - regardless of the language sung - that listeners freeze, become rapt, awed, and elevated to emotions they did not know they shared.  Nessun Dorma (No One Sleeps) is sung by a Prince in disguise because, see, he’s …….oh forget that absurd crap, all that matters is that his dream and the love of his life will be won when the morning breaks.  “Vin-cer- OOOO!”  I will conquer.  And, of course he does.  And in the throats of the great tenors, it makes mortals like us look at our tasks ahead, slit the eye, and whisper ‘bring it on’ gazing into the ethereal middle distance. 

 

The three judges were blown away, and although I did not see the rest of the competition, I’ve seen enough ‘reality’ talent to well imagine that even an adequate opera voice would have seemed as magical and refreshing as the needed shower and soap after much rap, or  booze after the contrived and forced emotions of country, coffee to get through any sensitive singer-songwriter, and whatever is at hand and needed to get through the Britney, Jessica and Beyonce wannabes.  I say this as an unaccomplished bluegrass and folk singer who made his living at such thirty years ago.  Although the garbage in opera far outweighs the brilliance and composes a far greater proportion of its canon than the genuine crap in pop music or any other genre’s, its high points are very high indeed. 

 

But they are all in the melded performance and the sight music: the lyrics, at best, are cloying and uninspired, the music melodramatic.  The performer must bring it together or it’s awful; they can’t hope the tune will do it. 

 

Not so much with Nessun Dorma.  It’s very hard to sing well, like our National Anthem, but there are few works where lyric and melody mesh so well and perfectly with the intent.  In the hands of great tenors on their good nights – and not otherwise - it is magisterial.  A transcendent moment.

 

Nessun dorma!... Nessun dorma!... Tu pure, o Principessa, nella tua fredda stanza guardi le stelle che tremano d'amore e di speranza! Ma il mio mistero è chiuso in me, il nome mio nessun saprà! No, no, sulla tua bocca lo dirò, quando la luce splenderà! Ed il mio bacio scoglierà il silenzio che ti fa mia! Coro donne: Il nome suo nessun saprà... E noi dovrem ahimè, morir, morir!... Il Principe: Dilegua, o notte! tramontate, stelle! Tramontate, stelle! All'alba vincerò! Vincerò! Vincerò!

No one sleeps!... No one sleeps!... Nor do you, o princess in your cold room. Look at the stars that tremble with love and hope! But my mystery, it is locked in me, my name no one will know…. No, no, only on your mouth I will reveal it, when dawn's light will shine! My kiss will break the silence and make you mine! Female choir: His name no one will know... And we shall have, alas, to die, to die...! The Prince: Disperse, o night! Set, you stars! Set, you stars! With the dawn I will win! I will win! I will win!

 

 

Knowing the lyrics makes it better.  Not something you hear a lot about opera.

 

I came to opera through my ex-wife.  Of course I’d heard of it before, and listened to it on the required moments of culture virtually all in my generation endured with a grandparent, listening to the tinny horrors of the 78 rpm.  Before hi-fi, all that recorded music could do was aid the memory, because it could not instill it.  There was no bass response, no under or over tones, no resonance of wood, and it really sounded bad, as if echoing down a long, thinning pipe.  But it was all we had.

 

This informed my initial impression of opera, which was aided and abetted by visuals of the 400 pound sweating women and the 300 pound balding men playing Romeo and Juliet, screeching in competitive enterprises for musical superiority that wasn’t audible to me.  I hated it.  All of it.  It was distant and affected and incomprehensible and long and when seen in person, mandated coat and tie on hot afternoons, which is when it was thought children were best exposed to higher callings.  Then, college and the woman whom I’d later marry in the late 1960’s.

 

She’d gone to Interlachen Arts Academy and she and her family knew famous people.  She’d roomed with a television star, and knew the Brubeck sons.  The zoo and the airport in San Francisco were named for her great grandparents.  Her step grandfather founded Bank of America, and his brother built the Golden Gate Bridge.  Her aunt was a Broadway producer.  Her father’s uncle was the guy who built the Bathysphere in the 1930’s, a very big deal back then.  A family of impressive accomplishment, and I was impressed, not to say intimidated, since we met when she joined our college bluegrass and folk group.

 

She was beautiful.  Yes, that.

 

She was a zillion times smarter than I, and had the ability to explain stuff to me in ways that made perfect sense and could twist me around my adamant, fat-headed opinions unlike anyone before or since.  She brought me to opera at gunpoint, much of which she loved and sang.  She signed us up to work the opera Tales of Hoffman at the central Florida venue rented by the central Florida Opera Society (of some sort).  Of course, I went.  I lived but to serve. 

 

And I met Beverly Sills, who sang the lead.  I may not have ever heard of her at the time.  As I type this, Sills is apparently getting her ticket punched to the Land of Pure Notes, from cancer.  I remember a very tall and happy soul who was the exact opposite of prima dona soprano, waving at everybody and chatting to anyone nearby, complete with funny faces, like the terrified guy at the curtained door leading to backstage, which was me that night.  Her personal story, such as was then known, was recalled for me by my fiancé, and it was and remains an inspirational and humanizing tale about Sills and her family.  Sills has just died, I hear, and bless her heart; you will hear no bad words said of her by anyone.

 

That she and Carol Burnett were buds strikes me as both appropriate and deserved.  Good friends deserve good friends.   Anyway.  I recall little beyond that. 

 

Except, Norman Treigle, who was the bass singer. He actually impressed me most of all the performers because he was ridiculously thin and rather fragile looking, yet his voice sounded like God on anabolic steroids with his eye on a hot babe for the evening.  I don’t recall the tenor or much else except the ancient crone with the money who’d produced the thing and the fawning harpies unresponsibly left unentombed about her – all in billows of lace - who absolutely intimidated me into letting them backstage.  I was embarrassed then and now to have caved.  It never has happened since when I work a door, and there’s been a bunch.

 

I hated the opera that evening, cannot recall anything about the show but this: I ceased thinking of opera singers as comical, rather pathetic basket cases with strong, if weird voices.  I sang more or less professionally  – although at such a much lower level it’s like there should be another word for it – and I knew how difficult vocal control was, and breath, and how hard it was to sing loud and on pitch at the end of our songs after three hours.  For me, anyway.

 

After three hours of singing with no microphones over a huge orchestra without a wavered note, never mind a bad one, and rarely able to find safety in harmony, it occurred to this, not terribly bright individual that first and foremost these guys are athletes, men and women both.  Some are better athletes than others.  Some have naturally lovelier voices than others but, in truth, get winded earlier and cannot sustain an entire evening, never mind a career.

 

And Paul Potts isn’t even that good.  I’m sorry.  His voice is unexpectedly powerful, but he’s untrained, because the quality of his voice changes from top to bottom, with thin spots and full spots and his voice actually broke a bit.  Nonetheless, he was chosen for the finals and he sang the same number again, complete with distracting sparks and lights. And he won it.  I don’t for a minute contest that he was the best of the bunch, and surely the work to be an opera singer is beyond the comprehension of us mortals.   So bless his heart, and that with no condescension and no bitterness for his being so much better than I could ever imagine myself being.

 

The three judges fell over themselves, possibly relieved that they could, for once, honor  actual traditional art and hard work and allowed the most palpably decent contestant on two continents (Britain Has Talent is the sibling show of American Idol) to ever win.  He was awarded a recording contract, and he may sell very well, but my opinion is that of the critics concerning pianist David Helfgott, whose life became the movie Shine a decade ago.  An inspiring story, but without the story there’s nothing there.  Helfgott is roundly considered a terrible pianist by today’s concert standards.  Potts isn’t a very good opera singer, and I doubt he could physically sustain an entire evening of like material.

 

He’s 36, an advanced age in any art, and has almost no presence whatsoever.  It was, in fact, the shyness and reserve – not to say utter lack of charisma - that won hearts as much as his emotional performance.  He’s also stout, which normally wouldn’t be an impediment to opera tenors in the past, but probably indicates – since it didn’t gather around a throat with an established career – that he isn’t remotely in good enough shape.  It’s hard to tell, because he sang – or we were only allowed to hear - an abbreviated version of Nessun Dorma.  I’m not sure he could do the entire two minutes and forty-five seconds.  We’ll see.

 

It isn’t fair to do this, and I realize this will annoy and anger some, but listen to this terrible recording of a world class performance of the same song, recorded live in Italy in the late 1960’s.  The tenor is Franco Corelli, and if you harbor any love for the Three Tenors you need to ditch it and listen to the voice of an athlete, and the best tenor I’ve ever heard. (This is his outfit for Turandot, to give a touch of the absurdity of the thing….)

 

 Corelli was one of the few tenors who stayed in shape his entire life, retired early - as did Sills - so the polite remarks about having lost it in his dotage and stayed too long out of vanity would not be part of his history.  He gives the impression he could hold the notes other tenors clip off – you know of whom I speak - for breath, oh, for another bar or two, depending how he felt that evening (he apparently did, sometimes, do this to embarrass sopranos in their duets, and when Bridgette Nielsen beat him at it – once – he bit her on the neck…..that’s the story), and his voice is just stupendous.  Listen to Potts on YouTube, singing into a microphone, then listen to Corelli here, without amplification or support and drowning out a full orchestra and holding ‘splenderà’ in a soft sustain that freezes the crowd and moment in near silence and great beauty.  Try it, humming, to get the idea. 

 

If you think Potts is in the same league, go back to Michael Bolton.  Potts may be easier on the ear, for all I know, but I’d doubt he has a future in opera. 

 

I still hate opera and most Broadway show tunes, virtually anything outside of the West Side Story set.  But I can listen for increasingly prolonged periods to sopranos and tenors in sheer appreciation of the physical strength and skill at work – the sheer athleticism - even when I hate the music.  It is an appreciation that has come late in life.

 

As for Potts, all power to him and I hope he makes a mint and no doubt he will make a lot of people happy.  I think that is one of the blessings – the only one – of reality contests like this.  People who wouldn’t even get their fifteen minutes now sometimes do, cash in, and enjoy it.  I cannot argue with that.  I also cannot argue with the fact that the technique is only a tool to achieve what some artists can do right off: touch the heart.  Potts grazed not a few in his performances of that one aria, and that’s worth far more.  I admit it.  As Sam Broussard used to say, and often, it’s the heart you bring to the art.  Big heart, has Mr. Potts.

 

When I first heard him in that YouTube clip, I saw before me the embodiment of Martin Tanner, a creature who appeared in a song by Harry Chapin in the 1970’s.  I’ve endured not a few performances by this nation’s Martin Tanners in my life – perhaps was one myself – and I’m grateful more avenues opened before Potts than Tanner, and he didn’t fall before a critic like me in the wrong mood. 

 

If you get a chance, listen to “Mr. Tanner” on the live album by Chapin and his group.  If you like Paul Potts, you’ll like Martin Tanner, there’s no doubt.  It’s the story of a big heart, and hearts don’t handle scar tissue well.

 

Mister Tanner was a cleaner from a town in the Midwest.
And of all the cleaning shops around he'd made his the best.
He also was a baritone who sang while hanging clothes.
He practiced scales while pressing tails and sang at local shows.
His friends and neighbors praised the voice that poured out from his throat.
They said that he should use his gift instead of cleaning coats.

But music was his life, it was not his livelihood,
and it made him feel so happy and it made him feel so good.
And he sang from his heart and he sang from his soul.
He did not know how well he sang; It just made him whole.

His friends kept working on him to try music out full time.
A big debut and rave reviews, a great career to climb.
Finally they got to him, he would take the fling.
A concert agent in New York agreed to have him sing.
And there were plane tickets, phone calls, money spent to rent the hall.
It took most of his savings but he gladly used them all.

But music was his life, it was not his livelihood,
and it made him feel so happy and it made him feel so good.
And he sang from his heart and he sang from his soul.
He did not know how well he sang; It just made him whole.

The evening came, he took the stage, his face set in a smile.
In the half-filled hall the critics sat, watching on the aisle.
But the concert was a blur to him, spatters of applause.
He did not know how well he sang, he only heard the flaws.
But the critics were concise, it only took four lines.
And no one could accuse them of being over kind.

(spoken)Mr. Martin Tanner, Baritone, of Dayton, Ohio made his Town Hall debut last night.  He came well prepared, but unfortunately his presentation was not up to contemporary professional standards. His voice lacks the range of tonal color necessary to make it consistently interesting. (sung) Full time consideration of another endeavor might be in order.

He came home to Dayton and was questioned by his friends.
He smiled and just said nothing.  And he never sang again.
Excepting very late at night when the shop was dark and closed.
He sang softly to himself as he sorted through the clothes.

Music was his life, it was not his livelihood,
and it made him feel so happy and it made him feel so good.
And he sang from his heart and he sang from his soul.
He did not know how well he sang

It just made him whole.

 

All Tanner needed was American Idol, I choose to think.  Sorry, Martin.  I truly am.  No starch on these.