Music: The Great Basso

"I like to play parts," Ezio Pinza once confided to a friend. "It is something you have or you have not. If you have, it's easy."

For nearly 40 extraordinary years, Basso Pinza had it. Blessed with a brawny, 6-ft.-1-in. frame, a handsome, dignified face and a flexible, powerful bass voice, he ranged through 82 operatic roles, singing and acting them in a style that had his admirers reaching far back into opera's Golden Age for comparisons. When he left the Metropolitan Opera at 55 in 1948 to appear with Mary Martin in South Pacific, Pinza slipped into the role of Broadway matinee idol with such ease that many postwar fans were scarcely aware that he had ever done anything else. After a stroke forced him to give up singing last summer, he launched enthusiastically into other plans, hoped for a straight dramatic career on Broadway. But that chance never came.

Under the Shower. Pinza developed into one of opera's giants with scarcely any formal musical training. At an age when some singers are already getting launched, he was working as a professional bicycle racer and a brakeman on an Italian railroad. The seventh child of a poor carpenter, he was brought up in Ravenna, considered a career in civil engineering before he turned to racing, in which he had only middling success. He was standing under the shower one day singing O Sole Mio when the cyclist in the stall next to him told him that he had a voice. Pinza prepped with a home-town voice teacher, was accepted by the conservatory at Bologna, made a whistle-stop debut with a small opera company, and departed for World War I.

Even before Pinza got out of the army at 27, he won a chance to sing the Count des Grieux in Manon in Rome. After that, his career picked up a dizzying momentum. Toscanini invited him to sing at La Scala, where he scored such a hit in Boito's Nerone that in 1926 Metropolitan Opera Manager Giulio Gatti-Casazza signed him up.

Like a Ballplayer. A true basso cantante (singing bass), he had enough flexibility to invade roles often sung by baritones without losing the power that enabled him to reach the back row without straining. And with his big voice he had the elusive personal magnetism and the dignity that grand opera demands. For a whole generation of operagoers, Pinza's Don Giovanni—in richly decorated doublet and single gold earring—was the virile embodiment of everything the role implied. Although Pinza could barely read music, he had a prodigious musical memory and a bone-deep sense of musical taste. He labored over makeup and stage business—he once spent hours hurling himself to the floor of the Met's stage to learn how Boris Godunov should die. At a few hours' notice he could move through any one of half a hundred roles with the reflex authority of a fine ballplayer.