Opera: The Big Basso

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Bassos, by nature's design, are made-to-order heavies — big, beefy, barrel-chested; bouncers who can carry a tune. The foghorn pitch of their voices suggests heartaches not heroics, lechery not love. Bulgaria's Nicolai Ghiaurov, at 6 ft. 2 in. and 200 Ibs., is no exception. Yet in the six short years since he emerged from behind the Iron Curtain, he has won the kind of hand-to-heart adulation usually reserved for tenors.

Last week, in his debut with the Metropolitan Opera, singing the role of Mephistopheles in Gounod's Faust, he proved why.

As devils go, Ghiaurov (pronounced Ghee-ah-oor-ov) was a diabolical con-man full of spunk and fire, swirling about the stage like Batman in a black leather cape and horned-toad cap. And when he sang, the voice came rolling across the footlights like a tidal wave.

Casual as a man singing in the shower, he dipped and soared to either end of his register with effortless ease, deftly switched from sustained pianissimos to quaking explosions of wall-to-wall thun der. But for all his raw power, the brightly burnished timbre of his voice carries a built-in caress. Ghiaurov, at 36, is unquestionably the best basso singing today.

Anything Handy. Offstage, Ghiaurov behaves like a kind of Bulgarian Jackie Gleason, mugging, joking, erupting into great rumbling gales of ho-ho-ho laugh ter. At parties, given a few drinks, he will invariably perform on any instrument that is handy — flute, clarinet, trombone, piano, harmonica, violin, all of which he learned to play as a child in Bulgaria. Son of a farm hand, he was raised in Velingrad, a mineral-bath resort high in the Rhodope Mountains. As a teenager, Ghiaurov had no interest in singing, gained fame in local circles as an actor and star athlete with the town soccer and volleyball teams. Drafted into the army for two years, he wangled a job as conductor of a 120-member chorus and orchestra, first discovered his vocal gifts while trying to teach others to sing. He won a state scholarship to the Moscow Conservatory, graduated with top honors in 1955, made his big debut in the West four years later in Milan. Soon he had established himself as "the pillar of La Scala."

As a frustrated conductor ("Even now, I would give up everything if someone offered me a small group"), Ghiaurov approaches each role like a Ph.D. thesis, spends months probing into the history and psychological motivation of each character. Many opera singers, having learned a role in a foreign language, often have no idea of the meaning of the words they mouth, much less those being sung by the rest of the cast. Ghiaurov, on the other hand, knows by heart every role of every singer in every opera he has ever sung, down to the smallest bit part. "How else," he asks incredulously, "can you put your whole heart and head into a role?"