Marcello Giordani, Italian tenor, dies

Marcello Giordani, an Italian tenor who gave his first performances for customers at his father’s gas station in Sicily and rose to international fame on the opera stage, where he received ovations for the ringing power of his voice, died Oct. 5 at his home in the Sicilian town of Augusta. He was 56.

The cause was a heart attack, said his manager, Katherine Olsen.

Giordani had loved the opera since his youth, when he recalled weeping in the back rows of a modest local theater as the music washed over him, but he attended no conservatory and did not study music seriously until after he had begun a safe, dependable career at a bank.

Fueled by what he described as his sense of “rebellion and ambition,” he quit his job at 19 and set out for Milan to train as an opera singer. He credited his success in part to his father, a former prison guard who also loved the opera and provided financial and moral support.

“It was a scandal,” he told The Washington Times years later. “There was fear from everybody; they were against it, leaving a secure job with a good salary, pension, health insurance, to do this. They thought it was madness.”

After rising through European and American opera houses, Giordani became a mainstay of the Metropolitan Opera in New York. He debuted with the company in 1993 as the besotted bumpkin Nemorino in Donizetti’s “L’Elisir d’Amore” in a concert staging of the opera in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park and made his last performance at the Met in 2016 as the troubadour Manrico in Verdi’s “Il Trovatore.”

The 240 performances in between — as well as his appearances opposite sopranos including Kiri Te Kanawa and Renée Fleming and in houses including Milan’s La Scala, the Royal Opera House in London’s Covent Garden and the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires — established him as a premier tenor of his generation.

Giordani lacked the popular name recognition of the Three Tenors — Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo and Jose Carreras — and his closer contemporaries Roberto Alagna and Rolando Villazón. But in an art form in which passions run as high in the audience as they do onstage, he thrilled operagoers with his high notes and ardent acting.

“Marcello Giordani sang like a god,” classical music critic Anne Midgette wrote in a New York Times review of his performance with the Opera Orchestra of New York in a concert staging of Cilea’s “Adriana Lecouvreur” at Carnegie Hall in 2002.

Giordani was best known for his command of bel canto operas, the later works of the Italian composers Verdi and Puccini, and French operas including Massenet’s “Manon” and Bizet’s “Carmen.”