The Truck Driver and the Choirboy
by James Kilbourne
Mario Lanza was part truck driver and part choirboy. Both qualities emerge in almost every song and aria he sang until 1954. After that, the choirboy often failed to appear, and disappeared entirely in the illness-plagued recordings of his last year.
These apparently opposite traits of his personality were both bursting with hope and an intense love of living. The truck driver was aggressive, exuberant, the “bull in a china shop” that makes us sometimes shake our heads and say, “Now, Mario!” It’s the part of Lanza that throws his cigarette on the ground in the Butterfly duet in a scene from “The Toast of New Orleans” and then gives Kathryn Grayson a look that excites and scares the bejesus out of her at the same time. The truck driver Mario’s pitch is often sharp when he sings the second stanza in almost every pop song, particularly in the Coke Show performances, but also frequently in his studio recordings. Often, this sharp pitch is accompanied by a rise in key introduced by the orchestra. A few examples that a Lanza devotee would recognize are the second “Waltzing along in the blue” in “The Loveliest Night of the Year” and the second “Core, core ‘ngrato!” from the Coke Show recording. This is the Lanza that sweeps you off your feet and plants breathless images in your mind that stay with you forever.
I have been metaphorically “waltzing along in the blue” with Lanza ever since I first heard him sing that line in the early fifties when I was about 8 years old, and since the much later release of his Coke Show Neapolitan songs, my heart has never really ever recovered from the heartbreak inflicted on it in the second “core” in the “Core ‘ngrato” recording. It is the truck driver in Lanza who makes you realize that no song can contain him. He’s too much to be contained. It’s also the part that horrifies his critics-the part they use to make their case that he was at best sloppy, and at worst technically incompetent.
Mario, the truck driver, makes many people nervous. My advice to people who feel this way is to immediately schedule at least a half hour a day listening to the most blatant examples one can find of truck driver Lanza recordings. For the most serious cases, it may be necessary to extract these lines from his songs and string them all together into a daily mantra. The resultant changes in your approach to life you may be slow to notice at first, but gradually you will find yourself doing things like starting that novel you always meant to write, or calling the girl you saw at a party four years ago whom you can’t seem to forget.
The choirboy in Lanza appeals to one’s sense of an innocent sincerity and a joyful reaction to the wonders of the world. Most young people have it; a residue of it remains in the average adult; stamping it out in people is the goal of cynics. The greatest fear of most people is to appear naïve when what they should be afraid of is that they are dying inside. If Mario the choirboy doesn’t reach your heart, I’m afraid I don’t have much advice to give you. You have lost the magic of Christmas, the glory of a perfect sunrise, the joy of living. The only thing I might suggest is that you stop whatever you are doing in life and try taking an entirely new approach.
To a greater degree than any artist I have experienced, Mario Lanza had his own vision and couldn’t care less if you thought it was silly, crazy or too emotional. Lanza went inside himself and inside the music for inspiration, not to his last critical review. I am struck by two facts of serious singing these days. The first is that the technical proficiency from the stars to the compramarios is much greater than during the Lanza era; the second is that singing is less courageous and much less exciting than it was then. Listen to “Guardian Angels” by Lanza. There is no singer today who has the raw, open, emotive courage to sing “There’s one with shining wings who holds my hand” as Lanza sings it. He approaches it as though it were a vision. He is filled with wonder and sincerity, and the effect on the listener is magical. My God, how I miss that in the over-trained and under-felt performances that rule today!
If I were a singing teacher, this is the advice I would give my students:
1) To paraphrase Maria Callas, study eight hours a day, seven days a week; then walk out on the stage and forget everything you have learned.
2) When you walk out on that stage, before you open your mouth, think of Mario Lanza. What is the essence of the music and what does your heart have to say about that essence?
3) You now understand the core of all great artists and, for that matter, all great human beings. Work hard and trust your heart.
Now, you are ready to sing.
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