Ezio Pinza (May 18, 1892 – May 9, 1957) was one of the most brilliant international opera stars of the mid-twentieth century. He is probably best remembered by today’s audiences, through the original cast recording of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific, as the creator of the role of Emile de Becque (“Some Enchanted Evening”) for which he was awarded the 1950 Tony for Best Actor.
Ezio Fortunato Pinza was his parents’ seventh child and their first to survive. He grew up in Ravenna and intended at first to be a civil engineer. His father, however, recognizing the beauty of his natural voice, encouraged him to study at the local conservatory and go on to the Liceo Musicale in Bologna. As a young man, Pinza was a devotee of bicycle racing. "Although I did not know it at the time," he told an interviewer years later, "I was developing the lung power which now makes people hear my voice even in the top row of the peanut gallery."
He made his operatic debut in Cremona in the role of Oroveso in Bellini’s Norma in 1914, but shortly thereafter both his career and his studies were interrupted by World War I and military service. When the war was over, the career gathered momentum, and since Pinza learned all his roles by rote, he never did actually learn to read music. (“I’m no musician. I just know how to make nice sounds.”)
His debut role in Rome in 1920 was King Mark in Wagner’s Tristan e Isolde (in Italian). Ezio Pinza then had a three-year contract under Arturo Toscanini at La Scala in Milan, beginning in 1922 with Pimen in Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, and creating the role of Tigellino in the premiere of Arrigo Boito’s Nerone in 1924. In 1926 he found an enduring home at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, appearing first as Pontifex Maximus in Spontini’s La vestale (with Rosa Ponselle in the title role), and reigning for the next twenty-two years as America’s leading bass.
Although he made occasional excursions to South America, Covent Garden, the Paris Opéra, the Salzburg Festival, San Francisco, and Chicago, he appeared in over 850 performances at the Met, singing fifty-one different roles. Pinza’s most popular by far was Don Giovanni, in whose golden costume he blazes in a splendid portrait hanging in the Met’s gallery. Apart from the Met, Pinza appeared at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in 1930–1939, and was invited to sing at the Salzburg Festival in 1934–1937 by the celebrated German conductor Bruno Walter.
In March 1942, the FBI arrested Pinza at his New York home
and unjustly detained him for nearly three months on Ellis Island with hundreds
of other Italian-Americans who were suspected of supporting the Axis. Norman
Cordon, a fellow basso at the Metropolitan Opera who was considered one of
Pinza's rivals, boasted privately that he had informed the FBI that Pinza was a
fascist sympathizer. At the time of his arrest and detention, Pinza was just
four months away from obtaining US citizenship. The incident was extremely
traumatic for Pinza, and he suffered from periods of severe depression for
years afterward. Despite this, shortly after Pinza's release, Pinza and Cordon
performed together in an ongoing Met production of Don Giovanni, with Pinza in
the title role and Cordon as the Commendatore.
In 1948 Pinza retired from the Met to move into Broadway musical theatre. At fifty-six, his chiseled good looks and enchanting voice undiminished, he starred with Mary Martin in South Pacific, a show that won a Pulitzer Prize as well as every Tony Award® for which it was nominated – Best Musical, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor/ress, etc. –, to a total of thirteen. It ran until January 1954, for 1,925 performances. Ezio Pinza then spent the next two years starring with Florence Henderson in Harold Rome’s Fanny.
Pinza's health began to decline during the mid-1950s; a series of heart attacks precipitated a stroke on May 1, 1957. Pinza died in his sleep of a heart attack on May 9, at the age of 64 in Stamford, Connecticut. Shortly before his death due to a stroke, he finished his memoirs, which were published in 1958. His funeral took place at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and he was buried in Greenwich, CT. He has a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
(Edited from Masterworks Broadway & Wikipedia)