New York Times - Peter Allen whose non-operatically light tenor and
precise but not pedantic style introduced more than 500 performances for the
Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday afternoon radio broadcasts, died on Saturday at
his home in Manhattan. He was 96. His death was confirmed by his niece Carol
Epstein. Mr. Allen presided over 29 seasons of broadcasts. After his last —
which ended with Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung,” on April 24, 2004 — he said that
delivering the opera world’s equivalent of color and play-by-play had been “the
richest experience of my life,” except for his marriage to Sylvia Allen. Week
after week, she sat next to him in the tiny soundproof broadcast booth at the
back of the Met, where they both had binoculars to watch the action on the
stage and headphones to listen in.
Mr. Allen spent his Saturday afternoons
reading from scripts that described the messy entanglements of opera. Listeners
considered him the voice of the Met, but he did not like that title. “With all
those voices out there on the stage, to call me ‘the voice of the Met’ is very
odd,” he said in 2000, sounding about the same in conversation as when the “on
the air” light was on: conversational, avuncular and warmly authoritative, but
not pompous or pretentious.
Beginning in 1975, he delivered a kind
of recitative, telling listeners what would happen as a given opera unfolded,
and even what was happening before that, from the moment the lights went down
to the moment the Met’s great gold curtain went up. “The bravos rise as he
mounts the stand, smiling to the house, bowing to the house, now turning to
conduct,” Mr. Allen said one Saturday in January 2000 as the Met’s artistic
director at the time, James Levine, arrived for a performance of “Der
Rosenkavalier.”
Peter Allen was born Harold Levy in
Toronto on Sept. 17, 1920, to David and Lillian Levy, and grew up in Cleveland.
He served as commanding officer of
minesweeping vessels in the Navy during World War II and stumbled into
announcing after the war at Ohio State University. He had been the principal
violist in the university’s symphony orchestra, and the Ohio State radio
station hired him to play in a string quartet. But the other musicians never
showed up, so what listeners heard was his voice, not his viola.
After working at a commercial station in
Columbus, Ohio, he moved to New York and in 1947 became an announcer on WQXR,
then the radio station of The New York Times, as well as an actor and a film
and television announcer and narrator.
During the 1973-74 season he was hired
as a standby for Milton Cross, who had been handling the Met broadcasts since
the 1930s. For a year Mr. Allen sat through the Saturday matinees, waiting in
the wings through 25 performances.
Mr. Cross died on Jan. 3, 1975, a
Friday. The next day, Mr. Allen was in the broadcast booth for Rossini’s
“L’Italiana in Algeri.”
“I’m keenly aware of just how
tremendously Milton Cross was loved and admired,” he said that day. “Cross
introduced millions of Americans to opera. And it’s precisely on that account
that I was fearful about taking up where he left off. No matter who took the
job, and no matter how talented he was, I didn’t think he’d work out — not even
some famous narrator, like Orson Welles or Charlton Heston.”
He knew he sounded different from Mr.
Cross. “No flamboyance, no phoniness, no deliberately putting a chuckle into my
voice,” he said, summing up his approach. He said he wanted to come across as
“just a guy who enjoys the opera.”
Mr. Allen recalled in 2000 that he
became hoarse as that first afternoon went on and “had to think about producing
voice instead of what I had to say.”
By the first intermission, he was
ad-libbing. A recorded tribute to Mr. Cross ended two minutes early. Mr. Allen
filled the time by describing the singers’ costumes, based on notes he had made
earlier.
It was not the last time he had to come
up with something to say on his own. A few weeks later, as the second act of
“Tosca” was about to begin, he was handed a note that said, “Keep talking.” He
did, without knowing the reason for the delay backstage: The tenor Carlo
Bergonzi had had a coughing fit.
Mr. Allen also improvised during another
incident he was unaware of, “the ‘Macbeth’ episode” as he called it, when an
82-year-old singing coach committed suicide by jumping from a balcony during an
intermission of “Macbeth” in 1988. People in the audience screamed as the man
fell 80 feet into the orchestra. But Mr. Allen did not see him and did not hear
the screams from inside his soundproof booth. The stage microphones did not
pick them up, either, because the radio audience was listening to “Texaco’s
Opera Quiz.”
Mr. Allen introduced a recorded feature
to fill another 10 minutes after the quiz. Then he went on the air, saying only
that there had been an emergency at the Met. About an hour later, the Met
canceled the rest of the performance.
Another time, he bridged a 23-minute
delay when the Met’s stage-moving machinery stalled during a scene change in
“Parsifal” and stagehands had to put the sets in place manually. Joseph Volpe,
who later became the Met’s general manager, heard Mr. Allen’s ad-libbing on his
car radio, driving in from New Jersey.
“How he came up with those things, from
one subject to another, from ‘Parsifal’ to Wagner to you-name-it, I don’t
know,” Mr. Volpe said in 2000. “It’s not something you can prepare for.”
But Mr. Allen tried. Week after week he
wrote about an hour’s worth of his own filler, a collection of information
about the cast, the composer and the production that he could work from if he
needed to.
Mr. Allen was succeeded in 2004 by Margaret
Juntwait, who died last year.
Mr. Allen had lived in the same
apartment in the Peter Cooper Village complex in the Flatiron district for
almost 70 years. Sylvia Allen died in 2006. No immediate family members
survive.
Starting in 1977, he was also the
announcer for the “Live From the Met” broadcasts on public television. He also
wrote and narrated two sets of CDs for the Metropolitan Opera Guild: “Talking
About ‘The Ring,’” about Wagner’s “Ring of the Nibelung,” and “Talking About
‘La Traviata.’”
After all those years of talking in the
dark as singers and conductors and audiences came and went, he had his own
favorites. He said in 2000 that the three operas he liked most were Verdi’s
“Otello,” Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” and Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov.” He
did not specify what his least favorite was, but he had pointedly unkind words
about one composer.
“There’s a lot to say about almost any
opera or composer,” he said, “except maybe Cilea.”
This article appeared in New York Times
on 10/11/16, see the link below for the original story.
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