Long before Leonardo Capalbo could even dream of being an opera singer, he was traveling back and forth between New Jersey and Calabria as a little boy with his father, mother, and two older sisters. Today he continues to fly back and forth across the Atlantic as he meets the commitments of a robust and flourishing career. In the fall of 2017, he began the season singing Nemorino in L’elisir d’amore in Hannover and then Rodolfo in La bohème in St. Gallen and Baden-Baden.
These last two roles—along with Duke of Mantua (Rigoletto)—are among Capalbo’s most solicited, although he continues to take on new roles, too, such Don José in Carmen, the title role in Donizetti’s Roberto Devereux , and Leicester in Maria Stuarda. These three roles offered Capalbo the opportunity of indulging his keen interest in history by reading everything he could find on the Elizabethan age.
Capalbo truly is a passionate student of history. In January, he was in New York to perform at Carnegie Hall to honor his friend and mentor Marilyn Horne in a celebration of her 84th birthday and the end of her tenure directing the annual “The Song Continues” program for promising young singers. Capalbo and seven other artists who had once studied with Horne and who now have successful careers were invited to sing. Capalbo performed three songs by Pietro Mascagni. The choice of these rare, seldom performed pieces reflected the deep knowledge of the history of classical singing that he has cultivated since childhood.
Back to Europe in March, he was in Lyon singing the role of Macduff in a production of Macbeth. I caught up with him in Madrid in April where he was debuting the role of Robert Devereux in David McVicar’s production of Benjamin Britten’s Gloriana at the Teatro Real.
Tell us how music figured in your life while growing up.
As a child I had very little musical education. My parents are Italian immigrants who came to the U.S. in the mid-1950s. My sisters are a lot older than I am. One lives in Calabria, where we are from. We always split our time between the two countries. That of course was part of my musical education, because I grew up bilingual. Although no one in my family is a musician, I do have many visual artists, architects, sculptors, and painters on my mother’s side.
With no special interest in music in the family, how did you discover opera?
From when I was a small child, my parents always had the television turned on. And it was always tuned to the Italian national network RAI, even in the United States. I never watched television much as a child and I don’t even turn it on now as an adult. But RAI was always on, and they would very frequently have transmissions of operatic performances from La Scala, Rome, or one of the Italian festivals.
One of my earliest experiences being truly captivated by opera and the human classical voice was seeing Pavarotti in concert in Hyde Park. I can still remember that. I was a little child. It was raining, and he was singing to Princess Diana. I just loved his voice, this glorious power, the effortless line that I heard in his voice—the sunshine that intrigued me and really drew me in.
And, so, I began to imitate. I went to the library. I researched and took out lots of recordings and read everything I possibly could on classical singing and voice. I started reading about Gustave García and Francesco and Giovanni Lamperti. By the time I was 12 or 13, I was already reading the books by Lamperti and Luigi Marchesi and trying their exercises on my own. I had no musical training but sort of self-taught by imitating or trying to emulate what I heard these fantastic singers doing.
Then I started researching singers from much earlier generations, like Giacomo Lauri-Volpi, Aureliano Pertile, Beniamino Gigli, Rosa Ponselle and, of course, [Maria] Callas. I started collecting recordings and purchased a turntable to play them. I tried to absorb as much of that music as I possibly could.
Did you sing along?
Of course I sang along. I had a compilation CD called Aria. It had a lot of great singers like Franco Corelli, Renata Tebaldi, and Giuseppe Di Stefano. I remember going through that. And I would lock myself in the bathroom. I would turn up this music of these phenomenal singers singing. I would look in the mirror and I would sing along to whatever they were singing whether it was Corelli doing “Vesti la giubba,” or Renata Tebaldi singing Butterfly. I did whatever to try to absorb and understand how these artists were making these amazing sounds.
When I look back at singers like Mario Del Monaco, I see immersed artists who were in love with what they were doing and the text and bringing the music to life. That’s why their voices were so captivating, powerful, and also vulnerable. You could hear in all these voices the full gamut of emotion.
So when did you finally get formal training?
I started taking private lessons with a music teacher, Jacqueline Harvey, who is still one of my very close friends, whom I consider to be one of my closest family members. When I met her, she said a really sweet and wonderful thing to me. “I think you’re so talented. All I really feel I can do for you is expose you to the structure of music”—because of course I had no real, formal education in terms of music. I was about 13 when I met her. And she said, “I want to expose you to the ABCs of music.”
So, we did that: basic piano, being able to play chords, basic solfège. We worked on simple songs. But I was able to rather quickly start working on some more complicated arias because I had linguistic skills early on because of my upbringing. “You have a natural talent,” she assured me, “and I just want to help you continue along this path and to encourage you.” And that she very much did. So I will always love her for that.
What was high school like? Did you have opportunities to perform?
You didn’t have television shows like Glee. It wasn’t cool to be a male and in the choir. There was [a group] called the Corolettes. I occasionally would sing solos and [they] would back me up because teachers there recognized that I had talent.
[My high school] did the first school musicals with me for the first time in some 20-odd years. We did things like The Sound of Music and The Wizard of Oz. I did my best Bert Lahr impersonation.
Did you do more musical theatre beyond high school?
I did lots of community theater. I auditioned for some semi-professional work for equity shows. I was even up for some Broadway productions. I always had a very mature-sounding voice, a sort of hybrid baritone/tenor voice, because I have this extension which could go up, which I still have today.
Did you always want to pursue music?
I was interested in so many things. I was always interested in politics, literature, and journalism. I was editor of the high school newspaper and a rather accomplished student writer. I always thought I would be good at political commentary, so I did apply to schools with that in mind. But my heart always drew me toward being onstage. I was always an actor and I still think of myself very much as an actor.
My voice is an extension of what I have to express. And all of the voices throughout history that I have been drawn to are voices that have something to say. As I continue to develop and work hard on improving, I still feel that what I have to offer emotionally would never be separated from it. You have to combine the two in order to actually sing well, technically.
How did you decide where to go to college?
Before I went to Juilliard, I met a teacher on the faculty, Charles Kellis, and I started taking some lessons. I applied and was accepted with a full scholarship and stipend. I took advantage of as many coaching opportunities as I possibly could in order to work as much repertoire as possible. I was unusual in the sense that I already had this rather encyclopedic knowledge of the history of singing, because growing up I had been a weird little nerd who was obsessed with music and history.
Was it clear you were going to go into opera? Was Broadway ever an attraction?
Once at Juilliard, I knew I wanted to focus on opera, as much as I loved Broadway and still love a lot of the music. My attraction to the music of Verdi is so strong, it’s difficult to turn your back on that. I did as much of everything and anything I could. I worked scenes of roles like Nemorino and Rodolfo. Of course, those are roles that I have since played many times. I sang my first Rodolfo when I was 21. It was great to be up there working with people like Frank Corsaro and exploring a role or even an art song and breaking it down and asking, “What does this really mean? And what are you really expressing and do you need to move your hand at this moment?” My time at Juilliard was well spent.
Going to the Academy of the West in Santa Barbara and working with Marilyn Horne was a huge influence on me. I spent summers working with her, and I still remain very close to her. She’s a great mentor of mine. This is a woman who not only was a great bel cantista but wants to continue that tradition. So her influence on me was great.
I started working early on. I’m rather unusual for my age group because I never did a Young Artist Program. I started working quite early and have been working ever since, always in leading roles. Because I had a linguistic background with Italian, it was not difficult for me to develop reasonably good French at an early age and to acquire other languages as I went along. My voice was always rather mature.
Your U.S. debut took place at the small California festival of Hidden Valley near Carmel in the role of Rodolfo. Your European debut was a double header at Opera North in Leeds, England, in the spring of 2004, where you sang the part of Paco in Falla’s La vida breve and the role of Luigi in Puccini’s Il tabarro. That’s a big, challenging role! Can you tell us about that?
You would be hard pressed to find many tenors my age today that would do Luigi quite well, let alone someone who was probably barely 24 at the time. I sang both of those roles—something like 16 performances—and I would do them back to back and sometimes on consecutive days.
Do I think that doing something like Luigi was premature for me at the time? Yes, it was. But it actually went well for me. My voice was always rather baritonal in quality. So, interestingly, I didn’t have to push in order to create a sonorous, potent, middle register, which you need for speedboat type characters—so I was able to sing the role and just sort of slot in the few high notes that were there. And I never harmed myself. I remained quite fresh and healthy.
So now as I develop and my voice goes more in that direction and I take on more of these larger roles, I just stay true to what my instrument is and how my instrument is at the time. I very much feel you have to be who you are, sing healthily and honestly—and if you do that, the correct voice will come out.
How do you go about deciding whether or not to accept a new role?
What you do is field the offers that come in and you say, “Am I able to do this? Does this fit into my schedule? Is this a role that I can offer something in and that will do me no harm and that I also will be able to shine in both vocally and dramatically?” Although I continue to add increasingly larger, heavier repertoire as I develop, because that is where my voice is going, I have not lost flexibility in my voice. I maintain as much flexibility and ability to diminuendo my voice on any given pitch as possible all the time. I’m constantly doing all sorts of exercises recommended by Marchesi, García, and Lamperti. I work with a wonderful teacher now, Sherman Lowe, who is based in Venice.
I keep a very wide repertoire because I’m inquisitive and I take on those challenges. It keeps my mind fresh; it also keeps my instrument fresh because it forces me to develop different articulations, like one would while playing an instrument.
I am also very tough on myself. I don’t do a performance and think, “Wow, that was great.” I have never, ever thought that. I’m not usually aware of the audience around me because I’m very immersed in what I’m doing. Part of my brain is focused on the technical aspect of singing—and the other part of me, which is the larger part, is focused on being that role, being that person, bringing it to life. And the only reason why the technical thing is smaller while I’m onstage is because I work on that every single day—breathing exercises, freeing the larynx, not using the wrong muscles, not pushing. We don’t want to push—we want the voice to be easy.
In order to make big heroic sounds that are stentorian when called for—one does this actually with ease. It’s a release of the voice, it’s not a pushing out of the voice. These are all things that one learns with time and experience. I don’t throw away the “lighter roles” that I do. I still do Nemorino. So even if I do Un ballo in maschera or Don Carlos and things like that, I don’t throw away Nemorino because I look back at great singers like Caruso. In his last season at the Metropolitan before he died, look at what the repertoire was. He was doing Canio. He was doing Eléazar and Nemorino.
Was this your instinct, or were teachers encouraging you to do this?
I think this was my instinct. But maybe my instinct was also influenced by the fact that when I started researching the history of this glorious art form as a child, I came across these older singers. Maybe the history buff in me moved me to look at old photographs and listen to scratchy recordings and ask, “What am I listening to? What can I hear in this?” And sometimes you’re listening to these very early recordings that are quite primitive, and it is difficult to understand what you’re hearing. But I started to have this different way of listening and could actually hear how the person was producing the voice. And that was special for me. And that still influences what I do.
Being a top-rank opera singer is a peripatetic profession and you have to travel to a variety of cities and countries. Where do you consider home?
Well, I have a place in West Palm Beach and I’m going to get a place soon in Treviso, Italy. I’m in Madrid for two months, then I go to Warsaw to work on a new production of Carmen in the role of José. While there were three days off for other people doing Gloriana, I was rehearsing Carmen. So, I gave last night’s performance with clogged ears from my airplane flight because I was unable to get them to pop open. But, hey, that’s life!
My husband Adam is my secret weapon. He travels with me and is an indispensable partner. We collaborate on everything I do. A trained musician, he listens to me sing and is basically my ears in the hall to critique me and help keep me sane as I go along the journey.
