I couldn't believe my eyes. I read it again, slowly. The incredible news was that Italy, the home of opera, was suffering a national shortage of quality singers.
Apparently there is no sign of a budding Gigli, Caruso or Pavarotti on the horizon. Did we ever think we would live to see the day? What is the world coming to? This is like Ireland without potatoes or Guinness.
The Guardian article was based on a piece in the Turin daily newspaper La Stampa which declared: "Italian men cannot sing any more. Opera houses are in alarm over the lack of tenors." Of the 60 singers recently auditioned by Milan's La Scala opera house for its 10 chorus vacancies, only three proved acceptable. In Turin, the Teatro Regio had failed to find a single suitable candidate from among 40 applicants. In Florence, the Teatro Comunale had been forced to search for singers as far afield as Argentina.
Old gramophone
What would my grandfather have said? He was the founder of one of the first operatic societies in the west of Ireland many years ago. He had an old HMV gramophone with a mahogany base, a silver coloured megaphone and a handle to get the turntable going. He used to listen to scratchy wax records of the Italian stars singing the great arias. He would then wander around the house humming away blissfully.
He believed music was the greatest of the arts, the one that could generate the most emotion, the one that could bring tears to your eyes.
Italy without top-quality tenors is unimaginable. We have always looked on Italy as a place where they produce marvellous tenors on conveyor belts. They sing in the streets, the parks, the hostelries and in the restaurants, where every waiter is capable of breaking into song at the drop of a hat (or a tray). So is all this now going to end? One hopes not.
My late mother also loved the Italian tenors, up to the Mario Lanza era. She used to get upset when the critics accused the rotund Italian-American of not being a real singer, but simply a "shouter". She had no time for the prima donnas, whom she claimed were not as good as the men. "They are not as musical, they screech," she contended.
She used to ask me: "Why have Italians such wonderful voices?" I would shrug my shoulders, bored from hearing the question so often, and say I hadn't a clue. It wasn't something I had given much thought to in my daily order of priorities. Maybe they had better teachers, I ventured.
No, no, she would reply. She had a theory that it was due to all the olive oil they consumed. She was convinced that this did something for the vocal chords. It softened them and resulted in a more tender, musical sound.
More passion
I honestly don't know, but they certainly have something going for them that singers in the rest of the big wide world haven't got. They sing with more passion and emotion than anybody else. While we have a few good tenors in Ireland, maybe our high-cholesterol diet stops them reaching world prominence.
Apparently, good tenors are 10 a penny throughout the world now (pardon the pun), and Italy is no longer the epicentre of opera. The great production line has slowed down and a number of other countries have caught up. This is apparently causing quite a bit of angst among Italians, as they see a proud tradition waning.
According to a concerned La Stampa, Italians have stopped singing in church. Italian folk music no longer exists. And in the music conservatories foreigners have taken over. The few young Italians who enter now find themselves surpassed by Korean, Japanese and Chinese students. No doubt they also come across the odd lucky Irish singer who has managed to collect enough money or sponsorship to go there.
The world is now a smaller place. Italian music culture has spread to most corners of the planet and has been enthusiastically taken up and built upon. This is a tribute to Italy. The world is benefiting, just as it benefited from the development of jazz in America.
Every country has its time at the top at something. The Greeks led the world in philosophy a few hundred years ago. The French were leaders in art, the British in drama, but they have all fallen back a bit since then. It's the same in sport. England invented soccer and cricket and then saw it their prowess fall away over the years as other countries became more proficient - good enough, indeed, to beat, and sometimes humiliate, the originators.
"Bizarre thing"
Of course, opera is not everbody's cup of tea and has often prompted extreme reactions. Charles de Saint-Evremond, a French man of letters in the 17th century, called it "a bizarre thing consisting of poetry in music, in which the poet and the composer, equally standing in each other's way, go to endless trouble to produce a wretched result." The 18th-century English statesman and writer Lord Chesterfield wrote to his son: "As for operas, they are essentially too absurd and extravagant to mention. I look on them as a magic scene contrived to please the eyes and ears at the expense of the understanding."
At the other extreme, it has been said that the mere existence of such a masterpiece as Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro is enough to to justify Western civilisation.