Quote of the day:

Why a four-year-old child could understand this report. Run out and find me a four-year-old child. I can’t make head nor tail out of it.
—Groucho Marx

Tuesday morning September 25, 1984, and the Metropolitan Opera had a problem. The performance that evening was going to be Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffman, and the scheduled tenor, Neil Shicoff, had just called in sick.

The Met was prepared for just such a problem, so they called William Lewis to go on in his stead.

Except he had a throat infection.

Still, he gave it the old college try, and the audience was informed that he was going on despite his illness and they were sympathetic, but it soon became clear that his voice just wasn’t up to the task.

And then, midway through the first act, when Lewis opened his mouth, a clarion tenor sound emerged—from the left side of the orchestra.

The powers that be at the Met had taken notice of Lewis’s throat condition, so they had alerted yet a third tenor, Richland’s own Kenneth Riegel.

Riegel hadn’t performed the work in nearly two years, so it wasn’t possible for him to take over the role on such short notice. But he did know the role well enough to sing it with the help of the score in front of him.

So arrangements were made to bring Riegel into the orchestra pit where he could take his cues from the conductor, Julius Rudel, and meanwhile, Lewis was notified from the wings of when and how the vocal transition would take place.

It was perhaps not the most dramatically effective performance of the opera ever staged (at least one reviewer complained that Shicoff’s lip-syncing was pretty bad; well, given that he had never rehearsed it that way what can one expect?), but the audience apparently enjoyed it. When it was over they cheered—for the two tenors arm-in-arm.

Here is Kenneth Riegel, hidden under tons of makeup, along with Christiane Eda-Pierre, singing an excerpt from Tales of Hoffman at the Paris Opera.