ETUDE the music magazine, December, 1949

I Learned to Sing by Accident.

By Mario Lanza

As told to James Francis Cooke


Mario Lanza, 27-year-old tenor from Philadelphia, has become almost overnight one of America’s best-known singers. He has long-term contracts with RCA-Victor Records, with Arthur Judson for concert appearances, and with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. His most recent movie appearance was in “that Midnight Kiss.” Next September Lanza will make his debut at La Scala in Milan, with Victor de Sabata conducting.


Last August the American Legion met in Philadelphia for that largest encampment it has ever held. It brought one million visitors to town. That was the week chosen by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for the premiere of the motion picture, “That Midnight Kiss,” in which Miss Kathryn Grayson and I were starring with Ethel Barrymore and Jose Iturbi. Philadelphia was chosen because of the scene of the film was laid in Philadelphia where I was born January 31, 1922, at Seventh and Christian Streets in “Little Italy,” and the story of the film had some incidents of my youth. Philadelphia’s “Little Italy” houses far more people of Italian descent than most of the cities in Italy itself.

In the early 20s, at the height of the prohibition era, Philadelphia’s “Little Italy” was probably the roughest, toughest, most vicious part of the United States. Gangsters, bootleggers, murderers, racketeers chose it for a battleground. Hardly a day went past without a shooting. As a little boy in the streets I heard the bullets whiz many times. In those days hot Latin blood literally boiled in the streets and alleys, and no one knew what the day would bring forth. I often wonder how I came through it alive, as many innocent bystanders were killed. Finally the police, the F.B.I., together with the stable citizens, who composed the better part of the community, gained the upper hand. “Little Italy” is no longer a gangster’s paradise, but is filled with citizens who love America and are so proud of their citizenship that few of the younger generation, unfortunately, can speak Italian.

While some 30,000 Legionnaires were parading for twelve hours through Philadelphia’s streets, another celebration was occurring in “Little Italy.” The Mayor of Philadelphia, Hon. Bernard Samuel, the president of the Chamber of Commerce, Ralph Kelly, and the chairman of the Chamber of Commerce, Arthur C. Kaufmann, together with other noted Philadelphians, took me in a motorcade down to my old home district, where a fiesta was being held as only Italians can hold fiestas, to celebrate my entrance to the movies in “That Midnight Kiss.” The streets were jammed with cheering neighbors and friends. Rhadames in “Aida,” returning after his victory in Ethiopia, could not have had a more boisterous welcome. It seemed incredible. Only a few years ago I was a piccolo ragazzo playing around the street and now the whole town was hailing me as a hero. Do you wonder that I was so emotionally moved that I wept with joy for three hours that night?

A fiesta in South Philadelphia's "Little Italy" welcomed Mario Lanza home at the time of the premiere showing of "that Midnight Kiss". In front of the store over which the newly famous tenor was born are gathered: (l. to r.) Lanza's father and mother (Mr. and Mrs. Cocozza), Mrs.Mario Lanza, Philadelphia's Mayor Bernard Samuel, Kathryn Grayson (Mrs. Jon Johnston), Mario Lanza, Jon Johnston.

My immigrant father, Antonio Cocozza, was a wounded and incapacitated veteran of World War I, who captured the first German prisoners in the Argonne. My grandfather, Salvatore Lanza, still conducts a grocery and trucking business at Seventh and Christian streets, and it was over his store that I was born.

Few Americans can sense the Italian’s love for opera It is the result of centuries of development. Opera is in every Italian’s blood. I am told that in Italy around the opera houses there are push carts in the streets loaded with opera librettos just like peanut stands around a ball park in America. The enthusiasm for baseball in our country is mild compared with the Italian’s love for opera. Scores of Italians with an irrepressible yen for producing opera have gone broke repeatedly.

My father was a great opera enthusiast and had a large collection of records of his favorite singers. I heard these from the time I could first hear a clock tick. They were as much a part of my life as spaghetti and chianti.

Father used to buy his records at a store operated by a remarkable character known as Pop Iannarelli. He was the Victor record dealer in our district. He had an amplifier in front of his store. When he put on a new record, the whole neighborhood was turned into an opera house. You could hear that amplifier winter or summer three blocks away. Nobody shouted “Stop that noise,” but “Bravo! Bis!” (Splendid! More! More!)

Pop Iannarelli took a great interest in me. He was a world of operatic inspiration and information. To be with him was like being brought up on the stage of an opera house. When I was ten, I could reel off the plots of fifty grand operas just as the average American kid could give you baseball scores. I also knew the principal arias of all these operas. When Pop Iannarelli put on records of “Vesti la giubba” or “Una furtive lagrima,” I seemed to break out in goose pimples from head to foot.

At the same time I was just a neighborhood kid interested in fun, sports and not without the inevitable mischief that shadows all small boys. I had my little street gang and I was the leader. Only the other boys looked upon me as a kind of “opera mad” high brow, while the other gangs were having difficulties in evading the police as well as the bullets of the real gangsters and racketeers who daily shot it out in “Little Italy”.

My school marks at the public school and at the South Philadelphia High School where the tireless music supervisor, Jay Speck, had charge of the music, were average but not brilliant. I learned something of musical notation under Mr. Speck, but never took any special part in the school musical activities. That was probably because the school never had a grand opera company.

I went in for sports, became a boxer, a baseball player, and a semi-professional football player. I was also a weight lifter. At 18 I could lift 200 pounds. I earned my living for some time in football. I was offered a college scholarship because of my success at football, but getting an education in that way did not appeal to me. To sports and to my musical interest I probably owe my escape from juvenile delinquency in that vicious district of Philadelphia in which I grew up.

My parents, noting my interest in music, wished to give me lessons. Our family was poor but they got together $75.00, bought me a violin and sent me to the Settlement Music School on Queen street supported by wealthy Philadelphians. Johann Grolle, a former director of the Curtis Institute, was its guiding spirit. Somehow I did not take to the drudgery of early violin study and when the teacher discovered that I was playing by ear instead of by note, he made a remark that made me fly into a temper and I threw the violin out of a third story window. It smashed on a passing rubbish truck and my career as a violinist was ended.

My parents looked upon me as incorrigible, for the loss of the $75.00 instrument came as a calamity to the family. Later, they sent me to the same school to study piano with no better results. At least however, I did not throw the piano out the window.

I did not even dream that I had a singing voice until I was nearly twenty. Many young folks who are unable to afford a good teacher, wait around bemoaning their fate until it is too late. If I had done that, I would have lost years of time. Get the best records of great singers and listen to them over and over again, hundreds of times. Listen to the fine, pure and relaxed production. Always sing mezza voce (half voice) with absolutely no strain at first, and then some day you may find as I did that you really have a voice.

Read everything you can about the voice and then use all the intelligence at your command in applying it to your own case. I think that many vocal aspirants do not realize how much all-important collateral information can be gained from records, books and magazines that even the best of teachers do not have time to take up in lessons. Somehow I picked up a surprising amount of musical information, not in the orthodox conservatory manner, but by tapping every possible source and impressing it upon my mind.

One day when I was between 19 and 20 years old, I was playing the Caruso record of the great tenor solo in Puccini’s “La Fani ulla del West” (Girl of the Golden West) and I felt an impulse to sing with the record.

I had had no vocal training of any kind up to that time, save that which was stored up in my subconscious mind by hearing countless records.  I had never thought that I could sing and the sounds that were coming from my throat amazed me. It was as though something pent up for years was now gushing out like a mountain spring.

I was dazed. It seemed a miracle to me. I sang with Caruso records incessantly, hardly taking time to eat or sleep. I had found my voice. I could hardly believe it. Even when my excited father came in and said, “Why, you have a great voice. You will have to study,” I was incredulous.

I did not know how to produce tone, but I knew the kind of tone I wanted, and when I reached the highest notes, veins stood out upon my forehead and my face turned blood-red. Finally, one day my father, who had been listening to me without my knowing it, came in with tears in his eyes and said, “You cannot waste any more time. You must go to a vocal coach at once.”

“But,” I said, “Papa, that is not singing, it is only noise.”

“Well,” he replied, “if that is only noise, it is the most beautiful noise I have ever heard.”

He sent me to Miss Irene Williams, a well-known coach in Philadelphia, who drilled me in some of the leading arias from the operas. I had up to that time, however, no fundamental lessons in actual voice training to teach me how to handle my voice to best advantage. Vocal coaching, which drills the singer in the roles he must sing, is quite different from voice training. The voice trainer is like the master violin maker who takes rare woods and forms them into a master instrument as did Stradivarius or Guarnerius. Both the voice trainer and the vocal coach are indispensable.

My grandfather, however, contended that I was only wasting my time singing. As I was then working for him in his grocery store, and in his trucking business, he demanded that I devote my time exclusively to business. He could not understand my dreams and what they meant to me. But my destiny was then clear and I knew that I was intended to be a singer. In the meantime there was no alternative. I had to drive Grand-dad’s trucks!


Mario Lanza Feature Articles

"My First Big Opportunity" - Etude January, 1950

With love, from Lorie