Nico Castel, Tenor and Diction Coach at the Met, Dies at 83

Nico Castel, the Henry Higgins of the Metropolitan Opera, who guided generations of the world’s foremost singers through the oohs and aahs of their craft, died on May 31 at his home in Manhattan. He was 83.

His wife, Carol Castel, said he died after a long illness.

A highly regarded operatic tenor, Mr. Castel was himself a mainstay of the Met’s stable, appearing in nearly 800 performances with the company from the 1970s onward. A well-traveled polyglot, he also had a parallel career as the company’s staff diction coach, a post he held for some three decades before his retirement in 2009.

As a singer, Mr. Castel was a comprimario. The term, from the Italian for “with the primary,” denotes an artist who specializes in character or supporting parts — in Mr. Castel’s case, the tenor who doesn’t get the girl.

His roles at the Met included Goro in Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” and Alcindoro in his “Bohème,” Borsa in Verdi’s “Rigoletto” and Monostatos in Mozart’s “The Magic Flute.” Reviewers over the years praised Mr. Castel’s rich dramatic characterizations, his sensitive musicianship and, not surprisingly, his impeccable diction.

Writing in The New York Times in 1985, Will Crutchfield called him “the Metropolitan’s resident standard-setter for linguistic flavor.”

As a coach, Mr. Castel instructed his charges in the fine art of rolling an “r” (or trilling or tapping it, as the language of the libretto demanded); admonished them against swarms of seething sibilants; and piloted them through the gravelly shoals of German fricatives.

He spoke English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian and Ladino, a language of Sephardic Jews, with native fluency, with multiple dialects of each on the tip of his tongue.

Mr. Castel was also variously a recitalist, translator, cantor and whisky importer. It was this last calling that had steered him into opera in the first place.

The scion of a multigenerational dynasty of Sephardic rabbis, Naftali Chaim Castel Kalinhoff was born in Lisbon on Aug. 1, 1931, reared in Venezuela, tended by a German nanny and educated in a French school, thus picking up five languages by the time he was out of short pants. He adopted the name Nico Castel early in his singing career.

As a youth in Venezuela, he worked for a whisky importer.

“One of my fellow workers said I could not work for the company and not try some whisky,” Mr. Castel said in the 1982 book “Great Singers on Great Singing,” by the operatic bass Jerome Hines. “So he gave me a glass of Johnnie Walker Red. I downed it in one draft and became very drunk and I began to sing. One fellow said, ‘Nico, you have a good voice, you ought to have it trained.’ ”

And so he did, studying in Caracas and later at the University of Mainz in Germany. After moving to the United States in 1948, Mr. Castel studied Romance languages at Temple University in Philadelphia; in the early 1950s, serving with the Army, he was a translator in Germany.

In 1958, Mr. Castel won the first Joy in Singing award, sponsored by the American soprano Winifred Cecil. His prize was a recital at Town Hall in New York.

Reviewing the concert, which included works by Rodrigo, de Falla, Ginastera and Brahms, John Briggs, writing in The Times, called it a “highly promising debut, which established Mr. Castel as a man to watch.”

Mr. Castel made his Met debut on March 30, 1970, as Don Basilio in Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro.” He performed with the company until 1997, concentrating toward the end of his tenure on speaking roles like Pasha Selim in Mozart’s “Entführung aus dem Serail” (“The Abduction From the Seraglio”) and the Major-Domo in Richard Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos.”

Other companies with which he performed over the years include New York City Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago and the Santa Fe, San Francisco and Seattle operas. As a recitalist, he was known in particular for his programs of Jewish music. Mr. Castel was a former cantor of the Scarsdale Synagogue in Westchester County, N.Y., and the Progressive Synagogue in Brooklyn.

Mr. Castel’s first marriage, to Carol Bayard, ended in divorce, as did his second, to Nancy Benfield. Besides his wife, the former Carol Cates, whom he married in 1988, his survivors include a daughter, Sasha Castel, from his second marriage, and a half brother, Americo Kalinhoff.

He taught at the Juilliard School, the Mannes College of Music, Queens College, Boston University and elsewhere. With his third wife, he founded and ran the New York Opera Studio, a training forum for young singers.

Mr. Castel was the author of “A Singer’s Manual of Spanish Lyric Diction.” He also published a vast series of librettos of French, German and Italian operas, painstakingly indicating the pronunciation of every word by means of the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Long after he was an established opera singer, he told Mr. Hines, he retained a great affection for Johnnie Walker Red.

By Margalit Fox, June 3, 2015

Source: NY Times