Charles Anthony: The 'Emperor' of the Met

(Click here for pictures of Charles Anthony in various roles at the Metropolitan Opera)

In a previous life – in the 1980s – I lived in New York and covered the New York Jets, a star-crossed NFL franchise suffering from Post-Traumatic Namath Syndrome. The Jets were such audacious flameouts they had to have been created by Broadway playwrights specifically for the back page of the New York Post.

    In those days, the tabloid mentality of the Post and the Daily News distilled to this truth: If you were a professional athlete, you were either a hero or a bum. That status could flip daily, of course, but there was absolutely nothing in between.

    Defensive tackle Joe Klecko once chased me around the Jets’ locker room with a bucketful of water, upset that I had written in a post-game “report card” that he had been “buried” by a blocker on a touchdown run. He missed – go figure – and I stayed dry.

    Another time after a particularly absurd loss, head coach Bruce Coslet conducted his Monday interview via speakerphone from his second-floor office. The beat reporters were on the first floor.

    I asked what seemed like a logical question: “Bruce, why are you doing this?”

    He answered: “I don’t have time to come downstairs.”

    As Buddy Diliberto might say, “That was like mañana from heaven.” Hold the back page!

    I considered it a blessing whenever I got a respite from the Jets’ soap opera to extend my subject matter to smaller humans in no need of dumbbells or shoulder pads. That’s why when the editor of the Loyola University alumni magazine called in 1984 and asked if I could do a feature story on New Orleans’ “Two Tenors” – Loyola alums Charles Anthony (1952) and Anthony Laciura (1974) – I privately did a Mark Gastineau sack dance.

    All of these memories come flashing back because Anthony, 82, died Feb. 15 at his Tampa, Fla., home of kidney failure. In 57 seasons at the Metropolitan Opera, Anthony appeared in 2,928 performances, more than any other solo artist in the company’s history.

    Anthony, a Catholic with a deep devotion to the Blessed Mother, was a 5-foot-7 hero. He was born for the back page.

    “Charles Anthony was the emperor of the Metropolitan,” said Laciura, who joined the Met on an August day in 1982 when Anthony met him at the stage door and gave him a New Orleans “where y’at” welcome and introduced him to the crew as his long-lost “son.”

    Anthony had the self-deprecating humor of someone who never viewed himself as a big shot. He told the story about the 1952 Loyola Talent Night, when he heard his name announced and was certain he had won the competition. Then WWL broadcaster Henry Dupre, one of the judges, called out another name, meaning Anthony had to step aside from the spotlight.

    A month later, Anthony, 22, competed in the Metropolitan Opera “Auditions of the Air,” the premiere testing ground for aspiring virtuosos around the country.

    “To show you what a good judge of talent I am,” Dupre told his audience that night, “the fella I picked third at the Loyola Talent Night just won the Met Auditions!”

    Anthony was born Charles Anthony Caruso, but just before going on stage at the Met for the first time in 1954, Met general manager Rudolf Bing felt he would be compared to Enrico Caruso and forced him to change his name.

    “It would be like me being named Babe Ruth and trying to perform as Babe Ruth,” Anthony said. “You would have two strikes against you.”

    Over more than a half-century, Anthony became known as much for his loving presence and his compassion for nervous, star-struck youngsters as for his incredible voice and professionalism.

    “After all these years,” he told Catholic Digest in 2005, “each time I walk out on stage, I’m still scared to death. When you get out there, you just don’t know what’s going to happen with those two little vocal cords. All you can do is pray. It’s the Virgin Mary who’s pulled me through. I’ve been praying to her since I was a child. Even on the night of my debut, after I’d performed, I said, ‘Blessed Mother, thank you!’”

    The thought of making his voice his life had not dawned on Anthony when he was a student at Warren Easton High School in the 1940s. There were more pressing concerns.

    “I hated geometry,” he said.

    So when his geometry teacher passed out a bulletin asking for volunteers for a school play, Anthony jumped at the chance. It was the first angle he ever liked.

    “They were taking all these big football players who couldn’t sing a lick – just because they were big,” Anthony recalled. “I went through the scale, and the conductor said I had the best voice, but they turned me down because I was too short to be a soldier.”

    He wound up carrying a flag, but the rest is history.

    Laciura said he will always remember the way Anthony opened his heart and his faith to the nervous, young singers in the wings.

    “He would say, ‘There’s no reason to be nervous. With all the stage lights, you’re not going to be able to see those 4,000 people,’” Laciura said.
“And then he’d let out a big laugh.

    “Charlie was able to get through all the shark-infested waters and still come out on top. That is a tribute to his deep belief in the company, which stems from a deep faith and a deep belief in yourself. He always told me, ‘You have a gift from God, and this gift needs to be shared. You can’t light it and then put a basket over it. It needs to be shined.’”

    To Laciura and many others, he was a true hero.

    “He was a man singing from his soul,” Laciura said. “He would always tell me, ‘Don’t back up. Go forward when you sing! Go forward! Lunge forward! Sing out, boy, sing out! Don’t apologize! God gave you a gift!’”

    Peter Finney Jr. can be reached at pfinney@clarionherald.org.