Specials

Son of Giacomo, restorer and decorator, and Elena Balistrieri, Bertolino was born on September 10, 1931, “in the historical center of Palermo, very close to the Politeama Theater." Originally named Ercole, he was the third of nine children. “We were seven boys and two girls, and my father was the only bread winner."
The first sounds that little Ercole must have heard were the lullabies of his mother Elena, who was gifted, according to the son, “with an extraordinary natural voice.” (She must have sung quite a bit to coax all her children to sleep!)

His passion for singing arrived relatively late in life: “growing up, I would sing the songs from the ’40s, the music of my generation. Every once in a while I used to entertain my friends impersonating this or that singer.”
When a friend’s sister asked Bertolino to sing at her wedding, destiny played a trick on him that would change his life. “I was 17 years old. I sang the Ave Maria by Schubert and the Panis Angelicus by Franck. Who could ever have imagined that sitting in the pews that day was Beniamino Gigli himself? I’m not ashamed to say that at that time I was so naive that I barely knew who Gigli was.”
 

The mythic tenor from Recanati, engaged by the Massimo Theater for the 1947-48 season, was staying at the Delle Palme Hotel in Via Roma and was auditioning young singers. “After he heard me in church, Gigli invited me to audition for him the next day. I went and sang the only piece I knew from memory, the Credo from Verdi’s Otello. Only when you are that young and have nothing to lose can you dare so much. And yet, I remember Maestro Gigli at the end of the audition saying in front of everyone that I had a beautiful baritone voice and that I was worthy of support."
Thanks to Gigli’s intercession, Bertolino was enrolled in the studio of Ester Mazzoleni. A famous dramatic soprano at La Scala in the Toscanini years, Mazzoleni had become a renowned voice teacher at the Bellini Conservatory in Palermo. “La Mazzoleni had great charisma and an impressive knowledge of voices and of repertoire. After I left her, I learned again and again how effective and sound were her methods.”
She must have had a high regard for Bertolino’s talent. At the end of the third year, she decided the time had come for her student to audition for one of the greatest baritones of all time, Titta Ruffo. “Ruffo liked me very much, but at his age he was sorry not to be in the physical condition to give me lessons. He suggested I go to Milan to sing for a very famous teacher, the Cremonese baritone Mario Basiola. At the end of the audition Basiola told me, ‘You are a wild horse, but a thoroughbred nonetheless.’ In Basiola’s studio, Bertolino watched some of the best of his generation file through, still students themselves: Di Stefano, Raimondi, Oncina, Guelfi.
“In those days it wasn’t easy to make a living in Milan and pay for lessons. I took all kinds of jobs in order to survive and guarantee myself a certain continuity in my studies: house painter, dishwasher at the Mensa ECA, a workers restaurant. Once I felt more secure with singing, I started participating in vocal competitions, but without telling my maestro, who thought I wasn’t ready yet. I was forced to apply with different names – Mario Berti or Ercole Bertoni. When they asked me for my birth certificate, I would say I forgot it…and it always worked out.”
After a few years the turning point arrived, the moment to decide whether it was worth continuing to pursue a singing career or if it was better to go in another direction. It was 1955 when 24-year-old Mario Bertolino entered the Concorso dell’As.li.co, the prestigious singing competition includes among its winners the likes of Bergonzi, Cappuccilli and Scotto.


“When I told Basiola that I had entered and that I felt ready for the challenge, he said, ‘Don’t embarrass me!’ Moreover, he said he would not attend the winners’ recital. Yet there he was, seated in the front row with tears in his eyes. When I got the [first?] prize, I intended to repay him for all the free lessons, but he would hear none of it. While I was his student, not only did he not let me pay him for lessons, but he often paid for the pianist himself. And if I was the last student of the day, he’d tell his wife to set another place at the table for dinner. Often I’m asked why we no longer have singers of a certain level. Perhaps it is because we no longer have teachers of a certain level.”

The victory of the prestigious contest marked the official beginning of Bertolino’s 52-year career. Singing as a baritone first and a buffo later, his repertoire encompassed more than 60 of the most challenging operatic roles. Particularly memorable were his interpretations in Don Pasquale, L’Elisir d’Amore, La Forza del Destino, Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Tosca, Manon Lescaut, Werther, Madama Butterfly, Rigoletto, Carmen and La Bohéme.
“I’ve never been formal. Some theaters want me for my dramatic ability on stage, others for my comic verve or for what I’m able to express with my voice, my experience and my acting talent. This is the reason I never acted like a snob when they didn’t offer me the most coveted roles. In the theater you must know above all how to command the stage, whatever the role. This is a concept that young people rarely embrace. Do you really think that the great singers have made their careers singing only important roles? Absolutely not!”
He pulls out a recording of Bohéme, whose cover shows Bertolino’s name next to that of Corelli and Tebaldi. “It was December 2, 1969. Conductor Anton Guadagno. I was singing two roles in that production, Benoit and Alcindoro. I’m very proud of it, because I’ve always been convinced that in order to be a great artist one must have a deep sense of humility and a visceral love for the stage, no matter how important the role or the stage you are walking on”.
Season after season, Bertolino’s name appeared on the roster of the most celebrated temples of opera, leading up to his debut at the Metropolitan Opera in 1964.
“In that phase of my career I was known with my real name, Ercole Bertolino, but I couldn’t stand how people, especially in the USA, mispronounced my first name, so I decided to pass from a pagan hero name to a Christian name that was easier to pronounce: Mario.”
Bertolino’s journey to the MET was long and arduous. He arrived in the USA without a regular VISA and escaped from the Immigration Office bureaucracy several times with the aide of some good-hearted compatriots. Bertolino began auditioning for the major opera companies in the USA. Only after he had sung in theaters like Philadelphia, San Francisco, Cincinnati, Dallas, Tampa and finally Chicago did Bertolino gain a green card and with it the permission to accept invitations from European and South American opera houses.
As his fame precedes him from city to city, he had the opportunity to sing next to the greatest singers of the second half of the 20th century.


“Jan Peerce heard me in Cincinnati while we were doing Rigoletto together and it was he who brought me to the attention of the Met, praising my vocal and acting skills. I sang at the MET for ten consecutive seasons. At the end I would have liked to renew my contract, but they wanted me to sign an exclusive contract that offered me mostly covers,” which is a contract in which you are supposed to sing only if the principal colleague is indisposed.
“At that moment of my career I felt still young and with great vocal potential, and I didn’t want to spend long periods waiting for my colleagues to get sick and cancel. So I turned down the MET offer and took on a new challenge, that of the Italian houses. After years away from my homeland, I trod the boards with childish glee in Bologna, Rome, Palermo, Genoa, Turin, Catania, Venice, Naples and Bari, always to that triumphal reception of which only the Italian public is capable. I have wonderful memories from the years at the MET. It was an authentic temple of art, but with the passage of time, and especially nowadays, it looks like a beautiful ship with an inadequate crew! In fact the direction of the theater is in the wrong hands: they not only understand nothing about voices, but they act as if the MET is their property, inviting only those singers who suit the narrow demands of the box office.



“It’s also true that these days there are few singers who create a real character onstage and the audience no longer has the power or the will to boycott a performance or a production in order to arrest this decline. If to this sorry situation one adds the superpower of opera agents, totally focused on the promotional side and not at all on the artistic quality of their clients, one easily understands why singers of my generation recoil from what they see and hear.
There are happy exceptions: artists whose efforts to save a dying tradition collide on a daily basis with the suicidal tendency of many directors and conductors in particular, who, in their desperate attempt to present something new, create something that is vulgar, that distorts the essence of the operatic theater and leads it towards an unavoidable end.
“If someone asks me who, among the conductors in career, could be compared to the great ones of the past generation with whom I had the luck to work with (Serafin, Patanè, Gavazzeni, Coppola), I answer without any hesitation: Daniel Oren,” currently resident conductor at Trieste Theater.
“In my opinion, in Oren’s case, we are facing a great man, a conductor and a musician with an unbeatable enthusiasm. Despite his young age, Oren has a very deep knowledge of voices and traditions.” It was Oren – Bertolino reveals – that was like a brother to him and pushed him to start singing again after the tragic car accident in which his son Michele Giacomo and his son-in-law Victor died. It was December 2003.
“After such a calamity I didn’t want to live anymore. I canceled all my engagements and wouldn’t answer the phone. Such things shouldn’t happen to any parent! It’s an atrocious, unspeakable grief.
“One day Oren, who was conducting at the MET at that time, knew about me, asked me to go to NY and said to me: ‘You must keep singing, because the audience needs you and because I know you can still give a lot. I’d like you to do Rigoletto in Tel Aviv.’ I refused, but the contract arrived anyway and after that I was summoned again for the Arena di Verona season. I can say that thanks to my friend Oren and due to the fundamental psychological support of my wife Costantina and my daughter Claudia, I began to live again and re-emerged from the darkest period of my life."
The courage to start anew demonstrated by Bertolino in that situation highlights the tenacity and the passion of a man who feels home on the stage and disoriented away from it. Perhaps this is the reason why when asked how long he would like to sing, he answers promptly: “Until the last breath. If you have enough strength to sustain your singing – and you find this strength inside you, it has nothing to do with muscles – you can sing forever."



When one looks at careers of such relevance like Bertolino’s, one wonders if sooner or later the moment will come in which the artist will decide to pass his accumulation of knowledge, experience and memories onto a younger generation. It is another challenge taken on by Bertolino, who has recently started giving voice lessons, primarily to professionals at the beginning of their careers.
“Young people represent the future, they are the continuation. We have to invest in them and enrich them with all the experience we have gained in many years of professional activity. It’s also true that young people must be very careful in putting their talent in the right hands. There are too many incompetent mercenaries around that ruin careers with an enormous potential. I personally think that the so-called voice teachers who have never in their lives been opera singers, never walked on a stage, who, in other words, have never had a professional career, should be arrested in the same way you arrest drug dealers!
One cannot be a voice teacher if he or she doesn’t have any familiarity with the projection, position and articulation of the sound, if they don’t know how to breathe, how to phrase in order to be heard in a house, if they have never dealt metaphorically with the stage dust: it’s like a surgeon that has never made an incision in his life. If you’re going to undergo surgery, I bet you will go to a successful surgeon, not to a doctor who recites manuals by heart but has never had a scalpel in his hands!”

(A special thank to Arthur McManus for his editorial expertise)