Mario! Mario!

Who would have dreamt that Alfredo Arnold Cocozza would grow up to become one of the biggest stars of the 1950s?

Mario Lanza was born in South Philadelphia, in a row home on the 600 block of Christian Street, one hundred years ago today. It was the year the great Caruso died (on August 9th), and Lanza, famously, went on to play him in the movies. In fact, “The Great Caruso” became the highest-grossing M-G-M film of 1951.

Legend states that Lanza was discovered by Serge Koussevitzky, traveling music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, after booking an adjacent hotel room so that he might be overheard practicing. Koussevitzky described Lanza as “Caruso redivivus” (Caruso reborn), and stated, “Yours is a voice such as is heard once in a hundred years.”

Fresh-faced and forever young, Lanza is preserved in his everlasting vitality on records and celluloid. He died of an apparent pulmonary embolism in 1959 at the age of 38.

Shortly before his own death in 1987, Enrico Caruso Jr. observed, “I can think of no other tenor, before or since Mario Lanza, who could have risen with comparable success to the challenge of playing Caruso in a screen biography… Lanza was born with one of the dozen or so great tenor voices of the century, with a natural voice placement, an unmistakable and very pleasing timbre, and a nearly infallible musical instinct.”

On the one hundredth anniversary of his birth, celebrate Koussevitzky’s “voice of a hundred years.”

Happy birthday, Mario Lanza.

“Drink drink drink” from “The Student Prince”:

At the time of his death, Lanza was preparing a return to the operatic stage as Canio in “Pagliacci” (seen here in “The Great Caruso”):

“Parigi, o cara” from “La Traviata,” with Frances Yeend and Eugene Ormandy conducting, at the Hollywood Bowl in 1947. In the audience was Louis B. Mayer, who signed the 26 year-old tenor to a long-term movie contract.

High-spirited tribute in Peter Jackson’s “Heavenly Creatures,” set to Rudolf Friml’s “The Donkey Serenade”:

Lanza’s first gold record, “Be My Love”: