THE SOLOIST

Years back when I belonged to the church choir, we had an Italian tenor with  tremendous vibrato.  Unfortunately he didn’t really fit in because singing in a choir requires you to blend with other voices. At one point when our director gave a solo at Christmas to a soprano, the tenor’s wife, who also sang with us, asked why her talented husband was not given that particular solo. Everyone was aghast at her outrage, because he really wasn’t a very good soloist and we all understood the director’s position. His wife was absolutely furious, but the director didn’t give in.

Knowing what I’ve told you, you might enjoy a story about this man which I heard a year later.

The tenor and his wife toured Italy and at every church they attended, he would sing the “Ave Maria” until his fellow travelers told him to stop. Upon hearing this story, I thought that he must have been attending Mass and singing it at the end of the Mass, which could only have been as few times in the week or two they visited the country.

I discovered how wrong I was when we toured Italy ourselves. In our ten day tour of Italy, every day we were in a different location and touring at least one church a day and sometimes two or three. It then dawned on me what the tenor had been doing.

Picture this, every church you would enter with other touring groups would be given a history of the edifice when suddenly a man in the crowd would start singing the “Ave Maria” in an extremely loud voice. Obviously he had been doing this in every church and everyone in his group or in the other groups finally became furious and demanded he stop.

I really think he told this story himself thinking it was funny, because I don’t know of anyone else who was on that tour. Talk about “The Ugly American”