This month is the 7th death anniversary of Ilonggo tenor Otoniel Gonzaga. He died in a Vienna hospital January 14. 2018.
Tenor Arthur Espiritu, who received three standing ovations in his last concert at UPV Iloilo in 2022, said he
treated the Ilonggo tenor as someone he looked up to.
Said Lea Salonga who sang with the tenor and the PPO in 2006: “Your glorious voice will be missed Otoniel
Gonzaga. Sing with the angels now.”
Singer Dulce said, “It was a big honor to share the stage with this great Filipino tenor.”
Gonzaga was last heard in the Philippines in 2006 when he came back for a visit and performed as a soloist
of the Philippine Philharmonic Orchestra under Julian Quirit with guest artist Lea Salonga and with the Manila Philharmonic Orchestra with Dulce and soprano Camille Lopez Molina.
Gonzaga appeared in more than 45 opera houses in Germany, including Berlin, Cologne, Dusseldorf, Hamburg, Hanover, Munich and Stuttgart.
Like Cecile Licad, the tenor received his training at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania under English tenor Richard Lewis, American soprano Margaret Harshaw and John Lester. While at Curtis, he won the first prize in the Marian Anderson International Singing Competition in Philadelphia. Licad’s mentor, Rudolf Serkin, heard Gonzaga in a rehearsal of Cosi fan tutte and commented, “Most singers sing loudly, but I like the way Gonzaga sings because he sings musically.”
Serkin’s admiration for Gonzaga later translated into an endorsement for him to be one of the soloists in Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy with Eugene Ormandy conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra.
One week before the Philippine debut of Pavarotti in 1994 in a concert, Gonzaga gave his countrymen a sample of what it took to be able to sing Act I of Otello. After the initial chorus opener, Gonzaga let out a piercing opening aria, “Esultate,” which stunned the audience.
A Frankfurt opera critic described the Filipino tenor as having a “powerful tenor voice with amazing lyrical
intensity.”
In Switzerland he was proclaimed a “brilliant Faust…[with] a heroic and unusually timbered voice.”
When he sang for the first time at the CCP in 1988, a thoroughly impressed National Artist for Theater Rolando Tinio wrote: “The performances of lyric spinto tenor Otoniel Gonzaga revealed, among other things, that Filipinos can be world-class in the tenor category. It is not true, as he has shown, that Filipino males can only produce sweet but small voices.”
Tinio was right. Gonzaga, singing in Sweden where the great tenors Nicolai Gedda and Jussi Bjoerling come from, was declared by the Swedish press as a genuine Verdi tenor after singing the male lead in La Traviata.
Born in Iloilo City, Gonzaga left the country in 1963 when his parents decided to live in Philadelphia for good.
His schooling at the Curtis Institute was unknown to Filipinos. The other Filipino who made ripples at Curtis
was Cecile Licad, whose teacher Rudolf Serkin was also impressed by Gonzaga’s singing.
After only a year of studies at Curtis, Gonzaga won first prize in the Marian Anderson Voice Competition and later got to sing plum roles in the school production of Cosi fan tutte and La Bohème. In one production of Pagliacci in the late ’60s, Gonzaga was in the chorus while the then unknown Placido Domingo was singing Canio.
In the mid-80s Gonzaga would again encounter Domingo who, along with his son, was in the audience when Gonzaga sang the tenor lead in the Hamburg production of Rigoletto.
As Gonzaga was removing his make-up in his dressing room, he heard a gentle rap on the door. Then a man’s voice said in Spanish, “Could a countryman of yours come in?”
When Gonzaga opened the door, there stood the majestic Placido Domingo, who had mistaken him for a Mexican. “You are Mexican, aren’t you?” Domingo asked. Gonzaga said he was a Filipino. It was also Domingo’s agent who arranged for Gonzaga’s audition with the legendary conductor Herbert von Karajan, who found the Filipino good enough as a substitute for the tenor Luis Lima who backed out from the Salzburg production of Tosca for health reasons.
From there, Gonzaga’s career took off with engagements at the Frankfurt Opera, including the national theater in Munich, and opera houses in Hamburg, Stuttgart, Dusseldorf, Hanover, Zurich, Glasgow, Barcelona and Brussels. In 1987, Gonzaga made his debut at the New York City Opera as Foresto in Verdi’s least-known opera, Attila.
Gonzaga, Prague Opera’s first choice for Otello, said his latest opera triumph is the penultimate of tenor roles.
“For one to do justice to the part of Otello, one must be ready not just vocally but psychologically, because one has to move from one extreme emotion to the other. He was a Moor, and he was a mercenary who was paid to go to war by the Venetians who didn’t want to dirty their hands. On top of that, he was in love with the 16-year-old Desdemona, but he was black. So, he finds himself in a quandary, being black in a big white world. He ends up murdering his loved one. Musically, Otello is very rewarding, and it is also one of the heaviest roles. One has to dig deep into the psychological equivalent of the role of someone in love and very jealous and consumed by murderous rage. So you have a whole spectrum of emotions. They say that if the music doesn’t get you in this opera, the emotions will.”
Of his last Manila concert in 2006 with the Manila Philharmonic, journalist Jullie Yap Daza wrote, “I am tongue-tied, dumbstruck. I can only say that the Christmas concert that starred Otoniel Gonzaga with Camille Molina and Dulce should have been watched by 10,000 or 20,000 people.”
Gonzaga is survived by his wife Christina, son Rolando and daughters Isabelle and Louise.
(Tenor Otoniel Gonzaga is one of tenors profiled in Pablo Tariman’s Encounters in the Arts along with Pavarotti, Jose Carreras and Arthur Espiritu. First printing now sold out. Central Books now accepting orders for second printing. Call 09065104270 or email: artsnewsservice@gmail.com)