Paul Plishka, an American singer acclaimed for his sonorous, liquid bass tones and near-perfect diction during a career at the Metropolitan Opera that spanned a half-century, died on Monday in Wilmington, N.C. He was 83.
His death was confirmed by his wife, Sharon Thomas, who did not cite a cause or specify where in Wilmington he died.
Known for a disciplined approach to choosing roles and a great concern for the development of his voice, Mr. Plishka was one of the most prolific solo singers at the Met, where he appeared in 88 roles over 1,672 performances.
“I think the secret of my longevity was having the good sense to turn down repertoire that wasn’t right for my voice at the time,” he said in an interview for this obituary in 2023.
Early in his career he preferred buffo, or comic, roles, especially in operas by Verdi. “My voice was more of the basso cantante — with a lyric kind of sound — not a villain’s voice,” he said.
But as his voice changed, Mr. Plishka accepted more dramatic roles, including the title one in Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov,” as Philip II of Spain in Verdi’s “Don Carlos” and as Mephistopheles in Gounod’s “Faust” — all stellar performances.
Late in his career he again embraced buffo roles, drawing acclaim especially for his rendition of the aging cavalier in Verdi’s “Falstaff.”
“To me, it put everything together — beautiful singing, acting and a character I was so attached to that I missed him between performances,” Mr. Plishka recalled.
Some singers approach a new role by first trying to probe that character — but not Mr. Plishka. “I always went for the vocals, because I wanted to be secure with each and every note I had to sing,” he said in the 2023 interview. “If you go to character first, you end doing ugly things to your throat.”
Among his few regrets was not getting enough opportunities to play one of his favorite characters, the title role in Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro.” He also lamented never being offered the title role in Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” — a slight he attributed to his stout physique.
“Throughout most of my career, I weighed between 240 and 300 pounds,” he said. “And I don’t think there are many Don Giovannis out there who look like that.”
When Mr. Plishka retired at 71, his voice was still robust and able to hit high notes as well as the low ones expected from a bass. “My hearing became a problem and was the main reason I stopped singing,” he said.
Paul Plishka was born on Aug. 28, 1941, in Old Forge, a former coal-mining community in northeastern Pennsylvania, where his grandparents, immigrants from Ukraine, worked in the mines and factories. His father, Peter, was a stockroom employee. His mother, Helen (Patrician) Plishka, was a seamstress in a dress factory. He had a younger brother, Peter.
The family moved to Paterson, N.J., where Paul starred in the high school chorus. After singing the role of Jud Fry in “Oklahoma!” he was invited to join the Paterson Lyric Opera Theater. Its founder and director, Armen Boyajian, became Mr. Plishka’s voice teacher throughout his career.
Mr. Plishka studied as a voice major at nearby Montclair State University, where he met Judith Ann Colgan. They married and had three sons.
Ms. Plishka and Mr. Boyajian both advised Mr. Plishka on his performances. “They were the two people who knew my voice even better than I did,” he said. “Judith was a passionate opera lover and attended almost all my performances.”
Mr. Plishka dropped out of college after two years and drove a truck for an ice cream company while continuing to sing with the Paterson company.
At 23, he auditioned for the Metropolitan Opera and toured with its national company. When the company folded three years later, he was invited to join the Met in New York.
He auditioned in front of Rudolf Bing, the longtime autocratic manager of the Met, who offered him buffo roles. But Mr. Plishka agreed to accept the work only if he were allowed to do occasional dramatic roles as well. “I don’t know how I found the courage to insist,” he said.
He made his Met debut in 1967, as the Monk in Ponchielli’s “La Gioconda.” Over the next three years he performed some 30 other roles, mainly buffo ones, including the lawyerly doctor Bartolo in “The Marriage of Figaro” and the bumbling friar Melitone in Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino.”
But by 1970 the Met had decided that his voice had become more suitable for dramatic roles. He was soon asked to portray major characters, like Philip in “Don Carlos” and the chaplain and tutor Raimondo in Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor.”
Out of concern for his voice, Mr. Plishka for many years declined to sing roles like Boris Godunov, the delusional czar, or Scarpia, the villainous chief of police, in Puccini’s “Tosca.”
“Both those characters have a great deal of tension and violence in their voice,” he explained, “and when you are a young singer, you cannot control those emotions and end up screaming and hurting your voice.” He never sang Scarpia, but he finally debuted as Boris Godunov at the Met in 1974.
Mr. Plishka had no qualms about accepting “graybeard” parts — like Raimondo in “Lucia di Lammermoor,” King Marke in Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” and the traveling patent-medicine peddler Dulcamara in Donizetti’s “L’Elisir d’Amore” — that other singers might reject out of fear of being typecast in secondary roles. “Many basses just want to sing the title roles — Figaro, Don Giovanni, Boris,” he said.
Mr. Plishka himself thrived on a steady mix of secondary and lead roles. Even early in his career at the Met, he was singled out for his distinctive performance as the devil in Gounod’s “Faust.”
“Mr. Plishka’s Mephistopheles was a harsher, more plainly malevolent character than is usually seen,” the critic Donal Henahan of The New York Times wrote in one review, in 1976, “and provided a few chills with his realistic outbursts of frustrated rage.”
Looking back on his long years at the Met, Mr. Plishka rated Falstaff, which he began performing in 1992, as his favorite and best rendered role.
Critics agreed. “Mr. Plishka gave the role an almost touchingly human quality,” Edward Rothstein wrote in The Times in reviewing a 1992 performance at the Met. “He was a Falstaff almost enticingly full of himself.”
Offstage, Mr. Plishka endured considerable grief. In 1984, his younger brother, Dr. Peter Plishka, chief of children’s services at the state-run Children’s Psychiatric Center in New York, was found dead from a self-inflicted knife wound in his Bronx apartment.
Mr. Plishka’s wife, Judith, died in 2004. He subsequently married Ms. Thomas, a former resident stage director at the Met. Mr. Plishka’s three sons, Paul Jr., Nicolai and Jeffrey, also died. (In 1991, Jeffrey was accused of the rape and murder of Laura Ronning, a young camp counselor in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, but he was acquitted of the crimes in 2010.)
In addition to his wife, Mr. Plishka is survived by his daughter-in-law, Fatima Plishka, and a granddaughter.
Mr. Plishka officially retired from the Metropolitan Opera after playing the Sacristan in “Tosca” on Jan. 28, 2012. But he was invited back for 15 post-retirement performances as Benoît and Alcindoro in Puccini’s “La Bohème” in the 2016-2017 season.
Mr. Plishka often insisted that he never wished to have been born a tenor, the usual male star of the stage.
“The role for a tenor is mostly one-dimensional,” he said. “He’s in love with the girl — and that’s it. With a bass, the characters are much more complex.”
Ash Wu contributed reporting.
