April 17, 2008 Issue                                       

©2007 The Chestnut Hill Local

Even road rage shooting can’t stop Ralph
‘Show must go on’ for Mt. Airy opera company founder
by LEN LEAR

PART TWO

For Mt. Airy native Rafaelle “Ralph” Tudisco, operatic music is a burning bush experience. When he is performing an aria with the Amici Opera Company, which he founded, his dark eyes seem to scorch the earth in front of him. When he discusses opera, there always seems to be water boiling under the lid.

Ralph, 50, who could talk his way out of a sunburn, lives, breathes, eats, sleeps and dreams opera. Like a sharecropper, however, Tudisco has learned that the high cotton is always filled with thorns. The sacrifices made by this stocky Mt. Airtite in order to pursue his dream would make Giuseppe Verdi weep.

For example, in 1982 and 1983, after beating out 50 competitors to win the Mario Lanza Scholarship (to pay for voice lessons), Ralph would work his day job at Holy Redeemer Hospital, first as a housekeeper and later as a lab technician. He’d start at 6 a.m., work till 1:20 p.m., then go to the 30th Street Station, take a train to New York City, arrive at 4 p.m., walk from 34th Street to 78th Street, take a singing lesson from 5 to 6 p.m., take a subway back to the train, go by train back to Philly, get home by 9 p.m. and then be at work the next day at 6 a.m.

In the mid-’90s, while working the graveyard shift as a nurse’s aide at Philadelphia Osteopathic Hospital, Ralph would work from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m., keeping himself awake with at least 10 cups of coffee, leave work and then sleep for just a few hours, shower and eat lunch, leave the house about 2:30 p.m., drive to Manhattan for a rehearsal from 5 to 8 p.m., drive home, go to work at 11 p.m. and get on the treadmill all over again.

And Ralph has overcome even worse obstacles than endless car rides, lessons and practices. In October, 2004, he was shot in both knees in a road rage incident at 66th Avenue near Broad Street in West Oak Lane. The alleged idiot who shot Ralph through his car door was eventually arrested and convicted and received a 10-to-20-year prison sentence. “I still have the pants with the holes in both knees as a reminder,” said Ralph, who made a complete recovery.

And on January 1, 2006, Ralph was driving at Church Road and New Second Street in Cheltenham — on his way to visit his mom’s grave at Hold Sepulchre Cemetery — when an electrical problem caused his car to blow up. Nothing was left of the car, but Ralph escaped just in time without injury. “The show must go on,” he declared.

Why on earth has Ralph put himself through such a grueling, torturous, almost inhuman routine — and of his own volition? “If you want something bad enough,” he replied, “you do whatever it takes to get it. . . Why do I eat? Because I have to eat to survive. Why do I sing opera? Because I have to sing opera to survive. It’s that simple. It’s not about money at all.”

To support his passion, Tudisco has also been a bartender, bouncer, waiter, cashier, exterminator, cook, nursing home worker and store manager. Among the restaurants where he was a server were the Broad Axe Tavern and Rizzo’s in Glenside. He also earned a degree in English in 1991 from Chestnut Hill College. Currently Ralph gives private voice lessons and teaches a course in opera at Temple University’s Ambler campus.

Tudisco grew up on Ardleigh Street in a Mt. Airy home once owned by Connie Mack, long-time manager/owner of the Philadelphia Athletics baseball team. His family later moved to Rugby Street. Ralph’s dad, also named Ralph, came to the U.S. at age 17 from Naples, Italy. Ralph, Sr., was a tailor, night club owner, car salesman, land developer and owner of parking lots on Broad Street. But he also loved to sing opera at home, and little Ralph breathed in and swallowed this hand-me-down passion. His dad also ran an opera company with Alfredo Salmaggi, a long-ago friend of legendary tenor Enrico Caruso.

The younger Ralph has sung in 100 operas and is familiar with 700 operatic vocal scores. (Once when another singer failed to show up for a performance of La Boheme, Ralph sang the absent singer’s part as well as his own.) He has more than 25,000 records, 2,600 CDs, 1,800 reel-to-reels, thousands of pieces of sheet music and hundreds of operatic videotapes. He has more than 600 signed photos of opera stars and original playbills going back as far as 1896. “I spend just about every penny I have on music,” said Tudisco. “I would spend money on music ahead of food.” In 1990 he purchased thousands of records from a widow on Wayne Avenue whose husband had owned record stores. “I put so many in my car,” he recalled, “that it ruined the shock absorbers.”

Knowing from cruel experience that there are not nearly enough venues for trained opera singers to perform in and that opera singers are almost always dancing along a precipice, Ralph founded the Amici (“Friendship”) Opera Company in 1998. “I sent flyers to every opera singer in creation, asking them to come and audition,” he said.

The first opera Amici performed was La Boheme at the Beth Emeth Synagogue in Northeast Philadelphia. Since then they have performed 56 different operas and dozens of collections of arias. They have sung at Allens Lane Theater, Savory Grill in Blue Bell and many churches and other venues in the Greater Philadelphia area and South Jersey.

On the subject of opera, Ralph is like an electric appliance: plug him in, and he operates on full current. But apparently many other singers do not share the same passion. “I’ve had singers make every excuse in the world,” he explained. “They will complain that there are not enough places to sing, but some of the same people will not show up for rehearsals when I offer them roles, even though we only have one a week.

“Some singers are their own worst enemies. Once I had 35 singers who told me they would come to an audition. Seven later called to say they could not make it. Of the remaining 28, only 11 showed up for the audition. The other 17 did not come and did not even bother to call.”

Another of Ralph’s pet peeves is a practice, unknown to the general public, of singers paying for roles rather than being paid themselves — a result of the supply of opera singers being so much greater than the demand.

“I was in an opera in New York,” he stated, “where six sopranos paid $500 each to perform. One had been a Metropolitan Opera finalist. They desperately need to have the experience on their resume. For a leading role at the Rome Opera Festival, you can pay $3,000, and even then, they often promise things they do not deliver. . . I have never paid for a role myself. When I was asked to, I always said I could not afford it.”

Tudisco, who has no children, was married once for three years in the 1990s to a native of Brazil. For many years he lived with his mother, Grace, who came to every one of his performances, until she died in 2004 at the age of 91.

For more information about any of the above, call 215-224-0257. Len Lear can be contacted at 215-248-8807 or lenlear@chestnuthilllocal.com.