Love me tenor

Opera's romantic new pop stars are as big as Timberlake -- and as authentic as Fabio.

By David Marchese

Read more: Arts & Entertainment

Il Divo (front) and Josh Groban

Dec. 5, 2006 | Fans of lightweight schmaltz have more to be thankful for this holiday season than endless reruns of "A Christmas Story" and Adam Sandler's "Hanukkah Song": Il Divo and Josh Groban are back with new albums.

And lest you think the recent arrival of Groban's "Awake" and Il Divo's "Siempre" comes as good news to only a niche group of opera-lite fans, think again. These poperatic pretty boys may well have more festive holiday seasons than just about any recording artists with new albums -- Groban's output since the beginning of the millennium has outsold megastars like Justin Timberlake and Beyoncé, and boy-band Il Divo is not far behind.

That's because Groban and Il Divo are the latest in a long and increasingly diluted line of popular operatic entertainers like the great Caruso, Mario Lanza, the Three Tenors and, most recently, Andrea Bocelli. Arresto! That claim isn't as ridiculous as it appears -- the aforementioned legends were not above injecting a little cheese into their art. One listen to Lanza singing "just one breath of spring from the air/ and I'm feeling strong as a bear" on a bit of trumpet-blasted soundtrack pap like "Boom Biddy Boom Boom," or Luciano Pavarotti making a mess of "Singin' in the Rain" with his wobbly English on "The Three Tenors Live in Concert," suggests that the distance between those acclaimed performers and the Chef Boyardee version of opera being peddled by Groban and Il Divo is not as far as it looks.

Even Caruso, a mythic figure of opera, was himself a popular star, and not just a hero of the cultured classes. In 1902, he was the first performer to sell a million copies of a record with his rendition of the "Vesti la Giubba" aria from "Pagliacci." Key to his appeal was his persona of a fiery Neapolitan lover; the notorious bum-pincher was known, particularly later in his career, for his outsize appetites -- gustatory and otherwise. It's no surprise that he scored his biggest popular success with "Vesti" -- the rafter-rattling aria is as crowd-pleasing as opera gets.

Born in 1921, the same year that Caruso died, Mario Lanza was the next mass appeal opera star, and an even more obvious template for the current generation of popera pups. Lanza, a trained opera star, wholeheartedly embraced the image of the lusty tenor -- portraying Caruso in a 1951 biopic and bragging of his own weightlifting and boxing prowess -- before his premature death of an embolism at age 37. He was frequently criticized for his overuse of the "Caruso sob" -- an exaggerated groaning and sighing employed to ratchet up the pathos. It might have made the critics squirm, but it made the girls scream; Lanza scored film hits with a series of tailor-made melodramas throughout the '50s, and felt no compunction about applying his booming tenor to wild, wobbling, lightweight dross like the million-selling "Be My Love," possibly still the most spectacular example of popera cheese ever recorded.

But even with Lanza's crazed interpretations, opera was well on its way out as a popular style, as the younger public turned to rock 'n' roll, and older fans were seduced by the silky-smooth stylings of Johnny Mathis or the crooning of Sinatra. The peculiar genius of Il Divo and Groban is that they've managed to split the difference between the crooners and the bombastic belters. Groban and Il Divo look like Mathis sounds -- wispy, delicate, smooth -- but their voices pack a ballsy, operatic punch. In an era when the hairy machismo of latter-day sex symbols like Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck seems more campy than sexy, Il Divo and Groban -- skinny, cleanshaven, tousle-haired -- have turned everything inside out; their voices provide the masculine charge that their handsomely non-threatening physiques deny.

Under the watchful eye of adult-contemporary super-producer David Foster (Whitney Houston, Celine Dion, Toni Braxton), this combination has proven massively successful for the 25-year-old Groban, who has sold a remarkable 11.6 million records since his 2001 self-titled debut. To put this into perspective, Bruce Springsteen -- another artist who's released three new, non-compilation albums this decade -- has sales figures that don't total even half of Groban's. The doe-eyed Californian has also proven to be a massive live draw as well; his last large-scale tour, in 2004, earned more than $28 million.

Next page: The formula for an Il Divo hit. (Psss! You better know Italian)