“The larger and more complex the part, the better he was,’’ James Levine, the Met’s longtime conductor, said of Mr. MacNeil’s Verdi roles in a 2007 interview with Opera News. “Boccanegra, Rigoletto, Macbeth, Nabucco, Falstaff, Iago - a lot of these parts could be said to be the most challenging and varied.’’
Referring to characters in “Aida’’ and “Tosca,’’ Levine continued, “He sang lots of Amonasros and Scarpias marvelously well, but those more complex ones were where he was at his best.’’
Though not known as a temperamental artist, Mr. MacNeil was remembered for a spectacular public outburst when he stormed off the Parma Opera stage in Italy on Dec. 26, 1964. It happened during “Un Ballo in Maschera,’’ when the Parma audience, notorious for rude displays of disapproval, hissed at the soprano Luisa Maragliano just as MacNeil was about to sing the aria “Eri tu.’’
“I was getting more and more angry as the rumbling and noise got worse,’’ he told The New York Times the following day. “I couldn’t stand it any longer. ‘Basta, cretini!’ [‘That’s enough, you idiots!’] I shouted and walked off the stage.’’
The situation grew worse in his dressing room, where the stage director warned him to return to the performance because he had his family’s safety to consider. Refusing to go back onstage, Mr. MacNeil sent his wife and children to their hotel. But when he made his way to the back entrance, he was assaulted by theater employees.
“During the scuffle, I got socked on the jaw,’’ Mr. MacNeil said, displaying a bruised chin during his Times interview. The following day the MacNeils fled Parma.
Cornell MacNeil was born in Minneapolis, where his father was a dentist and his mother a singer who had studied with the celebrated contralto Ernestine Schumann-Heink.
