Nico Castel: Met diction coach, tenor and creator of the IPA libretti series

Nico Castel worked on both sides of the footlights: first as a working singer, then for three decades as the person who prepared the Metropolitan Opera’s singers in their languages. This page gives the outline of his career in order; more guides to translated texts are in the libretti section.

Early life and training

Castel was born in Portugal and raised in Venezuela by multilingual parents and a German nanny¹. He attended a French school in Caracas¹. The mix of languages around him shaped everything he did later.

At 16 he moved to the United States to sing and to study romance languages at Temple University¹. In the early 1950s he served in the United States Army as a translator in Germany¹. In 1958 he became the first winner of the “Joy in Singing” award, which launched his career with a recital at The Town Hall in New York City^1,3.

Singing career and the Met

Castel sang as a comprimario tenor, a singer of supporting character roles, and he had a vast repertoire of them^1,4. He had over 200 operatic roles in his repertoire¹. He was also a gifted linguist⁴.

In June 1958 he made his debut with Santa Fe Opera as Fenton¹. In 1965 he first sang with the New York City Opera, as Jacob Glock in The Flaming Angel¹. Among his recordings are Manon and The Tales of Hoffmann, the latter with Sills and Norman Treigle¹.

He made his Met debut on March 30, 1970, as Don Basilio in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, and he performed with the company until 1997, toward the end singing speaking roles such as Pasha Selim². In all he gave nearly 800 performances there¹. Reviewers praised his rich dramatic characterizations, his sensitive musicianship and his impeccable diction².

Away from the stage he was also a recitalist, translator, cantor and whisky importer².

Diction coach at the Metropolitan Opera

Castel was the Met’s staff diction coach from 1979 until his retirement in 2009¹. The New York Times called him the Henry Higgins of the Metropolitan Opera². In 1985 Will Crutchfield, writing in the same paper, called him “the Metropolitan’s resident standard-setter for linguistic flavor”². As a coach he warned singers against “swarms of seething sibilants”².

He spoke English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian and Ladino with native or near-native fluency^1,2,3. Ladino, the language of Sephardic Jews, has its own page in the diction section.

The libretti series

Castel’s best-known legacy for singers is a series of translated libretti. He published a vast series of French, German and Italian opera librettos, marking the pronunciation of every word with the International Phonetic Alphabet². Each carries phonetic pronunciation guides in the opera’s original language³. Singers, teachers and conservatories throughout North America and Europe use them¹.

He completed the operatic libretti of Giacomo Puccini, in two volumes, with the exception of Turandot⁵. The volumes show the layout. Each line of the libretto is set three ways: the IPA spelling of the libretto on the first line, the original Italian on the middle line, and a word-for-word translation on the third⁵. A fourth line, in a more literary translation, is given where a passage needs it⁵. Each volume includes synopses of the entire operas, vocal categories, cast names and translations of the stage directions⁵. Volume I contains La Bohème, Edgar, La Fanciulla del West, Madama Butterfly and Manon Lescaut⁵; the publisher is Leyerle Publications⁵.

To learn how to use a libretto of this kind, read how to read a libretto. For the symbols themselves, see IPA for singers.

What the series gave singers

A singer learning a role in Italian needs the meaning of each word and its sound together. Castel’s layout puts both on the page, line by line: the IPA, the Italian and the English word for word⁵. The fourth, literary line appears where a word-for-word rendering is hard to follow⁵.

His coaching ran on the same attention to sound: he warned singers against swarms of seething sibilants². His libretti mark the pronunciation of every word in the IPA².

Other writing

Castel wrote A Singer’s Manual of Spanish Lyric Diction^1,3, published by Excalibur Press in New York¹. He also wrote a Ladino songbook, The Nico Castel Ladino Song Book, published by Tara Publications¹. Beyond those titles, he translated opera librettos prolifically and wrote manuals on diction for singers⁴. For the Spanish rules in a single page, see Spanish diction for singers.

Teaching

Castel taught at the Juilliard School, the Mannes College of Music, Queens College, Boston University and elsewhere². He joined Juilliard’s Vocal Arts faculty as a diction coach in 1989 and retired from Juilliard in 2014⁴.

With his third wife he taught on the faculty of the Spoleto Vocal Arts Symposium in Spoleto, Italy¹. The two also founded and ran the New York Opera Studio, a training forum for young singers^1,2. Castel presented the Nico Castel International Master Singer Competition every year; it accepted competitors up to age 40¹.

Death

Castel died on May 31, 2015, at his home in Manhattan. He was 83^2,4. He was an opera singer who became one of the world’s foremost diction coaches⁴.

Where his work shows up today

In the libretti, the IPA line sits above the original text with a word-for-word translation beneath it⁵. Read the pages on what a diction coach does and on transcribing an aria into IPA to see where that practice fits into a role preparation.