Paul Plishka

Bass Paul Plishka had an impressive career at New York's Metropolitan Opera, where his appearances stretched over more than 50 years. He also had notable success at European houses, such as La Scala in Milan. His repertory centered on the mainstream of Italian opera, but he recorded various materials, including folk songs of his ancestral Ukrainian home. Many of his performances opposite established opera stars have been reissued on recordings. Plishka was born in Old Forge, Pennsylvania, near Scranton, on August 28, 1941. His parents were blue-collar Americans, children of Ukrainian immigrants on both sides. Plishka thought about careers in football and farming but took guitar lessons as well, and a teacher assigned him popular songs to sing while playing. The family moved to Paterson, New Jersey, where Plishka joined the school chorus and won the part of Jud Fry in the musical Oklahoma! There, he was recruited by Armen Boyajian for a new workshop; he was Boyajian's only student for some years. He sang at Boyajian's Paterson Lyric Opera Theatre, attended New Jersey's Montclair State College, and did well at the Baltimore Opera Auditions and Metropolitan Opera Regional Auditions. By his early twenties, he was singing major operatic roles. After a stint with the touring Metropolitan Opera National Company, he was offered a place on the main Met roster in New York. He made his Met debut in Ponchielli's La Gioconda in 1967. At first, he had small, mostly comic roles, but he interacted with and soaked in influences from the leading stars of the day, such as baritone Sherrill Milnes and soprano Renata Tebaldi. Those early roles at the Met would be the first of 88 parts he would eventually include in his repertory there, for a total of more than 1,672 performances over 51 years. Plishka's recording career stretched well back into the LP era, with an early recording coming on an RCA release of Puccini's Tosca, starring Leontyne Price, in 1973. His roles at the Met gradually grew in size and importance, and after a 1974 appearance at the Strasbourg Opera House in France as Méphistophélès in Berlioz's La Damnation de Faust, he began to receive starring roles in New York as well. His repertory centered on the classic Italian operas of the 19th century but extended to Wagner and Russian opera as well as to the Stephen Sondheim musical Sweeney Todd, which he recorded live with the New York Philharmonic in 2000. Even after he retired in the mid-2010s due to hearing problems (he returned for several stints, the last of them in 2018), his recordings continued to appear in reissues; in 2023, he was featured on the Warner Classics album Renata Scotto: A Farewell. Plishka died in his retirement city of Wilmington, North Carolina, on February 3, 2025. By then, his recording catalog included at least 85 items. ~ James Manheim, Rovi