Nico Castel

Nico Castel was a Portuguese-born comprimario tenor and language and diction coach, as well as a prolific translator of libretti and writer of books on singing diction. Although Castel performed throughout Europe, North America and South America, he was best known for his nearly 800 performances at The Metropolitan Opera in New York City, where he also served as staff diction coach for three decades. Castel was raised in Venezuela by multilingual parents and a German nanny and attended a French school in Caracas. He moved to the US at the age of 16 to sing and study romance languages at Temple University. In the early 1950s, he served in the United States Army as a translator in Germany. In 1958 he made his debut in Verdi's Falstaff. In 1965, he sang the first of many roles with the New York City Opera. He made his Metropolitan Opera debut in 1970, where he continued to perform until 1997. He was its staff diction coach from 1979 to 2009. Castel had over 200 operatic roles in his repertoire, sang in opera houses in North and South America, Europe and Israel, and appears on various opera recordings. From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nico_Ca...) under Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b...)