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Singing With, but Not Through, the Nose

The tenor Roberto Alagna tries out the fake nose he will have to sing with in “Cyrano de Bergerac,” opening at the Metropolitan Opera on Tuesday.Credit...Kevin Hagen for The New York Times

Filling the giant Metropolitan Opera House with ringing high notes and without microphones is hard. Doing it with a big piece of foam glued to the end of your nose is even tougher — especially if you don’t want your tone to conjure thoughts of clothespins or head colds.

But that is part of the job description for the tenor singing the title role of Franco Alfano’s “Cyrano de Bergerac,” an opera about the doomed love of that dashing but nasally over-endowed French Guardsman. So when the star tenor Roberto Alagna arrived in his dressing room at the Metropolitan Opera one morning last week for his first nose fitting in preparation for Tuesday night’s opening, the stakes were high.

“This is more Pinocchio,” he said, dismissing one of two prosthetic proboscises he was offered. Then he turned to the other. “But this is more Cyrano,” he said. “Very good. Bravo!”

The process had started weeks earlier when Met makeup artists made a cast of Mr. Alagna’s face.

Roberto Alagna | "From Roberto to Cyrano" n°3 Nose CastingCredit...CreditVideo by RobertoAlagnaChannel

They then filled the mold with plaster — recreating the Alagna nose — and used it to build his stage nose.

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The nose was made out of foam latex, and created with the help of a cast of his face.Credit...Kevin Hagen for The New York Times

Now it was time to try out the finished product. Tera Willis, the assistant head of the makeup department, began brushing a sticky adhesive called Pros-Aide onto Mr. Alagna’s real nose, waited for it to become tacky, and then affixed his new Cyra-nose, made of a surprisingly lightweight foam latex.

“We can always cut the holes a little bit more if you feel uncomfortable,” she said.

That was no problem, but breakfast was a challenge. Mr. Alagna managed a morning banana easily, but his attempt to drink some coffee was thwarted. Marian Torre, a makeup artist, fetched him a straw. He sipped. Carefully.

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Drinking coffee with a fake nose proved a challenge — until someone brought a straw.Credit...Kevin Hagen for The New York Times

“It’s difficult because you can’t have the resonance of the sound,” said Mr. Alagna, who noted that many singers rely on their noses and nasal cavities to make their voices reverberate. “You have no resonance at all! It’s like putting cotton on a violin.”

So for Cyrano — a challenging role even without foam prosthetics on your face — he said that he tried hard to focus his sound. “You must sing very, very concentrated,” he said. “If you sing too large, you can’t sing this opera.”

Francesca Zambello, director of the production, said that all her Cyranos had been good-natured about the nose. “No one ever protested,” she said, noting that singers often have to sing through masks in works like “Don Giovanni,” “Les Contes d’Hoffmann” and “Un Ballo in Maschera,” which is, after all, about a masked ball. “That’s the story! You know that you have to do it.”

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With nose, mustache, wig and costume on, Mr. Alagna practicing some swordplay backstage.Credit...Kevin Hagen for The New York Times

Alfano, who composed “Cyrano” in 1936, is best remembered today for composing the ending of “Turandot,” left unfinished at Puccini’s death. “Cyrano” fell out of the repertoire; Mr. Alagna said that he fell in love with it after coming across the score in Switzerland. After trying and failing for years to persuade a major company to mount it for him, he decided to put in on himself in Montpellier, France, with his brothers, in 2003.

“I paid everything: the set, the costumes, the theater, the singers, the conductor,” he said. (The performance was preserved on a DVD and can be seen on YouTube.)

Mr. Alagna said that he identified with the character, who ghostwrites love letters intended for the woman he loves but believes he can never obtain because of his nose. “The nose is the symbol of a complex,” Mr. Alagna said. “And I was like this: very shy, not easy with my body, myself; it was impossible for me to speak with a girl when I was young, even to speak at school.”

The Met first mounted “Cyrano” in 2005 for Plácido Domingo. Mr. Alagna said that he was performing a somewhat different version, one that he and his brothers devised after working on the original manuscript to restore cuts and high notes that had been transposed over the years. On the title page of the score, the publisher Ricordi notes that it is the Alagna version.

In a rehearsal after the fitting, Mr. Alagna sounded very much like himself — no clothespins sprang to mind. When it was over, he mused that the fake nose had come to feel normal.

“When you put it away at the end of the show, and look at your real nose — you have no nose!” he said. “It’s very strange.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Singing With, Not Through, the Nose. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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