Incredibly enough, for all his success in opera and musical comedy, Ezio
Pinza was unable to read music, and conductor
Arturo Toscanini, with whom Pinza sometimes worked, often insisted on his singers performing every note as written! Everything Pinza sang, from the most complex operatic role to the simplest popular song, was memorized laboriously, note by note. As Pinza himself once said, "I'm no musician. I just know how to make nice sounds." Commenting on his working relationship with Toscanini, he once told an interviewer, "I always promise that I will not sing [Beethoven's] "Ninth Symphony" with that man, but when he calls, I cannot resist.... You have to sit for forty-five minutes and then you have to start [with an extremely difficult bass-baritone solo]".
