Nico Castel, 83, ‘The Henry Higgins Of The Metropolitan Opera’

“A highly regarded operatic tenor, Mr. Castel was himself a mainstay of the Met’s stable, appearing in nearly 800 performances with the company from the 1970s onward. A well-traveled polyglot, he also had a parallel career as the company’s staff diction coach, a post he held for some three decades before his retirement in 2009.”