Francisco Casanova —born Francisco Chahín Casanova on 3 October 1957 in El Seibo, died in New York on 26 September 2019— was a Dominican lyric tenor who built a twenty-five-year career on the world’s major opera stages, singing a repertoire of fifty-six leading roles.

A family of singers

He was the youngest of four children of Alfredo Chahín, a popular singer active in the 1940s with a trained tenor voice, and the pianist Bárbara Casanova, who gave him his first music lessons at age seven and later accompanied him at family gatherings. He made his stage debut at eight, in 1966, singing Rafael Hernández’s «Señorita» at El Seibo’s Teatro Prado, and went on to study under bandleader Enrique Estévez Pacheco before entering the Conservatorio Nacional de Música in the early 1970s, where he trained under the Dominican tenor Rafael Sánchez Cestero.

New York and the world’s opera houses

He emigrated to New York in 1978, and over a twenty-five-year career sang leading roles including Oronte in «I Lombardi» and Pinkerton in «Madama Butterfly» at the Metropolitan Opera, Alvaro in «La Forza del Destino» in Avignon, and Gustavo in «Un Ballo in Maschera» in Klagenfurt, Austria, in addition to engagements across Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Poland, the former Yugoslavia, Canada, Puerto Rico and Colombia.

Substituting for Pavarotti, and Carnegie Hall

On 18 May 1996, Casanova stepped in for Luciano Pavarotti at the «Pavarotti and Friends» concert at Avery Fisher Hall in New York, performing arias and duets from «La Bohème», «Un Ballo in Maschera», «Tosca», «Il Trovatore» and «Lucia di Lammermoor». He debuted at Carnegie Hall on 13 April 1999 as Eléazar in Halévy’s «La Juive», under conductor Eve Queler, and that August starred in the title role of Verdi’s «Aída» in his first full opera performance before a Dominican audience.

Legacy

Casanova performed for more than two decades without canceling a single engagement for illness, retiring from the stage in April 2012 as diabetes advanced; he died in New York on 26 September 2019, remembered in the Dominican press as the country’s most internationally accomplished operatic voice.