Mel Broiles: Opening
Mel Broiles was a great trumpet player. His playing was impeccable: accurate, exciting and dramatic. He was fearless. Under pressure, he always rose to the occasion. Mel would play an entire opera season and rarely miss a note.
Mel was principal trumpet of the Metropolitan Opera from 1958 until he retired in 2003. Prior to that, he served as principal trumpet of the Philadelphia Orchestra for one season in 1957. In 1961 he performed the U.S. premiere of the Jolivet Concertino for trumpet, piano and strings. Mel was a composer: 3 books of études and duets, many works for brass ensemble and a few tour de force solo pieces for trumpet. A master music calligrapher, he hand copied every opera part he ever played. Later in his career when he began using the D trumpet frequently, he recopied many of these same parts for D trumpet. His opera parts must number in the 100s and the music of all kinds that Mel hand copied would fill a small library. His calligraphy was as beautiful as any I’ve ever seen. In his spare time, Mel was an avid aviator. He was a superb pilot; he owned his own airplane.
It doesn’t matter where I go throughout the world, whether it be at a concert performance, a teaching clinic, or conducting engagement or even when performing with my band, Pink Baby Monster, there is always someone who asks me about Mel Broiles: “Please tell a Mel Broiles story”, or “Did Mel really do..... “, though in recent years the number of times Mel’s name comes up has become more infrequent. New trumpet heroes have arisen and the feats of the old trumpet legends are often dimmed by the passage of time. For years, I have been promising to write about Mel and only now- mainly because Michael Sachs asked me to do so- do I offer a few of my favorite ‘Mel’ tales. These are merely a small sample of hundreds of amazing stories. Everyone who ever worked at the MET has a ‘Mel’ story. He is one of the most fascinating people I have ever been around, a character of operatic proportions. I hope that the trumpet community, especially the orchestral trumpet community will find these vignettes to be as entertaining and inspiring as I do. There will never be another Mel Broiles. Perhaps a doctoral trumpet student will be inspired embark upon a Mel Broiles project similar to the wonderfully informative project Brian Shook is presenting to brass players around the country about William Vacchiano, Mel’s teacher. My hope is that many more ‘Mel’ stories will surface and that as a result the legend of Mel Broiles will resound in the trumpet ‘collective unconscious’ for the next 10,000 years.
I joined the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra in 1974 as co-principal trumpet. The other co-principal trumpet was Mel Broiles. I was the “new guy”, the kid fresh out of college who was going to ‘share’ quarterbacking duties with Peyton Manning or ‘share’ third base duties with “ironman”, Cal Ripken. Mel was not pleased that a snot nosed interloper had invaded his kingdom. He was not warm and welcoming to me and he didn’t have much to say to me my first year at the MET. In fact he addressed only one sentence to me my entire first season. At a break of a rehearsal for Verdi’s, “Vespri Siciliani”, while we were standing side by side at the urinals, Mel turned slightly to me and said, “Mark, men die in battle to the sound of the trumpet”. He left me standing there staring straight ahead at the tiles above the urinal holding my shrinking best friend. I was stunned, vaguely insulted and more than a little intimidated. I remember thinking, “What a great line!” It was a line straight out of a gladiator movie, or “Patton” or “300”. Of course I knew that trumpets and battle are inextricably linked; they have been for thousands of years. But when a trumpet legend like Mel Broiles felt the need to remind me, “the new guy”, of this relationship, my thinking about the trumpet was forever altered. It was a WTF moment before WTF entered the popular lexicon.