Mystery tenor from a decidedly post-mystery age: information about him is sorely scarce. He does pop up
in two complete opera recordings, both times as a comprimario, both times in pretty prominent casts: in 1968, he sang Tybalt to Franco
Corelli's and Mirella Freni's Roméo and Juliette; and in 1986, he sang one of the countless tiny roles in Vojna i mir,
under Mstislav Rostropovich and with Nicolai Gedda, Nicola Ghiuselev, Lájos Miller, Wiesław Ochman and so on. Otherwise,
however, his biography is largely obscure.
He was in born in 1936 "in Morocco" (with no further geographic specification); it must have been in the large central part of the
country, which was a French protectorate at the time, because it's obvious from Cardona's recordings that he was French. Although during
his career, he called himself mostly "Roberto" Cardona, his French is perfectly idiomatic, while he displays a strong accent in Italian,
and that accent is not Spanish, either, so "Roberto" was probably just an attempt to seem more "exotic".
There are but few proofs of any stage activity of Cardona: he sang a couple of comprimario parts in Tours from 1974 to 1977; and other
comprimario parts in Limoges in 1972 and in Geneva in 1973. Several of them were in operetta; the most prominent of his roles was Goro
(Tours, October 1975). All in all, that's not much of a career.
One last reference to Cardona is from 2007: the announcement of a concert of the amateur choir Syrinx from Melun stresses that the choir
members had been receiving advice on vocal technique for several years already from Roberto Cardona, "ex ténor de l'Opéra
de Paris". My best guess is that he was a chorister at the Opéra, who occasionally sang small solo parts at secondary theaters.
Reference 1: Opéra de Tours archives; reference 2;
reference 3: Bibliothèque Nationale de France
I wish to thank Claude Ribou for the picture, and for his help with the biography.
