C'est Lui

Having been particularly cruel to opera on Saturday, I feel it incumbent upon me to admit that not all citizens of the opera world are immoral and reflexively anti-Christian.  Baseball has the St. Louis Cardinals; football has Tim Tebow (who needs no introduction) and Philip Rivers (who should need none); Hollywood has Jim Caviezel; opera has ... Nathan Gunn.

Nathan Gunn has the good (?) fortune of being an unusually fit singer in a world that still hasn't forgotten how artists like Pavarotti and Sutherland could weigh something in the order of fifteen to twenty stone and still remain gainfully employed their entire careers.  In consequence, the first thing you'll usually read in articles on Nathan Gunn is that he's ... um ... attractive.  (Other adjectives have been used, but they don't feel at home on this blog, poor things.)  What news stories and bios of Gunn frequently neglect to mention is that he is a practicing Catholic and a father of five, and actually teaches music (at the University of Illinois - Urbana/Champaign) instead of focusing purely on performance.  I don't know, but I suspect it gives his family a little more stability than if he had to travel constantly, as most opera singers do.

If all this sounds too good to be true, you can always try googling the man.  Alternatively, he has appeared on the Colbert Report (a must for any prominent practicing Catholic) ... hem, yes; moving on.  YouTube has plenty of examples of his singing; but this one (with Gunn performing what is quite possibly my favorite baritone non-aria) takes the cake.