Peter Allen, whose nonoperatically light tenor and precise but not pedantic style introduced more than 500 performances for the Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday afternoon radio broadcasts, died on Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 96.
His death was confirmed by his niece Carol Epstein.
Mr. Allen presided over 29 seasons of broadcasts. After his last — which ended with Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung,” on April 24, 2004 — he said that delivering the opera world’s equivalent of color and play-by-play had been “the richest experience of my life,” except for his marriage to Sylvia Allen. Week after week, she sat next to him in the tiny soundproof broadcast booth at the back of the Met, where they both had binoculars to watch the action on the stage and headphones to listen in.
Mr. Allen spent his Saturday afternoons reading from scripts that described the messy entanglements of opera. Listeners considered him the voice of the Met, but he did not like that title.
