Charles Anthony, a character singer who set the record for most appearances at New York’s Metropolitan Opera – 2,928 – during a career that spanned from 1954 to 2010, has died at 82.

Mr Anthony, a tenor, died at his home in Tampa, Florida, from kidney failure following a long illness, Met spokesman Peter Clark said.

“Your talent, demeanour, joy and heart will be missed,” mezzo-soprano Susanne Mentzer said on Twitter. “What a loss.”

Beginning his career at the old Met on Broadway and moving uptown with the company to its new home at Lincoln Centre for the Performing Arts in 1966, Anthony was a supporting singer.

He shared the stage with the greatest classical artistes of several eras, performing in the Met debuts of Marian Anderson, Birgit Nilsson, Jon Vickers, Leontyne Price, Franco Corelli, Joan Sutherland, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and José Carreras.

“It’s no exaggeration to say that Charlie Anthony is the soul of the Metropolitan Opera,” Joseph Volpe, then the Met’s general manager, said when Mr Anthony was honoured during an intermission in Puccini’s Tosca in 2004.

Born Calogero Antonio Caruso in New Orleans in 1929, Mr Anthony entered the Met’s Auditions of the Air competition in 1952.

Met general manager Rudolf Bing feared the public would think he was related to the great tenor Enrico Caruso and he would be burdened with expectations – so he persuaded him to change his name.

“I couldn’t think of anything, so we just dropped Caruso, which made grandfather furious,” Mr Anthony said in 1992.