logo
livingroom

decorative bar

biographies


corner Last update of this page: August 9th 2004 corner
Lauritz Lebrecht Hommel Melchior
(March 20, 1890 - March 18, 1973) Denmark - U.S.A.

Lauritz Melchior

Opera singer

separator

Born in Copenhagen, Melchior's career as the reigning heroic tenor spanned the years from 1926 through 1950. He began his singing career as a baritone with the Danish Royal Opera. After hearing him take the high C for an ailing soprano during the soprano/baritone duet in Verdi's Il Trovatore, contralto Sarah Cahier told him that he was not a baritone, but a tenor. While studying with Wilhelm Herold, Melchior then made a highly successful metamorphosis into heroic tenor, debuting in Copenhagen as Tannhäuser in 1918.

During an extended stay in England in 1922, Melchior was heard by Marconi, who made him the first male singer to transmit his voice via radio. The renowned British author Hugh Walpole, present at a Prom Concert to hear Melchior sing, became his mentor, and later lover, and subsidized further study. Beigel soon recommended Melchior to Franz Schalk, co-director with Richard Strauss of the Vienna Staatsoper. Schalk sent Melchior on to Anna Bahr-Mildenburg for Wagnerian coaching.

Word of this phenomenal tenor voice traveled through the musical community, and soon Melchior was summoned to Bayreuth to audition for Siegfried Wagner, son of the great composer. Melchior remained in Bayreuth to study for one month with coach Karl Kittel. After much high-level socializing and lobbying by Walpole, Melchior was engaged to do his first Siegmund under the baton of Bruno Walter at Covent Garden in May of 1924, before going to his first season at Bayreuth.

The Covent Garden Siegmund, sung with Frida Leider and Friedrich Schorr who would become close friends of his, was not a conspicuous success due to Melchior's inexperience and the usual lack of rehearsal. In the narrow Wagnerian world of the time, there were virtually no new productions of Wagner's music-dramas except at Bayreuth.

Although his high notes had not yet settled into a consistent sound, sometimes thinner but tenorial, sometimes baritonal, Melchior's 1924 Bayreuth performances were successful, so successful that he was in demand elsewhere in Germany and Czechoslovakia, performing new roles soon after learning them - the young Siegfried and the Paris version of Tannhäuser.

Melchior's Metropolitan Opera debut as Tannhäuser was under-rehearsed and overshadowed by the debut that night of Marian Tally. At the completion of Melchior's six performances, conductor Bodanzky advised the tenor to go back to Germany and get more experience, being convinced that Melchior could in time become the world's best heldentenor.

Most of the world's great Wagnerian ensemble, of which Melchior was now a part, appeared at the Metropolitan eventually, even before 1931, when Hitler's activities against Jewish musical colleagues prompted Melchior's decision to leave Bayreuth and to abjure German houses forever. Melchior did most of his wartime performances in the United States to ecstatic reviews.

At the height of his fame as an operatic singer, Melchior embarked on a new career for which his skills as a practical joker had prepared him well: appearing on such popular radio programs as the Fred Allen show (in which the 250-pound tenor parodied Frank Sinatra of all people) and in his five MGM movies where he usually played a kindly, funny, singing grandfather-type

He retired from the stage in 1950, and died in Santa Monica, California.

separator

Click on the letter M to go back to the list of names

corner © Matt & Andrej Koymasky, 1997 - 2008 corner