Word: heldentenor
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Lauritz Melchior, great Dane of the Metropolitan Opera, sang Open the Door, Richard on a Kay Kyser radio show and got a chromatic catcall from the president of the National Association of Schools of Music for "debasing his art." Pooh, retorted jovial Heldentenor Melchior. If the musical stuffed shirts wanted more blatant examples of undignified monkeyshines, he could refresh their memories. Once, he recalled, he sang a hillbilly song on the Fred Allen show; another time, he danced an Apache number in which he impersonated a female who could have mopped up on Briinnhilde...
With only a week more of opera to go, Manhattan's Metropolitan last week turned up its biggest surprise of the season. He was a brand-new and authentic example of a very rare operatic commodity: a Wagnerian Heldentenor (heroic tenor). His name: Emery Darcy...
...need is more imperative economically than artistically. Chief mainstay of the box office for the past six years have been Soprano Flagstad and gusty, barrel-built Danish Heldentenor Lauritz Melchior. Almost always the pair sold out the house with their hefty love-making in Tristan and Isolde, their caroling and ho-yo-to-ho-ing in the Ring operas. Ordinarily there would be on the Met's Wagnerian bench two sopranos who could take Flagstad's place as Melchior's teammate. But last week it appeared that neither of these would be fully available...
Today, rotund, greying, 49-year-old Lauritz Melchior, the best Heldentenor of them all, is content to rest on his laurels. The father of two grown children (by his first wife, Danish-born Inger Nathansen, who died in 1927), he occasionally frets about 22-year-old Son Ib's cinema ambitions in Hollywood, keeps 19-year-old Daughter Birte hard at her business-school courses in Copenhagen. Though he diets in summer to keep his weight down to 225 Ibs., he takes his winter opera performances in his stride, often eats heavy meals before he goes to the opera...
Though he lives in Germany and sings in the U. S., tenants of the Ansonia do not need to be reminded that Heldentenor Melchior is a Dane. Melchior himself never forgets it either. On his island castle in Germany he always flies the Danish flag. And on the door of his Manhattan apartment is a sign. It reads: "Lauritz Melchior, singer to the Royal Court of Denmark...