Word: tenoritis
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...curtain raiser, the brand-new Santa Fe Opera Association had selected a surefire heart-throbber-Puccini's Madame Butterfly. The 32-piece orchestra launched into the opening bars as the distant view of the Jemez range faded in the dusk. Tenor William McGrath and Soprano Maria Ferriero soared expertly through Lieut. Pinkerton's and Cio-Cio-San's famous love scene climaxed by her Twilight Has Fallen, and Butterfly's lingering, final-curtain suicide touched off a round of applause that lasted through ten curtain calls. Technically, there were a few first-night bobbles. Gusts...
...befits a man who has spent much of his professional life expiring at the top of his voice (he has logged 227 hours of dying time in Tristan alone), Siegfried-sized Tenor Lauritz Melchior knows his deathbed bathos down to the last Cheyne-Stokes wheeze. When bandits hopped the fence of his Beverly Hills estate last week, bound him with neckties and began looting the place, the 67-year-old Dane huffed and puffed like a heart-attack victim, sagged to his chair in feigned death throes (Tristan und Isolde, Act III) to frighten them off. Said...
...earned Melchior something less than an Equity minimum. As the tenor untied himself, grabbed a deer rifle and hustled out the door, his captor audience skedaddled back out the gate, taking with it $140,000 in boodle (jewelry and cash). Police bag by week's end: two of the four badmen, all but about $40,000 of their loot...
...recordings of Orpheus and Eurydice break with tradition by casting a male singer as Orpheus, normally sung by a contralto. (Gluck himself wrote the role for a male contralto, later rearranged it for tenor in Paris, where castrati singers were frowned upon.) Of the two versions, Epic's (in French) is more authentic historically, but less effective, chiefly because Canadian Tenor Leopold Simoneau's silver-hued voice seems less moving in the role of the suffering Orpheus than the lyric baritone of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, imaginatively cast by Decca in its German-language version. The supporting casts...
Throughout, the deep, ringing speaking voice of Moses and the soaring tenor of Aaron were heard simultaneously. The orchestra played in a web of complicated polyphony, and the chorus sang in as many as twelve parts. Some found the rainbow shower of sound to their liking; others were puzzled and distracted, wondered whether the oratorio-like work was an opera at all. But Paris' Le Monde called it a miracle. The Neue Züricher Zeitung found the score "an ingenious summary of all that makes Schoenberg the founder of a new musical language." That language-like the words...