Word: heldentenore
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Angeles, Lauritz Melchior announced with a Heldentenor's roar that he would put on opera if the Met wouldn't. Said he: "It's a scandal, a disaster. The eyes of the world are turned to America and the greatest country in the world cannot even have an opera house! It looks as if we're only interested in jazz and crooning and all the semi-things...
...stage, the beefy Wagnerian gods of Gotterdämmerung snorted and bellowed in their Valhalla. In the wings, a huge Siegfried, mounted on a ladder, sagged his 230 Ibs. down onto waiting shoulders to be borne on stage. "I'm getting too fat for this," grumbled hefty Heldentenor Lauritz Melchior. A warrior-god charged into musty corners, looking for his sword; bored spear carriers fumbled through a prop basket full of hunting horns. Behind the backdrop a ragged army of stagehands lounged on the rocks of the Rhine (out of use for the moment), gulping coffee from paper cartons...
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...