Word: melchiors
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Like many another Heldenienor (including the late, great Jean de Reszke), Lauritz Melchior started his career as a baritone. Born in 1890 in a family of Copenhagen schoolteachers, he broke away as a youngster to earn his own living in a music publishing house, meanwhile studying singing and dramatics with local teachers...
Heldentenor. Lauritz Melchior is not a natural tenor. Jealous Italians refer to him sniffily as a misplaced baritone. Actually, he is an authentic example of a very rare type of singer: the true Wagnerian Heldentenor (heroic tenor). Most tenors have fairly light voices: their honey-voiced wailing is orchestrated to an accompaniment that will not drown them out. But Wagner had no use for such lightweights: the true Heldentenor must be able to out-boom a phalanx of trombones. Richard Wagner's heroes are strenuous fellows, who would willingly break a blood vessel to get to Walhalla, and Wagner...
Contrary to popular opinion, great opera singers are almost never discovered ready-made in fish markets and prairie ranches. They get that way only after years of hard training and plugging practice. No exception to this iron rule, Lauritz Melchior spent eight years before he rated a contract (in Copenhagen's Royal Opera) and a regular salary-1,000 kroner (about $200) a year. While he was still singing baritone roles at the Royal Opera, the eminent, U. S.-born vocal expert, Mme Charles Cahier, heard him, and wrote the director of the opera that Melchior was really...
...Melchior got his first big chance singing Wagnerian roles at London's Covent Garden, six years later moved on to Bayreuth and Munich, where he was rated one of the finest German-style tenors of the day. One sunny afternoon in 1926 he made his debut at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House. That evening, ill-starred Kansas City Soprano Marion Talley made hers. In the storm and shuffle of publicity that attended Soprano Talley's debut, Melchior was practically overlooked. One critic described his acting as "barely more than awkward." But Melchior stayed on. Not long afterward...
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...