Word: melchiors
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...Tenor Melchior is not averse to wassailing, but he takes his Wagner straight. After dinner on Wagner nights he calls for his roomy Cadillac and is driven with his wife, Kleinchen (Little One), to the stage door of Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House. He climbs the creaky stairs to the primo tenore's dusty dressing room,* fumbles around among the costumes of Tenors Richard Crooks and Giovanni Martinelli for his own raiment of deer skins and knightly robes. He washes himself in an antiquated, marble-topped washstand, glowers at the dead flies in the basin-shaped chandeliers...
...could be found in any opera house the world over. Some of them (Elisabeth Rethberg, Lotte Lehmann, Friedrich Schorr, Emanuel List) were veterans of leading German and Austrian opera houses. Some (Lawrence Tibbett, Julius Huehn) were U. S. singers. Many (Kerstin Thorborg, Karin Branzell, Gertrud Wettergren) were, like Tenor Melchior, Scandinavians. Sturdiest of all these sturdy troupers has been gargantuan, jovial Tenor Melchior, for 14 years the Met's leading Tristan, Siegmund, Siegfried, Lohengrin, Parsifal, Tannhäuser...
...Melchior and Flagstad, as Tristan and Isolde, are a team whose memory will still be green when the present generation of operagoers is old and grey. Tristan and Isolde are opera's greatest lovers, and to thousands of U. S. listeners Melchior and Flagstad are their incarnation. Though that incarnation is only limelight-deep (in private life Melchior and Flagstad are never more than polite, between eruptions of professional jealousy), operagoers are treasuring it while it lasts. For last month Diva Flagstad announced that she would retire at the end of this season. Soon this mortal pair of immortals...
...great hunter on the stage, Lauritz Melchior in real life is hardly less terrible. The deerskin costume he wears as Siegfried is the skin of a deer that he shot and skinned himself on a hunting trip in Germany. When he can get a week off from the opera, he makes for the woods of Maine or North Dakota, where he prowls around with a brass hunting horn and a brace of dogs, gunning for ducks, rabbits, deer. He has shot panthers in South America, once bagged a 1,600-lb. bison in North Dakota. In New Brunswick he shot...
...Melchiors' homes are three: the Manhattan hotel apartment, a Copenhagen hideaway and a 3,000-acre estate in Germany, at Chossewitz. There, though Tenor Melchior does not sing in Germany any more, he spends his summers. On an island in the middle of a lake, near the former Polish border, he inhabits what was originally the fortress of a medieval robber baron. All summer long, Lauritz Melchior invites his soul in this rustic barony. He likes to dress in Lederhosen, hunt his own land for rabbit, red deer or pheasant. On these expeditions he always carries his little brass...