Word: singed
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Hotel's Camellia House to try out an act sans Crosby and Hope. Far from Singapore, Zanzibar and Bali, Dottie wore shoes and a sequined gown, made it clear she's said so long to sarongs. "No more flitting around the jungle," she announced after leading a sing-along of Moonlight Bay and kissing a few pates around ringside...
...according to Thomas, it means that he has "the heroic amount of guts" needed to sing Wagnerian roles. Put in the U.S., it means that Thomas is the first and most notable of what appears to be a new stable of American heldentenors: men with the projection of a foghorn, the endurance of a marathon cyclist and the range of an ICBM. Most have an ego to match...
...graduated into the ranks of the full-fledged heldentenor. Basically, this requires a voice with the coloring of a baritone and the range of a tenor. Unlike the bel canto tenor who must employ vocal embroidery, the heldentenor must possess the raw power and endurance to sing the weightiest and longest roles in opera. The supreme tests are Wagner's Tristan and Siegfried, which require 65 and 90 minutes respectively, as compared, say, with the 22 minutes for Tosca. Lauritz Melchior, the last great heldentenor, did not attempt Tristan until he was 39. Thomas, now 38, figures that...
...humanity." This, he says, led him to major in psychology at the University of Nebraska, then to a job as a high school counselor in Oregon. "I was tremendously successful in my field," he confesses. He was at Stanford, working for a doctorate, when a voice teacher heard him sing in a university production. The teacher encouraged him to take voice lessons, and after four years of study Thomas decided to take the plunge. At the advanced (for opera) age of 30, he left the U.S. to join the Baden State Theater in Karlsruhe, Germany...
...Therapy. In the beginning, his career was more soap than grand opera; for the first year he and his wife Bettye, a former model, lived in the laundry room of an apartment house and subsisted on a diet of potatoes. At length he got a chance in 1961 to sing at the Bayreuth Festival, home of the heldentenor, where he was hailed as a "flawless" Parsifal. Last year he became one of the few U.S. tenors ever to sing at Milan's La Scala opera house. "The Italians," he explains simply, "love...