Word: tenoritis
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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...
...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...
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...
...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 no baritone but a tenor with the lid on. After he had practiced lifting the lid, he was allowed to sing his first tenor role: Tannhäuser...