It's been a Merrill-ful evening chez C-, starting with the recent Decca re-release of a 1963 arias disc, then the Barber from 1958 with Roberta Peters and Leinsdorf conducting, and now a bunch of duets with Jussi Bjorling (pictured to the right of Merrill) from 1950 and 1957. I'll take his Traviata with Anna Moffo and Richard Tucker to work with me tomorrow.
Robert Merrill, born Moishe Miller in Brooklyn, was one of the best-known American baritones in the middle of the 20th century; he passed away Saturday of natural causes while watching the World Series. Here are obits from the NY Times and Washington Post and today's NPR story.
What a vibrant, rich, focused, virile, ringing sound he had! Sad, isn't it, how often it takes someone's passing for you to pay attention to them? His recording of Iago's Credo certainly rocks harder than Carlo Guelfi's performance that I heard at the Met earlier this month. And while flipping through my CDs I realized I probably have recordings of him doing Largo al factotum on 4 different compilations -- and for good reason, it turns out.
Like seemingly everyone else writing about Robert Merrill this week, I too turned to Peter Davis's encyclopedic The American Opera Singer (somewhat unwieldily subtitled "The Lives and Adventures of America's Great Singers in Opera and Concert from 1825 to the Present"). If you're an American and at all interested in operatic history, there's really no excuse not to have a copy of this book around. Who knew that he and Roberta Peters were like the Britney and Jason Allen Alexander of their day?
His three-month marriage to twenty-two-year-old Roberta Peters in 1952, two years after her Met debut as Zerlina, was perhaps his last big mistake ("Roberta was a kid; that's her excuse. I was an idiot; that's mine"). Soon after that brief interlude, he settled into a happy second marriage.
Davis says he was "considered not much better than a stick onstage", but I've never seen any footage. Maybe it's time to place a Bel Canto Society order...
Mike Richter's Opera Notes and Miscellany will have a feature on Merrill (with soundclips [some Rameau, even!]) of him) starting Friday night.
http://www.mrichter.com/opera/welcome.htm
Posted by: Mme. Grisi Pasta | Oct 27, 2004 at 04:02 PM