the Celebrated Opera Artist

left: young John looking jaunty in a pork pie hat for a 1912 Victor ad. As noted elsewhere, he and the Victor Company had a mutually beneficial financial relationship. His recordings sold in the high thousands of copies, especially his Irish song and Victorian ballads records.

right: John McCormack, the International Opera Star, NYC, 1910; his first season at the Metropolitan Opera House, as Rodolfo from Puccini's La Boheme. In many opera houses he also sang Lt. Pinkerton in Madama Butterfly for many seasons, and he had a special liking for another Puccini role, the dramatic role of Cavaradossi in the grand opera Tosca.

Outside of the "modern" composer Puccini McCormack was especially noted as Don Ottavio in Mozart/da Ponte's Don Giovanni; Edgardo in Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor; Tonio in Donizetti's The Daughter of the Regiment; Elvino in Bellini's La Sonnambula; Almaviva in Rossini's The Barber of Seville; the French romantic tenor roles of Faust and Romeo, by Gounod, and Gerald, from Delibes' Lakme, and two Verdi roles: Alfredo in La Traviata and Il Duca in Rigoletto. He also sang very infrequently the tenor leads in Mozart's The Magic Flute; Flotow's Martha; Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffman; Herbert's Natoma and Mussorgsky's The Fair at Sorochintzke.

Although not a large voice, it carried well in most opera houses because of the superb technique that was intuitive as well as placed by the Italian vocal maestro Sabbatini. That ability, wedded with a natural legato, exquisite musicianship and sweet-timbered Celtic vocal charm made McCormack especially valuable at that time, and a striking alternative to the Italian and Spanish tenors who ruled the Italian opera "wings" of major opera houses. His voice was nearly ideal (read below) for the early 19th-century bel canto repertoire in the first years of his opera career, from 1907-1914, notably at the Royal Opera at Covent Garden, London. McCormack also sang in the prestigious opera houses of Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia after making his American debut in 1909 for Oscar Hammerstein's Manhattan Opera House. When that house closed he joined the Metropolitan Opera, on/off from 1910-1918, primarily as a guest artist. McCormack finished his opera career in 1921 and 1923 in Monte Carlo, a lovely ornate theater perfectly suited to his vocal strengths. That last season he sang Rossini, Puccini, Mozart and Mussorgsky. He sang a limited schedule in 1922 (no opera) due to a severe strep throat illness which nearly killed him, in those pre-antibiotic days.

It has long been a subject of discussion among McCormack scholars how that illness affected his voice. Many detect a marked difference on recordings after that illness, but I don't hear it that much, and he had finished recording the "mainstream" arias that demanded B-flat and above by 1917, and the bulk of those were done from 1908-1916, when he was in his twenties. The few Handel and Beethoven arias he recorded between 1920-36 didn't place high range demands on the voice. He never had an especially "long" voice to begin with, and he was nearing 40 years of age in the early 1920s and the voice was changing somewhat. To quote Henry Pleasants in his The Great Singers book, "the top notes, above B-flat, were not his by divine right, and he did not have them for long." Indeed, even in his early years I would presume that McCormack had to make adjustments in the Donizetti & Bellini roles with high-lying tessituras as did the mid-20th-century lyric tenors Valletti, di Stefano, Alva, and Monti--only in the last thirty-five years with Luciano Pavarotti, Nicolai Gedda, Enrico di Giuseppe, Chris Merritt, Frank Lopardo, Rockwell Blake and Juan Diego Flores have we begun to hear those bel canto tenor roles sung with most of the original high notes intact and in the correct keys. In other music, McCormack, like Caruso--and later Tucker, Domingo and even Pavarotti (post-1980)--always transposed down by a half-step the aria from Puccini's La Boheme.

We should also remember McCormack maintained a grueling concert schedule up until the early 1930s--the voice could be expected lose some of its youthful ease and vigor. After 1923 he devoted himself to the concert stage, recording studio, radio and films to reach his immense public.