Patrick Bade
Jewish Singers at the Met: Alma Gluck, Alexander Kipnis, Rose Pauly, Richard Tucker, Jan Peerce and Leonard Warren

Patrick Bade | Jewish Singers at the Met Alma Gluck, Alexander Kipnis, Rose Pauly, Richard Tucker, Jan Peerce and Leonard Warren | 02.14.24

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- People very often ask me these days if I’m Jewish. And if they don’t ask that, they ask, “Well, why is it that you are always talking about things Jewish?” So I thought I’d start by telling you the story of how this came about, because it’s actually very relevant, in several ways, actually, to the subjects of tonight’s talk. In fact, my connection with the Jewish world goes back very, very early to my early childhood, to the neighbours, the next door neighbours of my grandparents, when I was five years old. They were called Kay, and they really took an interest in me and they invited me into their house. I remember, one day, they sat me on the sofa and they played me a record of a new singer. a new singer then, Renata Tebaldi, and I loved it. And they were so pleased that I was enthused, that they actually gave money to my mother to get her to buy me an LP of Renata Tebaldi. Then, fast forward to the 1980s, the late 1980s, I worked on a series of programmes for Classic FM radio on the history of the Metropolitan Opera. I was working with Mel Cooper, who was a regular at Classic FM, and one night… He was a lovely man, I liked working with him, but he was a bit chaotic. And one night we were working very, very late on one of these programmes and we finished and he said, “Oh my God, the day after tomorrow, "I have to do a lecture on great Jewish singers "for a Jewish charity in Scotland, and I can’t think of any.”

And his problem, of course, was that the Jewish singers in the first half the 20th century almost never went by their birth names. You couldn’t really have a career with an obviously Jewish name. Certain parallels with what I was talking about last week, that it was impossible to have an operatic career with a black skin. Of course, the difference was that a Black singer can’t change the colour of their skin, but a Jewish singer can change their name. And in fact, of the 11 singers I’m talking about this evening, only one of them had a career under her real name. The image on the screen is of Rosa Raisa. I talked about her before in the context of Chicago. So I told you this story about how she arrived in America with her birth name Rosa, no, Raitza Burchstein. And she was told, “Well, you can’t possibly have a career with a name like that.” So her name was Italianized and it became Rosa Raisa. And it was convincing enough for her, amazingly, in as late as 1937, she sang “Tosca” in Berlin. You might think, “Why on the earth would any Jewish singer want to sing in Berlin under the Nazi regime in 1937?” I dunno, maybe it was a kind of gesture of defiance. Anyway, dead singers, old singers, have been my passion since my earliest childhood. So of course, I knew who all the Jewish singers were and what their real names were.

So I sat for about an hour, in the middle of the night this was, at Classic FM, with Mel, and I just dictated a talk about Jewish singers to him. Then I went home and I made, in those days it was still a cassette tape, and he sent a bike over to pick up the cassette, and he went up to Scotland and he gave the lecture. And I didn’t really think more about it for a couple of years, and then one day, a friend who owned a record shop, he said, “Do you know anybody who can do a lecture about Jewish singers for a charity?” It was for a lady called Brenda Josephs in London who was sponsoring it. And I said, “Well, I could do one,” cause I have the tape, effectively I have a lecture on Jewish singers, “but would they mind somebody called Patrick?” It’s not a very Jewish name, really. So Brenda said, no, she didn’t mind at all. So I gave that lecture and there was somebody from the London Jewish Cultural Centre who was at the lecture, and then she said to me, “Would you repeat it at the London Jewish Cultural Centre?” So I said, “Of course, I’d love to do that,” and I did it. And then they asked for a second lecture, and then they asked for a third lecture, and after that, Trudy Gold, my very, very dear friend, Trudy Gold, she said to me, “Well, people like you here. They’d like to hear more of you. Would you like to work with us on a regular basis?” And so I said to her, “Well, I think I’ve shot my bolt. I didn’t have a Jewish upbringing, I had a Catholic upbringing, and I don’t really know anything more than I’ve said already.” And she said to me… I’m misquoting Jonathan Miller. She said to me, “Well, it doesn’t have to be Jewish, it can be Jew-ish.”

And I thought about this, and I thought it was a really interesting idea. I got more and more into this and I became very, very fascinated. I built up a whole library, really, on Jewish cultural history. In my house in London, there’s a whole section of my library about this. So what really interests me, ‘cause I’m not… To tell the truth, I’m not remotely interested in the religious aspect of this. Had quite enough religion as a child, believe me. Spending a year in a Benedictine monastery can put you off religion for life. But what really fascinates me is assimilated Jewry. In any aspect of modern culture from the Revolution onwards, there is always some kind of interesting Jewish involvement. They’ve always been at the cutting edge of every cultural development, and this is something that really grabbed me. And also, for me, working at the London Jewish Cultural Centre, it was a kind of a, what can I say? It was a mutual love affair. I adored going there. It was the most enjoyable teaching I’ve ever done in my entire life. I loved the audiences. They were so interesting. They were sometimes very challenging. I still get a bit of it, of course, from your comments at the end of these Lockdown lectures that there are a lot of people out there who know a lot and they ask interesting questions and make interesting comments, and I absolutely loved that for all my time at the London Jewish Cultural Centre.

So, to move on to the Metropolitan Opera, this lady is, I think, the first really important Jewish singer to appear at the Metropolitan, and her name was Lucienne Bréval. She had made her debut at the Paris Opera in 1894 and she appeared over two seasons at the Met from nine, no three actually, from 1900 to 1902, and she was the partner of the world’s most famous tenor Jean de Reszke, and she was very admired, both in New York and Paris. She’s a bit of a mystery. She was very evasive, indeed dishonest about her birth. Not about her Jewishness, She was very open about that and really actually capitalised on it. When you read reviews of her performances in Paris, critics commented on her Semitic beauty. You might feel a little uncomfortable that with these days, but I don’t think that was intended in any kind of anti-Semitic way. Quite the opposite, really. But she pretended to be Swiss and to have been born in Switzerland. Well, she wasn’t, she was born in Berlin. Her real name was Bertha Shilling, so she was actually German. So it was a bit like Sarah Bernhardt, also who was of German-Jewish origin, but pretended to be Dutch 'cause it wasn’t a good thing, in 1900, in France to have any kind of connection with Germany. Two other mysteries about her.

There was a Belgian soprano called Blanche Arral, and in her memoirs, she puts forward a very bizarre theory that Lucienne Bréval was the half sister of Nellie Melba. I think it’s impossible, actually. We’ve got Nellie Melba’s birth certificate in Melbourne, in Australia. But Blanche Arral said that Lucienne Bréval was the only other soprano that Melba was ever nice to, and she couldn’t understand it. She thought there must be some secret family reason that Melba liked her. And the second mystery is that she was very famous. I mean, if you go to Paris flea markets, as I do, every Saturday and Sunday, you can find tonnes of stuff about, popular postcards of her, these are postcards, can find magazines, she’s on the front of magazines. She was famous, and glamorous, and much loved. All the critics say she had a sensational voice. She had a big voice; she could sing Wagner. But she never made a commercial record, sadly. So I can’t… I could play a trace of a trace of her voice because that’s all we have in a cylinder recorded by Lionel Mapleson in 1902.

But it’s such a dim, distant thing that I’m not going to torture your ears with it. So we move on, two very, very lovely American Jewish singers, Alma Gluck on the left, and Sophie Braslau. You can see, they were both charming, beautiful women, both with ravishing voices. Alma Gluck, she was not actually born in America, she was born in Romania and her real name was Reba Fiersohn. Her first husband was called Glick, but again, that’s a well-known Jewish name, and she decided to change it to Gluck, which means, of course, happiness in German. She was born in 1884, but she moved, as a child, to America. So she was brought up and she was trained as a singer in America. And Sophie Braslau was actually born in New York in 1892, and they both had the same teacher, an Italian songwriter and vocal coach called Alberto Buzzi-Peccia. You may know some of his songs that were recorded by many famous singers, Caruso, and Galli-Curci, and so on. He obviously did a very good job, because they, both of them, have most wonderful techniques as well as beautiful songs. So they both had fairly brief careers at the Metropolitan, and disappointing, I would say. They were simply not given the major roles.

They were confined to small roles, and they both, quite quickly actually, left the Metropolitan in frustration. Now, why was this? I don’t think, actually, it was primarily antisemitism. I think it’s the fact that neither had the European training and experience that was regarded as a prerequisite for a career at the Metropolitan. Remember the first, I talked about this before, the very first American born and trained singer to have major roles at the Metropolitan was Rosa Ponselle, but that wasn’t till a decade later. So I’m going to play you… So what they did, as they realised they weren’t getting anywhere at the Metropolitan, they just weren’t going to get the roles, they both turned to concert careers. Actually again, it is a parallel with all those Black singers who were not allowed onto the stage of the Metropolitan and had to make their way in the concert hall. And luckily, they both made wonderful records. Alma Gluck’s records were really bestsellers. A ravishing voice, very, very beautiful voice. Her second husband was the famous violinist, Efrem Zimbalist, you see him on the right hand side. So my first recording to play you is a very lovely record, “Chanson hébraïque” by Ravel, with the two of them performing together.

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And here is Mr. and Mrs. Zimbalist with their children. The little boy on the left, of course, became a very famous TV star, Efrem Zimbalist Jr. They actually, again, didn’t deny their Jewishness, but they converted to Protestantism. They were Episcopalians and I think really quite devout. And so this is Sophie Braslau, with a wonderful mezzo voice, actually tending to contralto. It’s a very dark voice, very deep voice. And she could have been a wonderful Verdian mezzo. She really had the power for it. She could have sung big roles like Amneris and Eboli and so on, but she was confined to little roles, as I said. So I’m going to play you a duet, the Flower Duet, famous Flower Duet from Madam Butterfly, and she’s singing with the soprano Frances Alda. So Suzuki, a somewhat thankless role, I would say, but you can hear, in this excerpt you can hear the fine quality of her voice.

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Now, these are four singers who are absolutely essential to the golden age of Wagner at the Met from the mid 1920s up to the end of the Second World War. I’ve already talked about this, so I’m not going to play any of these singers or talk in any detail, but many people would say that Friedrich Shaw, on the left, who was from a Hungarian Jewish background was the greatest Wagnerian base baritone of the 20th century. I think most people would agree that Lauritz Melchior, who was Danish and also from a Jewish background, although I think maybe more distantly, he was the greatest heldentenor of the 20th century. And Alexander Kipnis, top right, in my view, the greatest Wagnerian bass. And Emanuel List, a very fine Wagnerian bass. It was his misfortune, really, to be around at the same time as Alexander Kipnis. It was very wonderful for the Met. They could put on really luxury casts for Wagner in the '30s and right through the Second World War.

This is Rosa Paoli. Her real name was Rosa Pollack. She was born in Hungary in 1899. And she is one of those singers who was actually just famous for one role, and that role was Richard Strauss’s opera “Electra”. And wherever she sang this role, she created an extraordinary sensation. Strauss himself greatly admired her. So she sang it… Where did she sing it? Berlin, and of course she had to leave Berlin in '33. She went to Vienna, created an absolute sensation there, came to London, critics went absolutely wild about the incredible intensity and power of her performance. And she also had these extraordinary, luminous, thrilling top notes. And then she went to New York. I’m hoping I’ve got, what have I got? Oh! I’m missing these little… and oh dear, so dreadful when you miss, unless it’s hidden underneath something there, the thing I have to click onto. Well, I’ll have to miss her out, I’m afraid. But there is a complete concert recording of her “Electra” in New York, in reasonable sound and then, she sang it in San Francisco. I remember in the 1980s meeting a very elderly man who talked about the impact. There was this woman they’d never heard of. She turned up, she sang this role and everybody was just astonished. And then she went on to sing it in Argentina, at the Colón, and then when the Second World War broke out, she was only in her late 40s, but she decided to withdraw and she went to Palestine. And there, during the Second World War, she became a vocal coach.

One of her pupils was the wonderful singer Hilde Zadek. I had the great privilege of interviewing her at the London Jewish Cultural Centre. We had a real capacity audience and she was wonderful. She had the audience in her hand. I’ve been thinking about her a lot recently, 'cause I remember in the questions and answer at the end, she said something that moved everybody. She got a standing ovation from the audience. She said, 'cause people asked her about her background in Palestine and later Israel. And she said, I remember, I can repeat the exact words she said, she said, “I’m not a political person "and I will say only one thing about this. "I long for the day when Jews and Arabs "can live together as brothers.” And I’m sure there are many people who would echo those sentiments in these very difficult and terrible times. But I asked her about Rosa Paoli, what was she like? 'Cause you know, there was speculation and maybe in one of the reviews of her performance in London, said, “This woman must have killed her mother,” because of the intensity of her interpretation of the role of Electra.

And she said “She was a very tortured person and that she was, she said, "She described me as being like a wounded wild beast.” And she put this down to the fact that, in her youth, she had had an affair, an affair with an Egyptian man and they’d had a child. He’d taken the child and she was never able to get access to her child, and this was something that tormented her. And maybe that torment fed into the intensity of her interpretation of that one role. So this is Jennie Tourel, real name Jenny Davidson. And she was born in Russia, although she described herself as Canadian. She moved to Paris and she was a very popular singer in Paris in the 1930s. And then she came to New York, good timing, I would say, in 1937, and she made her debut at the Metropolitan. And there is a very good quality transcription of the broadcast of her debut in the role of “Mignon” in 1937. So I’m going to play you the introduction to that performance.

[Clip plays]

• [Announcer] Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. The National Broadcasting Company invites you at this time to listen to another Saturday matinee performance during the popular spring season of the Metropolitan Opera Company. And today we are to hear the French opera “Mignon” by Ambroise Thomas sung in French. This afternoon’s performance of “Mignon” has the following cast. Jennie Tourel sings the part of “Mignon” and incidentally, this young Canadian mezzo soprano is making her Metropolitan debut in the role this afternoon.

[Clip ends]

And let’s hear her in the most famous aria from that opera during this very performance.

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Now, she didn’t last long at the Met, she only had a couple of seasons there. And in this case, I think it may have been more about the voice itself. And it’s a lovely voice, as you could hear, it’s got a very nice timbre, very distinctive timbre and lovely quality, but it wasn’t a big voice and there weren’t really… The Met wasn’t doing the kind of roles that suited her. There was very limited amount of French repertoire at the Met. “Mignon” was not an opera that was done very often. So she moved to the City Opera, but her main career, again, was in the concert hall. She had a very close association, for the rest of her life, with Leonard Bernstein. In fact, they had a love affair for a while, although I suppose she was considerably older than him. But after that affair, they remained very close friends and very, very often performed together.

Here’s Jennie Tourel with Leonard Bernstein later on. This is the Hungarian bass, Mihály Székely. Hope I’m pronouncing that 'cause it should be the other way around, shouldn’t it? Hungarian? Székely Mihály? I hope I’m pronouncing it right. I’m not very confident, really, of my Hungarian. And he, again, wonderful sonorous bass. And he came at a time Ezio Pinza and Kipnis were the great basses and they were both at the end of their Met careers and retiring, so he was replacing them in many roles. But he only lasted four seasons from 1946 to 1950, and the reason that was political. The Iron Curtain came down and he was eventually stuck in Hungary. He’d started his career in the 1920s in Budapest, and was much valued singer. So much so that under the Horthy regime, when there were lots of antisemitic laws enacted and Jews were not really allowed to participate, in Hungary, in public life. He was given, in inverted commas, “honorary Aryan status” so that he could continue to perform at the Budapest Opera, right through the Second World War, up till the invasion of Hungary by the Nazis in 1944, and then he had to go into hiding and luckily escaped and survived. One of his great roles at the Met was “Fiasco” in “Simon Boccanegra”, and I’m going to play you him in that, but this is a later Hungarian recording. This is not a Met recording and he’s actually singing it in Hungarian.

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So not quite as smooth and honeyed as Ezio Pinza, but a wonderful sonorous sound, that tremendous resonance of the bottom note there at the end. Now, when we come to the 1940s, American born Jewish singers really come into their own, and there were two factors behind this. One was the financial difficulties of the Metropolitan, in the opera house in the late 1930s, forced them to turn to the Juilliard School and Foundation for financial help. And they gave the help on condition that the Met would showcase more American trained singers. And the the other factor, of course, was the outbreak of the Second World War and that cut off the supply of European singers. There were many famous European singers who were due to make their debuts in 1940 and '41. Tiana Lemnitz, the German soprano, Germaine Lubin, the, the French soprano, and they just never got there. So the Met was actually forced to take on more American born and American trained singers. So all five of these were born in the New York area. Top left is the tenor, Jan Peerce. His real name was Jakob Pinkhes Perelmuth. And then in the middle is Robert Merrill. His real name was Moishe or Morris Miller. Top right, Roberta Peters. Her real name was Roberta Peterman. Leonard Warren, bottom left, he’s Leonard Leonard Warenoff, and Richard Tucker, bottom right, Rubin Ticker.

So they were a whole generation of very, very fine singers who really dominated the casting of the Metropolitan. We’re going to start off with Jan Peerce, who was born on the Lower East Side. His parents came from Poland, they were immigrants from Poland. He was born in 1904, and he started off singing on the radio. And actually it was Toscanini who heard him on the radio and invited him to audition, and then used him. And he prided himself on being the successor of the great Italian Aureliano Pertile, who was Toscanini’s favourite tenor in Italy. So in the latter part of his career, he was the tenor who worked most with Toscanini. And I’m going to play you his “Che gelida manina” from “La bohème”. This is interesting 'cause this is Toscanini conducting and amazingly, of course, Toscanini conducted the world premier of “La bohème” in 1896. So it’s fantastic to have this performance in very good sound.

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Now, if you listened to that very carefully, you’ll notice there are actually two tenors singing that, because Toscanini cannot hold himself back. He cannot resist joining in. So you can hear him faintly singing along with Jan Peerce. Now I see, suddenly some more comments have gone into the Q&A and I bet it’s people telling me that they saw him in “Fiddler on the Roof”. because he landed up singing in, performing in that on Broadway at the end of his career. Now this is Richard Tucker, who was actually Jan Peerce’s brother-in-law because he married Sara Perelmuth, who was Jan Peerce’s sister. But they didn’t get on. They had quite a big falling-out. I’m told it was partly because each of them regarded themselves as being Toscanini’s tenor, because Richard Tucker also performed frequently with Toscanini and recorded with him. He actually began his career as a cantor.

So this is his pre-opera career. He’s not in an operatic costume here, he is actually dressed as a cantor. And here he is in his favourite role of “Eléazar” in “La Juive”. And I kick myself to this day because I could have heard him in this. In the early '70s, he came to London and he did a concert performance of “La Juive” at the Albert Hall. And I, for some reason, I can’t think why, didn’t rouse myself to go and hear it. And I regret that very much, because he’s really thrilling and marvellous in this role. Now, a couple of months back, I was talking about Caruso and I showed him in the role of Eléazar and somebody commented they were a bit shocked at Caruso wearing a prayer shawl. Well, this here is Richard Tucker going on stage and wearing a prayer shawl, as a rabbi, and he obviously felt it was okay to do that, despite the fact that of all these singers that I’m playing you today, I think he’s the only one who was religiously Jewish and kept a strict kosher household, for instance. So here he’s in the very beautiful Passover scene from Halévy’s “La Juive”.

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This is Leonard Warren. He was actually the first of these singers to make his debut at the Met. This was actually just before the Second World War. In 1939, he sang the small role of “Paolo” in “Simon Boccanegra” with the great Lawrence Tibbett taking the title role. And there is a broadcast of that in very good sound; it’s a wonderful, amazing cast, if you can get hold of that, with Elisabeth Rethberg, Giovanni Martinelli, Ezio Pinza, it’s a kind of dream cast.

But he made a real impression in this small role, and it’s a huge voice, huge, a rather burly voice, big, dark baritone voice tending more to the bass in its timbre, but with very good top notes as well. Tremendous singer in the Verdi roles. He famously died on stage at the Met during a performance of “La forza del destino”, but I’ll tell that story when I get to my talk on Rudolph Bing in a week or so. So, he’s particularly associated, as I said, with the Verdi roles. The first new production presented by Rudolph Bing when he took over the Met in 1950 was, oh no, that was “Don Carlos”, but very soon afterwards, he did “Macbeth” with Leonard Warren in the title role. And here he is. ♪ Music plays ♪

Now I’m going to finish with a duet from “Rigoletto”, I’m going to dedicate this to my very dear friend Robin Miller in New York. Actually one of these days I must ask her whether her family, whether is a family connection with Robert Merrill, on the left hand side, whose real name was Miller. I’m going to play you the act one duet between Rigoletto and his daughter Gilda, which is my friend Robin’s favourite excerpt in opera. I don’t know whether she still has it, but many years ago, I made her a cassette tape with different versions of this duet. But this one is quite hard to beat. It’s a very beautiful one. And it’s by singers who, at the time, were husband and wife, Robert Merrill and Roberta Peters.

It was not a marriage that lasted, and she later said that she’d really fallen in love with Robert Merrill’s voice rather than with the man himself, although they remained on good, friendly terms. And I can see why she fell in love with the voice. It is one of the most beautiful baritone voices on record. It’s wonderfully smooth. To my ears, it’s a much more beautiful sound than the sound of Leonard Warren. And it was obviously a good technique too. He’s the only one of these singers I heard live. Right at the end of his career, he came to London and he gave a concert at the Drury Lane Theatre. I went to that and the voice was still completely smooth, completely intact. So here is Robert Merrill and Roberta Peters in the Act One Duet from Rigoletto.

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Right, well, let’s see what you’ve got to say.

Q&A and Comments

“Happy Valentine’s Day.” Thank you very much. I’m not going to… I love being part of the North London Jewish community. I absolutely love it, and I feel incredibly honoured to have been embraced by it, but I’m not about to convert religiously. “It can only be a secular bar mitzvah.” Yeah, you are right. It would have to be secular. “Glick is Yiddish for luck.” So she just pronounce the pronunciation, yes. “People lay down their cultural gifts when they begin to assimilate, it’s they offer to, in their turn”, yes, I think that’s an interesting way of putting it. “Hungarian orthography is simply pronounced "ess”, so when S is, when it’s alone, is pronounced like shuh, shuh, yeah, thank you.

Q: “Was the American actor Efrem Zimbalist the son?” A: Yes, he was, he was that little boy I showed you in the picture.

“Interesting to see the violinist feature. How come that fiddlers escaped religious prejudice and led their cohort,” and I can’t quite understand that. It is very interesting, of course, and I’ve talked about that before.

Q: “How many great violinists are Jewish?” A: It’s very, you could count the ones that are the greatest of the 20th century or who are not Jewish really on one hand.

Glad you enjoyed “Mignon”, it’s a very charming opera. I love “Mignon”. “Tucker and Peerce, among others, had highly publicised employment as cantors in the high holiday services in the wealthy synagogues.” Yes, yes, Herbert, you are quite right. “You can hear Toscanini singing along with Jan Peerce.” And yes, Jan Peerce recorded many Jewish liturgical pieces. “Gorgeous voice.” Yes, it’s a very… Hi, hi Katrin. And it’s funny, isn’t it? It’s amusing, because Toscanini, who, that was the only Puccini opera that he continued to love and to perform until the end of his life. And “La bohème” of course is something so special. Yeah, they couldn’t edit it out, and yeah, it’s kind of a joy to hear it, isn’t it?

This is Francine. You met Licia Albanese after she retired from the Met. I also met her, actually. I met her in Luca at the Puccini Festival. She lived to a grand old age. And this is Faye who heard Jan Peerce in Rhodesia. That recording of “La bohème” was the first set of records that you had in 1953. I’m glad, it’s still well worth listening to, because there are many wonderful recordings of “La bohème” but that’s among the top ones, I would say. Yeah, I can well understand falling in love with it. “Whenever Tucker or Peerce performed in Toronto, they would eat at the kosher restaurant on Spadina Avenue, Goldenbergs, and sometimes at quality restaurants.” “Heaven listening to Jan, Jan Pierce in "Bohème”,“ I agree with you. It’s one very Italianate, actually. His Italian annunciation is fantastic. And it’s an open sound, isn’t it? Very, that kind of open-throated sound that you really want.

And this is Richard Tucker who visited South Africa in the mid-60s and was a house guest of a friend of yours. "They all went to Kruger Park where on the Shabbat he sang Kiddush in the banks of the…” I don’t know how to pronounce this, “Gukuza, and it was beyond spectacular.” I bet it was. And your wife Diana was a young girl then, but still speaks of the amazing and memorable experience. What a wonderful thing to have had. Yes, too bad that you couldn’t record it. “Jan and Alice Peerce also kept a strict kosher household after serious surgery on his eye, until his death, and they were dear friends, as were Roberta Peters and Robert Merrill.” Wonderful to know those people. I didn’t know about Jan Peerce’s involvement with Bach. That’s interesting. I wonder if there are recordings of that.

Where, I’ve just lost the… Where are we? And this is Arlene who heard Richard Tucker as a guest cantor- So, oh, don’t want that! Sorry, ooh dear! Where are we?

Q: “Who’s the soprano singer in 'La Juive’?” A: She’s a Japanese soprano called Yasko Hayashi, a wonderful singer with a very, very Italian sound. You would never guess that she was Japanese. She really sounds like an Italian. I heard her at Covent Garden as “Madam Butterfly”. She was wonderful. I don’t know if she made commercial recordings, but that recording is a radio broadcast and you can get it and she’s very, very good in it.

Thank you, Alice. And this is Alan, who sang in a concert in London with Richard Tucker with the London Jewish Male Choir. You probably know my very dear, dear friend, Alan Bilgora, who also sang in that choir.

Q: “Did Jan Peerce also start out as a cantor?” A: And yes, ‘cause it is actually the music of Ravel the Alma Gluck, but it’s Ravel writing to Yiddish and Hebrew texts.

“Tucker and Peerce from Silver Age of Cantors in the '40s and '50s.” Those early cantors in the early 20th century are absolutely spectacular, amazing technique they all had.

“The Bluebird of Happiness. Peerce recounts touring the Midwest and having a kosher dinner, incognito, with a family who couldn’t afford tickets to his concert that night, and he had someone call 'em to say that complimentary tickets were being held at the hall for them. They were shocked to learn when he came on stage "that their dinner guest was Peerce.” That’s a nice story. Am I going to feature the first women’s orchestra? I don’t think I know about it. You’ll have to tell me about that. There were, of course, women’s orchestras in Europe, certainly, going back to the 19th century. Thank you, Paula. And well, that family, they were just the Kays who lived next to my grandparents. They were just so warm. I actually walked into their house by accident, as a four old, and immediately, 'cause the house was identical to my grandparents, they just embraced me, literally and emotionally. “Merrill sang Rigoletto at the Royal Opera House. They changed the opening night so that it didn’t clash with Yom Kippur.” That was unusually nice of them.

“And Tucker and Peters in 'The Marriage of Figaro’ at the old Met House.” Thank you, Rita. “Jan made a hit record, ‘Bluebird of Happiness’.” Yes, with that’s of course why he, it was his biggest hit and it’s why he named his autobiography “Bluebird of Happiness”. “Well, Peerce also had a perfect pitch, and that’s why.“ Well, Toscanini also liked the fact that he had such good a pronunciation of Italian. "Roberta Peters grew up in the Bronx and played with Francine’s husband when they were children.” And thank you, Roger. "For Women’s Orchestra, see Phil Spitale.” I’ll try and look that up. Thank you all very, very much and see you again for a very different subject on Sunday. Bye-bye.