Recovering the Forgotten Singer, 4: Joseph Schmidt

Charles Affron, one of the bloggers of OperaPost, has recently published Just Off Grand. This opera-themed novel is available on Amazon and best searched under the name of the author. Modeled on Honoré de Balzac's Old Goriot (Le Père Goriot), Just Off Grand takes place in and around New York City between the final days of World War II and the end of 1945. Our hero is an ambitious young cantor aspiring to a career in opera. Tracking his progress from a “Borscht Belt” hotel to a dramatic Yom Kippur Eve service in a prosperous West Side synagogue, the novel also stages a riotous dress rehearsal at the Metropolitan Opera. The often conflicted, sometimes destructive interplay among the characters mirrors the ferment of post-War society.

Renowned operatic tenor Joseph Schmidt (1904-1942) was never engaged by an opera company. Managers considered him too short (just under five feet [1.54 meters]) for the lyric stage. The sound stage was another matter. The angle of the movie camera compensated for his stature in nine films, most in German, a few in English-language remakes. Cinemas, concert halls, and the recording studio were his domains.

Born in a region of Romania that is now Ukraine, it was in the synagogue where, like his American contemporary Jan Peerce and the younger Richard Tucker, that Schmidt first attracted attention. He sought training in Berlin and was soon cast in leading roles in radio transmissions of complete operas, among them Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine, Mozart’s Idomeneo, and Puccini’s La Bohème. His movie career began in 1931; he achieved star status in 1933 with Ein Lied geht um die Welt (A Song Goes Round the World). A U.S. tour in 1937 grew his international reputation.

With Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Joseph Schmidt, along with other Jewish artists, was banned from work in Germany. At the start of the war, the tenor had secured passage to Cuba when another refugee stole his reservation. Belgium became his home until the Nazi invasion of 1940. Frail, in fact gravely ill, Schmidt fled to Switzerland where he was promptly interned in a labor camp. The Swiss doctors diagnosed his condition as nothing more than “malingering” and shortly thereafter he was dead of a heart attack.

His brief career notwithstanding, Schmidt’s recorded legacy is extensive. In a clip from the 1934 film Wenn du jung bist, gehört dir die Welt (When You’re Young, the World Belongs to You) he sings the familiar aria “Ach, so fromm (known better in Italian translation as “M’apparì [She appeared to me])” from Flotow’s Martha. A few bars from the even more familiar “The Last Rose of Summer” precede the aria. Schmidt’s sunny timbre invests the music with the sweetness that was his calling-card. (Movie fans will note that the clip has been colorized and will recognize character actor S. Z. “Cuddles” Sakall from his appearance in Casablanca.)  

 

Tamino’s “Dies bildnis ist bezaubernd schön” from Die Zauberflöte documents Schmidt’s pure Mozartean style.

Unlike many of the French and German tenors of the 1930s, Schmidt sang Verdi and Puccini in the original Italian. His “Nessun dorma” from Turandot is, unusually, at once passionate and refined.

Adolphe Adam, best known for his score for the ballet Giselle, also composed an opera, Le Postillon de Lonjumeau (1837), that enjoyed great popularity in the 19^th century. The rollicking aria, “Mes amis, écoutez l’histoire (Friends, hear the story),” sung here in German, is favored to this day by tenors with a free top register. Schmidt tosses off a high D, a daunting feat.

 

 

 

YouTube offers a trove of Schmidt’s recordings, including duets with Grace Moore from his 1937 American concert tour.