ROBERT
WEEDE
By James A. Drake
I am both honored and pleased to be able to once again present Dr. James A. Drake
as our guest author today. A recently retired college president, James A. Drake
is a distinguished author of seven books, four of which are biographies of great
opera singers of the twentieth century. Although not a musician (he earned a
doctorate in philosophy and taught primarily in social-science disciplines
before he became a university administrator), Dr. Drake earned the confidence of
the legendary soprano Rosa Ponselle, with whom he collaborated on her
autobiography for Doubleday and Company. With a foreword by Luciano Pavarotti,
the Ponselle-Drake collaboration yielded excellent reviews and was named "Music
Book of the Month" by the National Book Clubs of America in 1982. The book was
also promoted during a Metropolitan Opera broadcast in the 1982-83 season. By
that time, Dr. Drake had been selected by Sara Tucker, widow of the celebrated
tenor Richard Tucker, to write an authorized biography of the great singer, who
had died in 1975 while at the peak of his career. For the Tucker book, Luciano
Pavarotti again contributed a foreword, and the biography was officially
released at a special event hosted by maestro James Levine at Lincoln Center.
Once again, Dr. Drake's newest work received a "Music Book of the Month"
award.
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Robert Weede
"This
place is worse than Hell," a frustrated Mario Lanza wrote to his
manager from the steaming-hot Army Air Force base in Marfa, Texas,
where the young tenor had been assigned for his stint as a draftee during the
summer of 1943. “Oh, how I wish I could have Robert Weede here now," Lanza
lamented. "I could sure use some singing lessons."
The
young Mario Lanza was not alone in seeking out Robert Weede for help with vocal
technique. "Bob was our 'voice repairman,'" said Jan Peerce of
Weede's uncanny ability to pinpoint, analyze and, as Peerce put it, to
"repair" other singers' vocal problems. Other first-rank
singers including Norman Treigle, Dominic Cossa, and John Alexander also sought
Weede's help and advice at key points in their careers. At no time would
Weede accept any remuneration for assisting his colleagues when they were
experiencing vocal problems.
Jan
Peerce had sought Weede’s help during the only vocal crisis that the
otherwise-durable tenor ever experienced.
Weede helped Peerce regain his voice, and appeared with him in San
Francisco on The Standard Hour radio
series, where they sang the duet “Le minaccie i fieri accenti” from La Forza del Destino:
Weede
also appeared on radio with Peerce’s young brother-in-law, Richard Tucker, on The Squibb Hour, where Tucker had become
a frequent guest artist after being signed by the National Concert Artists
Corporation, an agency which secured radio appearances for both up-and-coming
and well-established classical musicians.
On
The Squibb Hour, accompanied by Lynn
Murray and his orchestra, the young Tucker and the already-established Weede
sang “Within the Temple There,” an English version of “Au fond du temple
saint,” the tenor-baritone duet from I Pescatori
di Perle:
Although
Tucker had not yet made his Metropolitan Opera debut when he appeared on The
Squibb Hour, Weede was first-rank baritone by then. Born Robert Wiedefeld in Baltimore,
Maryland, on February 22, 1903, he studied
voice at the Eastman School of Music in the mid-1920's, and subsequently went
to Milan for
additional study in 1929-1930. Upon his return to the U.S., he began
performing in regional opera companies, and by 1936 his growing reputation
earned him a Metropolitan Opera audition.
Weede
made his Met debut on May 15, 1937, as Tonio in a double-bill performance of Pagliacci and Cavalleria Rusticana.
Not until the rehearsals were in progress did he realize that another
promising young American baritone, Thomas L. Thomas, had been scheduled for his
debut the same day, as Alfio in the Cavalleria performance. The
next day, both baritones were lauded in the New York press for their extremely
impressive debut performances.
In
the wake of the success of Weede’s Metropolitan debut, he was offered a
recording contract by Columbia Records.
One of his most successful Columbia
disks was of “Si puo?,” the prologue from Pagliacci,
with Frieder Weissmann conducting:
After
his initial success at Tonio, Weede spent the the next three seasons at the Met
performing in concerts and galas, usually singing one aria (typically, the Pagliacci prologue)
and perhaps singing in a trio, quartet, or other ensemble, but garnering very
little attention from the New York critics for these brief appearances.
All
of that changed on the evening of February 27, 1941, when Weede first
appeared in the title role in Rigoletto, in a cast that included Jussi
Bjoerling as the Duke of Mantua, Hilde Reggiani as Gilda, and Bruna Castagna as
Maddalena. Amid this strong cast, it was the previously-unheralded Weede
who netted the
All
of that changed on the evening of February 27, 1941, when Weede first
appeared in the title role in Rigoletto, in a cast that included Jussi
Bjoerling as the Duke of Mantua, Hilde Reggiani as Gilda, and Bruna Castagna as
Maddalena. Amid this strong cast, it was the previously-unheralded Weede
who netted the praise of all of the major critics.
"It
was not much of a Rigoletto at the Metropolitan for anybody
but Robert Weede last night," wrote Irving Kolodin in the New
York Sun. "However, what this American baritone accomplished in his
first appearance at the opera house in this role was striking enough to make
the occasion a memorable one, not only for him, but also for the
audience."
"As a primary asset," Kolodin continued, "Mr. Weede has
a voice—a big voice, moreover, which fills the opera house with ease and
doesn't require the forcing to which he sometimes resorted. But it has
quality as well as size ... [and] he was entitled to the robust applause
he received."
In
the New York Post, critic Edward O'Gorman wrote that
"Mr. Weede has an enviable baritone voice, one that is full and
robust, capable of a wide range of expression and yet one that has none of the
coarseness usually encountered in a voice of its type. Its chief characteristic
is perhaps its pliability. But the
element that distinguished Mr. Weede's characterization of Rigoletto was
neither vocal nor histrionic, although each was telling in its way, but an
uncanny sense of theatre that balanced the two in a performance that was a
personal triumph for the singer ...."
Writing
in the New York World-Telegram, Robert Bagar said that
"Mr. Weede's singing proved thoroughly compatible with the demands of
the part. His impersonation grew in stature as the evening wore on, and
in the emotional give-and-take of the third act he dominated the stage."
Although Weede’s first appearance in Rigoletto
was apparently not recorded, his performance of the demanding role during a
Saturday matinee radio broadcast on January 31, 1942, was preserved in an
off-the-air recording:
From 1941 to 1953,
Weede added Amonasro in Aida, Manfredo in L' Amore dei tre
re, Shaklovity in the Met premiere of Mussorgsky's Khovanshchina,
and Scarpia in Tosca to his Metropolitan Opera repertoire.
It was as Scarpia that he sang his last performance with the Met, a
matinee broadcast from Detroit
on April 17, 1953, with an all-American cast including tenor Eugene Conley as
Mario Cavaradossi and Dorothy Kirsten as Floria Tosca.
Some of Weede’s
most successful Tosca performances,
however, occurred not in the U.S.
but in Mexico City,
where he sang Scarpia to the Floria Tosca of Maria Callas during the summer of
1950. They were also cast together in Aida, and later, in Chicago, the two would sing together again
in Il trovatore and Madama Butterfly.
But it was their pairing in Tosca that netted enthusiastic
reviews from the critics and wild applause from the audience:
In
1956, Weede left the opera stage to appear on Broadway as Tony Esposito in the original
production of Frank Loesser's The Most Happy Fella, at the Imperial Theater in New York
City. Reviewing the opening performance,
New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson praised Loesser’s musical adaptation of
the “romance of a lovely waitress who marries a rich, ebullient vintner.”
Singling
out Weede’s performance as Tony, Atkinson wrote, “The music is beautifully
sung. Robert Weede, as the vintner, is a
wide, artless-looking man with a powerful voice that can travelthe full range
from romantic fervor to despair. He
sings the part with the authority of a professional.”
Weede
was also seen on Broadway in Milk and Honey from 1961-63 (which was also recorded by
Columbia Records) and Cry for Us All in 1970. But neither Milk
and Honey nor Cry For Us All impressed critics and audiences to the
same degree that Weede's Most Happy Fella had. For that, Weede was nominated for, and
received, the 1956 Tony award for "Best Performance by a Leading Actor in
a Musical."
Because
of his engaging personality, both onscreen and off, and his first-rate acting
and nuanced characterizations, Weede's voice was only infrequently assessed by
the same criteria that are applied to almost other operatic voices. One
who had no difficulty doing so was Max De Schaunsee, who had reviewed every
major singer since Giovanni Martinelli arrived in New York in 1910.
Speaking of Weede's voice at the time of his early success as Tonio in Pagaliacci, De Schaunsee described it
"as a big voice, but not a beautiful voice in the usual sense of that
phrase--not in the class of Lawrence Tibbett, or John Charles Thomas, or
Leonard Warren and Robert Merrill.”
“Although
he was definitely a baritone,” De Schaunsee said, “Weede’s singing often took
on more of a tenor quality in his middle and upper range. But it was not as a singer per se that he made his mark. He was a superb actor, an actor who could
sing, an actor who was an artist in the finest sense of that word."
Robert Weede died in Walnut Creek, California, on July 9,1972. But through
his numerous recordings and radio appearances, and the relatively few
television appearances he made, he earned a form of immortality that few
artists experience in their lifetimes.
JAMES A. DRAKE
