Great Dane

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In an apartment in Manhattan's highceilinged, eminently respectable Hotel Ansonia, 20-odd massive, military-looking Danes sat one evening last fortnight around a barrel of Danish beer. The warriors were at ease. They toasted King Christian X, and many another, in glass after glass of clear, burning aqvavit.* After every glass of aqvavit, they downed a chaser of beer.

At one point in the evening someone produced a rifle, suggested that they celebrate the good old days with a good old-fashioned shooting match. Carried by acclamation. The hotel corridor made a fine shooting gallery, with a homemade target set at one end of it. It was all carried out in military style. One Dane stood sentinel at the elevator door, warning back passengers with a white flag. As the rifle banged, horrified hotel guests cowered in their rooms, bellhops scurried for cover. Several bullets hit the target. Nobody got shot. It was one of the most successful meetings the Manhattan chapter of the Royal Danish Guard had ever had.

Next morning, the jovial host, a 225-lb. onetime Danish Guardsman named Lauritz Melchior, felt that things had perhaps been carried a little too far. His wife took pieces of cake and candy to the neighbors, assuring them that such a thing would never happen again. The neighbors allowed themselves to be placated. For Mrs. Melchior is very persuasive. And Lauritz Melchior is the world's No. 1 Wagnerian tenor.

Tenor Melchior is not averse to wassailing, but he takes his Wagner straight. After dinner on Wagner nights he calls for his roomy Cadillac and is driven with his wife, Kleinchen (Little One), to the stage door of Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House. He climbs the creaky stairs to the primo tenore's dusty dressing room,* fumbles around among the costumes of Tenors Richard Crooks and Giovanni Martinelli for his own raiment of deer skins and knightly robes. He washes himself in an antiquated, marble-topped washstand, glowers at the dead flies in the basin-shaped chandeliers, and applies his grease paint. In exactly 20 minutes he is dressed as the young Siegfried, his noble paunch encased in a deer skin, his stubby grey hair covered with a luxuriant blond wig. Thus accoutred, he lights a big black cigar and trundles down to the wings, where the waiting Kleinchen inspects him from top to toe, sees that his massive legs are properly powdered and that his hunting horn is in place. At the murmuring strains of Wagner's prelude, Melchior throws away his cigar and clears his throat. Kleinchen smiles and murmurs her parting salute: "Hals--und Beinbruch" (an old German good-luck greeting meaning "May you break your neck and your legs"), and the great Lauritz Melchior bounds youthfully on to the Metropolitan's aged stage.

Siegfried et al. In the early 1920s, when the late Enrico Caruso died and Soprano Geraldine Farrar retired, the Metropolitan's Italian opera began to limp downhill. But its Wagnerian opera has goosestepped steadily on. When big, blue-eyed Soprano Kirsten Flagstad joined the company in 1935, Wagnerian opera began to boom, played to the biggest box office the Met has known since Caruso's day. Principal drawing card in the Met's Wagnerian productions was Soprano Flagstad's bosomy personality and earth-mother voice. But she could not have done it all by herself. Supporting her was as fine a team of husky, seasoned Wagnerian troupers as could be found in any opera house the world over. Some of them (Elisabeth Rethberg, Lotte Lehmann, Friedrich Schorr, Emanuel List) were veterans of leading German and Austrian opera houses. Some (Lawrence Tibbett, Julius Huehn) were U. S. singers. Many (Kerstin Thorborg, Karin Branzell, Gertrud Wettergren) were, like Tenor Melchior, Scandinavians. Sturdiest of all these sturdy troupers has been gargantuan, jovial Tenor Melchior, for 14 years the Met's leading Tristan, Siegmund, Siegfried, Lohengrin, Parsifal, Tannhaeuser.

Melchior and Flagstad, as Tristan and Isolde, are a team whose memory will still be green when the present generation of operagoers is old and grey. Tristan and Isolde are opera's greatest lovers, and to thousands of U. S. listeners Melchior and Flagstad are their incarnation. Though that incarnation is only limelight-deep (in private life Melchior and Flagstad are never more than polite, between eruptions of professional jealousy), operagoers are treasuring it while it lasts. For last month Diva Flagstad announced that she would retire at the end of this season. Soon this mortal pair of immortals will be offstage forever.

Many of Richard Wagner's heroes (Siegmund, Siegfried) are huntsmen. Hunter Siegfried begins his career by bringing in a live bear, earns his spurs hunting a 20-foot, papier-mache, steam-spouting dragon, ends up by getting hunted himself and being carried home on his shield like a dead stag.

A great hunter on the stage, Lauritz Melchior in real life is hardly less terrible. The deerskin costume he wears as Siegfried is the skin of a deer that he shot and skinned himself on a hunting trip in Germany. When he can get a week off from the opera, he makes for the woods of Maine or North Dakota, where he prowls around with a brass hunting horn and a brace of dogs, gunning for ducks, rabbits, deer. He has shot panthers in South America, once bagged a 1,600-lb. bison in North Dakota. In New Brunswick he shot a bear, had it dressed and smoked and toted the meat back to his Manhattan apartment. For weeks smoked shanks and shoulders cluttered the Melchior home, hung in closets, dangled out the windows over busy Broadway. He tried to eat it all, but failed. His friends finally saved the situation by carrying away and loy ally consuming presents of bear meat until the supply was exhausted. Kleinchen does not like hunting. But she likes Melchior. Says she: "I am a married woman, and very happy. I try to make a nice home."

The Melchiors' homes are three: the Manhattan hotel apartment, a Copenhagen hideaway and a 3,000-acre estate in Germany, at Chossewitz. There, though Tenor Melchior does not sing in Germany any more, he spends his summers. On an island in the middle of a lake, near the former Polish border, he inhabits what was originally the fortress of a medieval robber baron. All summer long, Lauritz Melchior invites his soul in this rustic barony. He likes to dress in Lederhosen, hunt his own land for rabbit, red deer or pheasant. On these expeditions he always carries his little brass hunting horn, blows a blast on it like Siegfried himself.

Heldentenor. Lauritz Melchior is not a natural tenor. Jealous Italians refer to him sniffily as a misplaced baritone. Actually, he is an authentic example of a very rare type of singer: the true Wagnerian Heldentenor (heroic tenor). Most tenors have fairly light voices: their honey-voiced wailing is orchestrated to an accompaniment that will not drown them out. But Wagner had no use for such lightweights: the true Heldentenor must be able to out-boom a phalanx of trombones. Richard Wagner's heroes are strenuous fellows, who would willingly break a blood vessel to get to Walhalla, and Wagner saw to it that their tones should ring with desperate effort. Prince of Heldentenors is Lauritz Melchior. His triple-brass larynx (which earns him the same top Metropolitan pay that Flagstad gets: $1,000 a performance) can stand the wear & tear of Siegfried's "Forge Song" and Siegmund's stentorian "Waelse Waelse" without straining a capillary. But what impresses Wagnerites is his ability to color Wagner's mystical, mountain-glade poetry with just the right shade of Teutonic Weltschmerz, his solemn evocation of all the Nibelungenlied's nature-nourished gnomes and demigods. When Melchior sings, Wagnerites forget the Metropolitan's tattered backdrops and seem to see the green Rhine and the doom-cragged, primeval mountains of Gothic legend.

Like many another Heldenienor (including the late, great Jean de Reszke), Lauritz Melchior started his career as a baritone. Born in 1890 in a family of Copenhagen schoolteachers, he broke away as a youngster to earn his own living in a music publishing house, meanwhile studying singing and dramatics with local teachers.

Contrary to popular opinion, great opera singers are almost never discovered ready-made in fish markets and prairie ranches. They get that way only after years of hard training and plugging practice. No exception to this iron rule, Lauritz Melchior spent eight years before he rated a contract (in Copenhagen's Royal Opera) and a regular salary--1,000 kroner (about $200) a year. While he was still singing baritone roles at the Royal Opera, the eminent, U. S.-born vocal expert, Mme Charles Cahier, heard him, and wrote the director of the opera that Melchior was really no baritone but a tenor with the lid on. After he had practiced lifting the lid, he was allowed to sing his first tenor role: Tannhaeuser.

In 1919 Melchior got his first big chance singing Wagnerian roles at London's Covent Garden, six years later moved on to Bayreuth and Munich, where he was rated one of the finest German-style tenors of the day. One sunny afternoon in 1926 he made his debut at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House. That evening, ill-starred Kansas City Soprano Marion Talley made hers. In the storm and shuffle of publicity that attended Soprano Talley's debut, Melchior was practically overlooked. One critic described his acting as "barely more than awkward." But Melchior stayed on. Not long afterward, Soprano Talley's bubble had burst, and Manhattan operagoers began to think that Melchior was the best all-round Heldentenor they had heard since Jean de Reszke. As the years went by, and Wagnerian opera became the Met's specialty, sturdy Lauritz Melchior rolled up a world's record for Wagnerian trouping. To date he has sung 188 Siegfrieds, 138 Siegmunds, 104 Tannhusers, 54 Parsifals, 68 Lohengrins and 163 Tristans--nearly twice as many as the great Jean de Reszke himself.

Today, rotund, greying, 49-year-old Lauritz Melchior, the best Heldentenor of them all, is content to rest on his laurels. The father of two grown children (by his first wife, Danish-born Inger Nathansen, who died in 1927), he occasionally frets about 22-year-old Son Ib's cinema ambitions in Hollywood, keeps 19-year-old Daughter Birte hard at her business-school courses in Copenhagen. Though he diets in summer to keep his weight down to 225 Ibs., he takes his winter opera performances in his stride, often eats heavy meals before he goes to the opera house, smokes all the cigars he wants to, drinks his aqvavit neat. His brown-eyed, Bavarian-born wife Kleinchen (real name Maria Hacker), who could almost be tucked into one of the pockets of his massive vest, keeps him well fed and amused. One of the things about her that amuses him most is the way they met. Originally a cinema actress with the old German UFA films, Frau Melchior landed in her future husband's garden in a parachute during the filming of a picture. Since their marriage in 1925 Kleinchen has never missed one of his performances. She accompanies him on all his tours, entertains his guests, manages all his business affairs, passes upon his contracts, writes his letters, helps with his press interviews, welcomes his friends to the Melchior eight-room apartment at the Ansonia.

Though he lives in Germany and sings in the U. S., tenants of the Ansonia do not need to be reminded that Heldentenor Melchior is a Dane. Melchior himself never forgets it either. On his island castle in Germany he always flies the Danish flag. And on the door of his Manhattan apartment is a sign. It reads: "Lauritz Melchior, singer to the Royal Court of Denmark."

*Liquor (88 proof) distilled from potatoes; name a corruption of aqua vitae, brandy. *Stars at the fusty Metropolitan do not have private dressing rooms. All leading tenors use the same one.

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