1884 - 1945
CAREER
Of all the great singers of this century John McCormack was the most versatile. Opera and oratorio, Handel and Mozart, Brahms and Wolf and Rachmaninoff, Irish folksongs and ballads of simple sentiment: in all these he was at home. Long after his death, many of his achievements continue to set a standard. No one within living memory has brought such technical finish to " Il mio tesoro or such a soaring rapture to "Ganymed "; yet McCormack was idolised all over the world - and still is - by thousands to whom Mozart and Hugo Wolf mean little or nothing.
John McCormack was born in Athlone, County Westmeath, Ireland on June 14, 1884. The family was at that time living in a small row house in "The Bawn," a neighborhood in Athlone, east of the Shannon River. The river divides Athlone into two parts, with the west side being County Roscommon. John was the fourth of eleven children born to Hannah and Andrew McCormack, and one of the five to survive childhood. Both his parents were born in Galashiels, Scotland. Andrew's father was Irish and had originally hailed from Sligo. Mrs. McCormack's family was Scottish Presbyterians
He won a medal at the National Irish Festival (Feis Ceoil) at Dublin in 1903, and began his studies there as a member of the Roman Catholic Cathedral choir under its choirmaster and organist, Vincent O'Brien. In 1904 he travelled to America and sang in the St. Louis Exhibition; in the following year he went to Milan to study with Vincenzo Sabatini. his studies progressed rapidly, and on January 13th, 1906, he made his stage debut under the assumed name of Giovanni Foli (his fiancee was a Miss Foley) at the Teatro Chiabrera in the small town of Savona on the Gulf of Genoa. Unlike most operatic tenors, he was then expected to look about twice his actual age; for his role was that of the middle-aged hero of Mascagni's L'Amico Fritz. By the following year he was deemed ready for London, where his sympathetic timbre, easy production and spontaneous manner soon made him a firm favounte On February 17th, 1907, he sang at a Sunday League concert in London; on October 15th he made his Covent Garden debut as Turiddu in Cavalleria Rusticana. This was a fairly successful event, but still more so was his Don Ottavio in Don Giovanni of a few weeks later; here he already showed his purity of style and technical powers as a classical singer. In 1909 he appeared at the San Carlo, Naples; and on November 10th of that year he made his New York debut at the Manhattan Opera House in La Traviata. Until the time of the First World War he was in regular demand on both sides of the Atlantic for the lighter lyrical roles in such operas as Lucia di Lammermoor, La Sonnambula, Lakme, La Figlia del Reggimento and Rigoletto, in all of which he often sang with Tetrazzini; while in his most famous part, that of Rodolfo in La Boheme, he made numerous appearances with Melba. But in those days the shadow of Caruso tended to dim the lustre of all other tenors of the Italian school, Bonci and Martinelli not excepted. McCormack had already made an enormous success as a concert singer; and before long, being by his own admission a poor actor, he decided to abandon the stage. The decision was neither sudden nor irrevocable; as late as 1923 he made several appearances at the Opera of Monte Carlo, winning particular praise for his exquisite singing in Mussorgsky's Fair at Sorochintsy. But by this time the concert platform had become the centre of his artistic career.
Partly because of his Irish nationalism (which for a time made him unpopular in England) McCormack began to spend his time increasingly in the United States, and in due course he became an American citizen. On his return to England in 1924, however, his superlative singing caused all political differences to be forgotten. The writer in Grove's Dictionary adds that, on account of the frankly sentimental and popular elements in the tenor's programmes, "by this time he could no longer be taken altogether seriously as a musician ". But the truth was that his musicianship had steadily increased, and was evident, in the opinion of many good judges, in everything he touched, howsoever trivial. McCormack's own view was that the unsophisticated people who thronged to his concerts had a perfect right to their enjoyment; in any case, whatever the song, he was incapable of debasing his style. It was perhaps a pity that he did not sometimes take a smaller hall for programmes of a higher artistic level, for his repertory of serious music became vast, and the brief classic groups with which he used to begin his regular recitals only touched the fringe of it.
In 1928 McCormack was made a Papal Count by Pope Pius XI, an honour peculiarly dear to his heart. By that time he had returned to live in Ireland, and for another decade he continued to give concerts in many parts of the world, especially in the British Isles. In the autumn of 1938 he made a farewell tour, taking his leave of London audiences at the Royal Albert Hall on November 27th. But during the first winter of the war he emerged from retirement to tour in aid of the Red Cross, and in the following winter he made several broadcasts in a popular series called " Irish Half-Hour ".
For more than thirty years he had been a frequent and extremely successful visitor to the recording studios of Victor and H.M.V.; and until September 1942 he continued from time to time to make records, compensating for his declining vocal powers by a still matchless art and mastery of microphone technique. During the last years of the war, however, his previously robust health began to fail rapidly, and he died peacefully on September 16th, 1945. One cannot refrain from quoting the the words which his widow found written in a memorandum book on his desk, because their simple eloquence is so characteristic of the man and the artist: 'I live again the days and evenings of my long career. I dream at night of operas and concerts in which I have had my share of success. Now, like the old Irish Minstrels, I have hung up my harp because my songs are all sung'.
Like the old Irish minstrels . . ." he said of himself; and indeed he was, above all things, a minstrel. No one could equal him in the art of telling a story in song; no singer has surpassed the distinctness of his enunciation, or his sense of the shape and colour and meaning of words. Such things, like his sincerity and spontaneity, link him with the minstrels and troubadours of the middle ages; he loved and needed the public just as the public loved and needed him. But he was a minstrel who had the misfortune to be born into an age when the good songs are mostly sophisticated, and the popular songs mostly cheap. Even when singing the trashiest of shop ballads, he sang without cynicism or condescension, without the slightest admixture of cheap tricks or mechanical devices. He sang always from the heart, surrendering himself not so much to the cheap words and music themselves, as to the ideas behind them. So, even here, a musician could hardly fail to admire the inexhaustible fascination of his style; though people of refined tastes, who were not musicians, might well be distressed. During one of his concerts at the Theatre Royal, Dublin, Sir Compton Mackenzie found the poet Yeats pacing up and down behind the Dress Circle, muttering to himself" If it weren't for the damnable clarity of the words . .
Of the millions who enjoyed the singing of John McCormack", wrote Ernest Newman in the London Sunday Times, few realised how great an artist he was, and why. To the multitude he was the unrivalled singer of simple things expressed in a simple musical way, with a special gift for clear enunciation and clean-cut melodic line-drawing. But these gifts, admirable as they were in themselves and in his use of them, were only part of a much larger whole. He was so perfect in small things because he was steeped in greater ones, was subtly intimate with them, and had attained complete mastery of the expression of them. "What he did was to carry over into his performance of simple songs an art based on, and subtilised by, the most intensive study of the masterpieces of song from Handel and Mozart to Hugo Wolf. . . . He was a supreme example of the art that conceals art, the sheer hard work that becomes manifest only in its results, not in the revolving of the machinery that has produced them. He never stooped to small and modest things; he invariably raised them, and with them the most unsophisticated listener, to his own high level. I never knew him, in his public or his private singing, to be guilty of a lapse of taste, of making an effect for mere effect's sake. He was a patrician artist, dignified even in apparent undress, with a respect for art that is rarely met with among tenors. There is no one to take his place."