John McCormack

Count John Francis McCormack was an Irish lyric tenor celebrated for his performances of the operatic and popular song repertoires, and renowned for his diction and breath control.

In March 1904, McCormack became associated with James Joyce, who at the time had singing ambitions himself.

Career

Fundraising activities on his behalf enabled McCormack to travel to Italy in 1905 to receive voice training by Vincenzo Sabatini (father of the novelist Rafael Sabatini) in Milan. Sabatini found McCormack's voice naturally tuned and concentrated on perfecting his breath control, an element that would become part of the basis of his renown as a vocalist.

In 1906, he made his operatic début at the Teatro Chiabrera, Savona. The next year, he began his first important operatic performance at Covent Garden in Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana, becoming the theatre's youngest principal tenor. In 1909, he began his career in America. Michael Scott ("The Record of Singing" 1978) writes that at this stage of his career, he should be considered a tenor of the Italian style—and he sang (and recorded) French operatic arias in the Italian language. Steane ("The Grand Tradition" 1971) stresses that, for all his later devotion to the concert platform (and his Irish identity), he was (for albeit a relatively brief period), in essence an Italian operatic tenor.

In February 1911, McCormack played Lieutenant Paul Merrill in the world premiere of Victor Herbert's opera Natoma with Mary Garden in the title role. Later that year, he toured Australia after Dame Nellie Melba engaged him, then at the height of his operatic career, aged 27, as a star tenor for the Melba Grand Opera Season. He returned for concert tours in subsequent years.

By 1912, he was becoming increasingly involved with concert performances, where his voice quality and charisma ensured that he became the most celebrated lyric tenor of his time. He did not, however, retire from the operatic stage until after his performance of 1923 in Monte Carlo (see biography below), although by then the top notes of his voice had contracted. Famous for his extraordinary breath control, he could sing 64 notes on one breath in Mozart's "Il mio tesoro" from Don Giovanni, and his Handelian singing was just as impressive in this regard.

McCormack made hundreds of recordings, his best-known and most commercially successful series of records being those for the Victor Talking Machine Company during the 1910s and 1920s. He was Victor's most popular Red Seal recording artist after tenor Enrico Caruso. In the 1920s, he sang regularly on radio and later appeared in two sound films, Song o' My Heart, released in 1930, playing an Irish tenor, and as himself appearing in a party scene in Wings of the Morning (1937), the first British three-strip Technicolor feature.

John McCormack ad (part 1) in The Film Daily (1929). This film was shot in Ireland, but was still in production.

McCormack was one of the first artists to record the popular ballad "I Hear You Calling Me", written in 1908 by Harold Harford and Charles Marshall; he recorded it twice for Odeon starting in 1908 and a further four times for Victor between 1910 and 1927 – it became his best seller. McCormack saw and liked the estate while there filming Song o' My Heart (1930),