others have greatness thrust upon them
As you may recall, last year the BBC Music Magazine published a list of “The 20 Greatest Sopranos of All Time,” and one or two of you didn’t quite see eye to eye with their selection.
Well, this year they’ve turned their attention to the top 20 among tenors, who are (in ascending order of greatliness):Â
20. Sergey Lemeshev
19. Wolfgang Windgassen
18. Alfredo Kraus
17. Anthony Rolfe Johnson
16. John McCormack
15. Franco Corelli
14. Peter Schreier
13. Juan Diego Florez
12. Carlo Bergonzi
11. Tito Schipa
10. Peter Pears
9. Nicolai Gedda
8. Jon Vickers
7. Beniamino Gigli
6. Lauritz Melchior
5. Jussi Bjoerling
4. Fritz Wunderlich
3. Luciano Pavarotti
2. Enrico Caruso
1. Placido Domingo
No Bea Arthur?!
I like eddiepensier’s list far better than the original, though leaving Domingo off entirely doesn’t seem quite right.
The BBC Music list derives from polls of British critics. This probably explains why Pears is in the list.
enough with all this yowling about this or that tenor – there are so many different types of opera that to say one singer in a certain style is better than another is just meaningless. Far more fun – and more revealing would be for y’all to leave lists of 10 favourite (note I say favourite – and not greatest) operas – how about it, dears?
Meremarie
You’ve got it! I suspect the BBC Music Magazine asked its critics to list their favourite tenors – not necessarily the greatest (which is debatable anyway on all sorts of criteria). I still maintain that Windgassen is the hardest to justify. He wouldn’t be in my top 10 Wagner tenors. He was a stalwart, Ersatz-heldentenor at a time when they were thin on the ground. The fact that he replaced Ernst Kozub as the Siegfried on the Solti Ring says it all. He was the only tolerable choice at the time. Mind you, if he were around today……
Greatest tenor I have heard? I do not know, but I know what I like: the singing of Count John McCormack, the legendary Irish tenor, who sang well in every musical genre, not just and not primarily in opera.
His rendition of Mozart’s Don Giovanni aria “Il mio Tesoro” is still considered the most technically finished ever.
Favorite opera composer:
Verdi
Fave operas, in no particular order:
Traviata
Trovatore
Nozze di Figaro
Macbeth
Christopher Columbus (pastiche of Offenbach put together in 1976 for the Bicentennial)
La Cenerentola
I give up. The biggest problem making this list for me is that I like scenes and arias from far more operas than I do complete operas, and I like certain singers in certain roles. For me, Lucia, Luisa Miller, Violetta, and Gilda are, and maybe always will be, Anna Moffo.
And my list of greatest operas would include composers I don’t actually listen to, but can acknowledge the greatness of, such as Wagner and Beethoven.
No Svanholm or Jan Peerce on the list? Erika Slezak is below the Divina Kim Zimmer. And, if I remember from my youth in the 60s Corelli was something of a punchingbag for critics. And before I have to go to the Met Archives, who was the most frequent Tristan for Fremstad when she and Gadski were doing Isoldes? Just some thoughts I have while reading these comments.
Ah, Kim Zimmer doesn’t have Erika’s lineage. And what little I’ve seen of Zimmer impressed me, but I am strictly an ABC soap fan; I got hooked early on AMC, OLTL, and GH and never got hooked on anything else. By the way, Renee on OLTL? She starred in the original production of “A Little Night Music”.
Is that Victoria Clark? My big faves are the goddess Deidre Hall and the whacked out Robin Strasser as the increasingly bizarre Dorian.
Lucretius – surely Bea Arthur is a baritone?