Nicola Rescigno (1916 - 2008)

Born into a musical family in New York City, Nicola Rescigno studied with Pizzetti, Giannini and Polacco. He made his debut in 1943, conducting La traviata, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music for Alfredo Salmaggi’s opera company. He then toured the United States with the San Carlo Opera Company, serving as the company’s music director […]

Graziella Sciutti (1927 - 2001)

Graziella Sciutti (17 April 1927 – 9 April 2001) was an Italian soprano opera singer and later vocal teacher and opera producer. Sciutti was born in Turin, Italy. Her parents were musical, her father being an organist; her mother was French. She studied privately with Ginevra Marinuzzi, then in Rome at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia […]

Lina Pagliughi (1907 - 1980)

Lina Pagliughi (May 27, 1907 – October 2, 1980) was an Italian-American opera singer. Based in Italy for the majority of her career, she made a number of recordings and established herself as one of the world’s finest lyric coloratura sopranos of the 1930s and 1940s. Pagliughi was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Italian immigrants. […]

Cesare Valletti (1922 - 2000)

Cesare Valletti (December 18, 1922 – May 13, 2000) was an Italian operatic tenor, one of the leading tenore di grazia of the postwar era. He was much admired for his polished vocal technique, his musical refinement and elegance, and beauty of tone. Valletti was born in Rome, where he studied music. He also studied privately […]

Fausto Cleva (1902 - 1971)

Fausto Cleva (17 May 1902 – 6 August 1971) was an Italian-born American operatic conductor. Fausto Cleva was born in Trieste in 1902. After studies at the Conservatorio in his native city and Milan, Cleva made his debut conducting La traviata in Carcano, near Milan, before emigrating to the United States in 1920, becoming an American […]

Ramón Vinay (1911 - 1996)

Ramón Vinay started his operatic career as a baritone in Mexico in 1938. He later switched to tenor, making a second debut in 1943 and forging a successful international career after World War II . Vinay eventually returned to the baritone fold in 1962 and retired from the stage in 1969. Even as a tenor, however, […]

Gottlob Frick (1906 - 1994)

Gottlob Frick (28 July 1906 in Ölbronn-Dürrn – 18 August 1994 in Muhlacker) was a German bass who sang in opera. He was known for his wide repertory including Wagner and Mozart roles, as well as those of Nicolai and Lortzing. Frick’s teachers included Fritz Windgassen (father and teacher of Frick’s contemporary, the tenor Wolfgang Windgassen). He […]

Hilde Gueden (1917 - 1988)

Hilde Gueden was born Hulda Geiringer in Vienna, and studied singing with Otto Iro, piano with Maria Wetzelsberger, and dancing at the Vienna Music Academy. She debuted, as Hulda Gerin, in 1937 in Benatzky’s operetta Herzen im Schnee at the Vienna Volksoper. Her operatic debut came in 1939, when she sang Cherubino in Le nozze […]

Joseph Keilberth (1908 - 1968)

Joseph Keilberth (April 19, 1908 – July 20, 1968) was a German conductor who specialized in opera. He started his career in the State Theatre of his native city, Karlsruhe. In 1940 he became director of the German Philharmonic Orchestra of Prague. Near the end of World War II, he was appointed principal conductor of the […]

George London (1920 - 1985)

George London was born to a Russian Jewish family in Montreal, Quebec, Canada and grew up in Los Angeles, California, United States. In the summer of 1945 Antal Doráti invited his longtime friend, the Hungarian bass Mihály Székely, to sing at the first concert of the newly reorganized Dallas Symphony Orchestra. Because of travel difficulties Székely […]

Clemens Krauss (1893 - 1954)

Clemens Krauss made the rounds of regional centers, conducting in Riga (1913-1914), Nuremberg (1915) and Stettin (1916-1921) (formerly part of Pomerania in Germany; now part of Poland). The latter appointment gave him ample opportunity to travel to Berlin to hear Arthur Nikisch conduct the Berlin Philharmonic, a major influence. He then returned to Austria as […]

Astrid Varnay (1918 - 2006)

Both her parents were Hungarian and born in small towns in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but she was born in Stockholm, Sweden, where her parents were living during part of World War I. During a Da Capo interview in 2012 Varany claimed that although she was born in Stockholm, her ancestry was Hungarian, French and German. […]

Hans Hotter (1909 - 2003)

Born in Offenbach am Main, Hesse, Hans Hotter studied with Matthäus Roemer in Munich. He worked as an organist and choirmaster before making his operatic debut in Opava in 1930. He performed in Germany and Austria under the Nazi regime, avoiding pressure on performers to join the Nazi Party, and made some appearances outside the country, […]

Leonard Hokanson (1931 - 2003)

Leonard Hokanson (August 13, 1931 – March 21, 2003) was an American pianist who achieved prominence in Europe as a soloist and chamber musician. Born in Vinalhaven, Maine, he attended Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts and Bennington College in Vermont, where he received a master of arts degree with a major in music. He made […]

Lucia Popp (1939 - 1993)

Lucia Popp was born Lucia Poppová in Záhorská Ves in the Slovak State (later Czechoslovakia and today Slovakia). Popp initially entered the Bratislava Academy to study drama. While she began her vocal lessons during this period as a mezzo-soprano, her voice developed a high upper register to the degree that her professional debut was as the […]

Hermann Prey (1929 - 1998)

Hermann Prey was born in Berlin and grew up in Germany. He was scheduled to be drafted when World War II ended. He studied voice at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin and won the prize of the Frankfurt contest of the Hessischer Rundfunk in 1952. He began to sing in song recitals and made his […]

Waldemar Kmentt (1929 - 2015)

Waldemar Kmentt (Wien, 2 February 1929 – Ibidem, 21 January 2015) was an Austrian operatic tenor, who was particularly associated with the German repertory, both opera and operetta. Born in Vienna, Kmentt studied at the Vienna Music Academy, first the piano, and later voice with Adolf Vogel, Elisabeth Radó and Hans Duhan. In 1950, he sang […]

Walter Berry (1929 - 2000)

Walter Berry (8 April 1929 – 27 October 2000) was an Austrian lyric bass-baritone who enjoyed a prominent career in opera. Walter Berry was born in Vienna. He studied voice at the Vienna Music Academy and made his stage debut with the Vienna State Opera in 1947. He became a permanent member of the company in […]

Rita Streich (1920 - 1987)

Rita Streich (December 18, 1920 – March 20, 1987) was one of the most admired and recorded lyric coloratura sopranos of the post-war period. Rita Streich was born in Barnaul, southern Siberia, in the Russian part of what was then the Soviet Union, to a German father who had been a prisoner of war there, and […]

Sena Jurinac (1921 - 2011)

Sena Jurinac was born in Travnik, Bosnia-Herzegovina (then part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia), the daughter of a Croatian father (a doctor) and a Viennese mother. She studied at the Zagreb Academy of Music, and with Milka Kostrenčić. Her voice was pitched exactly between soprano and mezzo. Her repertoire included Poppea, Elisabetta (Don Carlos), Desdemona (Otello), […]

Anneliese Rothenberger (1926 - 2010)

Anneliese Rothenberger was born in Mannheim, Germany. She studied with Erika Müller, and took up her first engagement in Koblenz in 1943. In 1947, Günther Rennert offered her a job at the Hamburg Opera House, where she sang in Rennert’s now famous production of Alban Berg’s Lulu twenty years later, a role she would also […]

Peter Kreuder (1905 - 1981)

Peter Paul Kreuder (18 August 1905 – 28 June 1981) was a German-Austrian pianist, composer and conductor. Peter Kreuder was born in Aachen, the son of a Kammersänger. He enrolled as a piano student at the Cologne Conservatory in 1910, where he performed his first concert one year later, and at music academies in Munich, Berlin […]

Marika Rökk (1913 - 2004)

Marie Karoline Rökk was born in 1913 in Cairo, Egypt, as the daughter of Hungarian architect and contractor Eduard Rökk and his wife Maria Karoline Charlotte née Karoly. She spent her childhood in Budapest, but in 1924 her family moved to Paris. Here she learned to dance and starred with the Hoffmann Girls at the […]

Oskar Karlweis (1894 - 1956)

Oskar Karlweis (10 July 1894, Hinterbrühl – 24 January 1956, New York City) was an Austrian stage and film actor, active internationally. Son of a playwright, Karlweis abandoned his youthful law studies for the stage, first for eight years at Vienna’s Stadttheater. After service in World War I, he was active with Max Reinhardt’s Theater in […]

Mischa Spoliansky (1898 - 1985)

Mischa Spoliansky was born into a Jewish, musical family in Białystok, then part of the Belostok Oblast of the Russian Empire. His father was an opera singer and his sister would later become a pianist and his brother a cellist. After the birth of Mischa the family moved to Warsaw, and later Kalisz. After the […]

Heinz Roemheld (1901 - 1985)

Heinz Roemheld (May 1, 1901 – February 11, 1985) was an American composer. Born Heinz Eric Roemheld in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he was one of four children of German immigrant Heinrich Roemheld and his wife Fanny Rauterberg Roemheld. Heinrich was a pharmacist, but all the members of the family were musical. Heinz’s brother Edgar (1898-1964) became […]

Victor Young (1900 - 1956)

Victor Young was born in Chicago on August 8, 1900, into a very musical Jewish family, his father being a member of one Joseph Sheehan’s touring Opera company. The young Victor began playing violin at the age of six, and was sent to Poland when he was ten to stay with his grandfather and study […]

Leo Robin (1900 - 1984)

Leo Robin (April 6, 1900 – December 29, 1984) was an American composer, lyricist and songwriter. He is probably best known for collaborating with Ralph Rainger on the 1938 Oscar-winning song “Thanks for the Memory”, sung by Bob Hope and Shirley Ross in the film The Big Broadcast of 1938. Robin was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, […]

Grete Mosheim (1905 - 1986)

Grete Mosheim was born in Berlin, Germany on 8 January 1905, the daughter of Markus Mosheim (1868-1956) and his wife Clara Mosheim née Hilger (1875-1970). Her sister was actress Lore Mosheim, who appeared in at least nine movies. Mosheim started her acting career at the age of 17 and was a member of Deutsches Theater, Berlin […]

Friedrich Hollaender (1896 - 1976)

Friedrich Hollaender was born in London, where his father, operetta composer Victor Hollaender, worked as a musical director at the Barnum & Bailey Circus. Young Hollaender had a solid music and theatre family background: his uncle Gustav was director of the Stern Conservatory in Berlin, his uncle Felix Hollaender was a well-known novelist and drama […]