I hadn’t actually interfaced with opera stars before, but I did have a memorable chat once with Robert Merrill, famous baritone of the Metropolitan Opera, who is best known for his interpretation of Figaro in Rossini’s Barber of Seville.
That meeting was recalled when I learned that he had died. Had he reached 87 as the New York Times announced or 85 as the Associated Press claimed? It’s hard to be sure, as performers are known to disguise their actual age, so I would guess that the Times had the most careful fact-checker.
I first heard him sing on the radio in the 1940s and 1950s, but he also appeared on television in TV’s infancy years. Most Americans, however, know him best from watching and hearing him over a number of years sing the National Anthem at Yankee baseball games. He was a great baseball fan and it was poetically appropriate, perhaps, that he passed away while watching the World Series.
He was kind enough to record a public service radio spot for me that I was producing for the American Bible Society perhaps a dozen years ago. We were introducing the new Contemporary English Version. We had created a stable of celebrities to voice passages of that new Bible translation so that listeners could hear the ease of the text that had been intended as listener-friendly when read aloud. Merrill was most willing.
He told me to meet him at his club in Manhattan and I found him there one noon. We moved from the noisy dining room to a smaller and quieter side room where our engineer had set up his microphone and recorder.
When I showed him the script for the first time, he smiled and said, “I sometimes have trouble reading aloud.” My eyebrows went up a few millimeters and he hastened to explain.
“I stutter. Or I used to. I had to overcome it, of course, because I was appearing so much in the public.” We worked through his reading it aloud a couple of times, making sure the flow of it was comfortable to me and to him. We did a number of “takes” before we were satisfied, but that is the rule, not the exception. When he projected his “Figaro” voice with its vigor and lively energy, I knew we had a winner.
Of course I was curious. I inquired how he overcame his handicap.
“It was through my singing,” he said. “My mother discovered that I didn’t stutter when I sang and so she encouraged me to sing and sing and sing. She didn’t realize what that would lead to.”
He further explained that, in order to overcome the stutter reflex when he had to speak, he trained himself to “sing in my mind” as he spoke. “It worked!”
He said that once, when he was singing at the White House during the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, he discovered after the concert in chatting with the President, that Ike himself had been a stutterer. They each had their own technique for overcoming the vocal impediment and they both were successful.
I had forgotten the text I had chosen for him to read so I plucked the CD out of my files this morning and played it. I was moved to hear again his musical voice reach out to the listeners with these words:
Keep your Creator in mind while you are young! In years to come, you will be burdened down with troubles and say, “I don’t enjoy life anymore.”
Hello! This is Robert Merrill with a wonderful text from the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes in a new translation into contemporary English from the American Bible Society. Listen:
Someday the light of the sun and the moon and the stars will all seem dim to you. Rain clouds will remain over your head. Your body will grow feeble, your teeth will decay, and your eyesight fail. The noisy grinding of grain will be shut out by your deaf ears, but even the song of a bird will keep you awake.
You will be afraid to climb up a hill or walk down a road. Your hair will turn as white as almond blossoms…
We each go to our eternal home, and the streets are filled with those who mourn. The silver cord snaps, the golden bowl breaks; the water pitcher is smashed and the pulley at the well is shattered. So our bodies return to the earth, and the life-giving breath returns to God.”
As a world-famous singer who could thrill opera and concert audiences with his vibrant two-octave-range baritone, he possessed the gift of beautifully controlled, “life-giving” musical breath which he has now at last returned to his Creator.
R.I.P. Bob Merrill.
|
| Page last modified by Richard Lee on 9 November 2004 |
|