Many people believe that Italy is the only country that can give birth to great tenors, such as Enrico Caruso, Beniamino Gigli, and Luciano Pavarotti. However, Richard Tucker, who was born in Brooklyn, New York, and whose 50th yahrzeit was observed this week, is still acclaimed and revered as one of the greatest operatic tenors of the 20th century.
He was also one of its greatest cantors.
I was fortunate enough to hear Tucker sing three times, in the early 1970s. The first was at a concert in Tel Aviv, in which he sang several operatic arias, with a cantorial piece as an encore. I also heard him sing the part of Canio in a performance of Pagliacci at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, a role in which he himself felt he excelled.
The third time was at the funeral of celebrated Jewish composer Sholom Secunda, who wrote most of the cantorial pieces that Tucker sang and recorded, and who often conducted his choir. At the funeral service, Tucker sang the Kel Maleh Rachamim memorial prayer with palpable emotion.
According to his oldest son, Barry Tucker, when his father left the funeral service, other cantors began praising his rendition of the prayer. “My father exploded,” recalls Barry. “‘That was not a performance!’ he started to yell. My mother had to restrain him.”
This was typical of Tucker, a sincere, forthright, and warm-hearted man, who knew his worth and who believed that his magnificent voice was a gift from God. Pavarotti, one of Tucker’s most famous successors at the Met, called him “one of my gods,” and “the master of us all.”
For Time magazine, his voice had “a ringing, luminous sound… an almost unique evenness of tone and quality from top to bottom.” For The New York Times, his power, sweetness, and thrilling top notes gave him “one of the most remarkable voices of his generation.”
In the early 1950s, Met general manager Rudolf Bing told everyone: “Caruso, Caruso, that’s all you hear! I have an idea we’re going to be proud someday to tell people we heard Tucker.”
A Brooklyn kid headed for greatness
Born in 1913 to Sam and Fannie Ticker, Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Bessarabia, he was named Rubin, and to family and close friends, he was always “Ruby.” Recognizing the tunefulness of his voice, his father had him evaluated by Samuel Weisser, a respected cantor, teacher, and composer, when he was only six. Weisser immediately took him into his choir and continued to train him in the melodies and techniques of synagogue music for several years.
Meanwhile, Rubin, who later changed his first name to Richard and his last name to Tucker, grew up as a typical Brooklyn kid. He was highly competitive at sports, had a fondness for gambling, and never lost the distinctive Brooklyn twang in his speech.
His first job was as a runner on Wall Street, and for a while he had a business supplying silk linings for the fur trade. But he took his musical studies very seriously, and as his voice matured into a glorious, powerful lyric tenor, he began to sing with Weisser at weddings and other events.
When he was 22 he married Sara Perelmuth, to whom he remained devoted throughout his life. Her older brother Jacob also became famous as a star of the Metropolitan Opera, under the name of Jan Peerce. (For a fuller account of their relationship and of all the details of Tucker’s life, read James A. Drake’s excellent biography of Tucker.)
In 1938, having served as a part-time cantor at a New Jersey Conservative congregation, Tucker was appointed as the cantor of the much grander Temple Adath Israel in the Bronx, where the celebrated composer of Yiddish folk songs and cantorial works Zavel Zilberts was the musical director.
But Tucker already had an operatic career in mind, and Zilberts encouraged him to find a teacher. He began to study with Paul Althouse, an American tenor who had sung at the Met and whose influence dominated Tucker’s artistry and mindset throughout his career.
Besides helping Tucker develop his voice and teaching him vocal techniques, Althouse instilled in his student three cardinal rules. First, not to rush his career by taking on the heavier operatic roles too soon but rather to let his voice grow with age and experience. Second, not to overly tax his voice before a performance or a synagogue service with excessive exercises and warm-ups. And third, to keep his work and his family life separate.
Barry Tucker confirms that his father never sang at home. As Tucker grew more successful, he kept an apartment in Manhattan on Central Park South, a combination studio, office, and pied-à-terre, convenient for reaching the Met on the days when he was performing there.
But above all, Tucker was a family man who made his living by using his voice in the opera house, the concert hall, and the synagogue. Barry recalls that whenever his father traveled, the phone would ring promptly at 7 p.m. each day so that he could catch up with the news of Sara and their three sons.
In the summer of 1943, Tucker became cantor of the Brooklyn Jewish Center, then a very prominent Conservative congregation. Soon after his appointment, there was already speculation that his future lay in opera.
“There has been a good deal of talk about Mr. Tucker’s operatic possibilities,” wrote one of the congregants in the Jewish Center Review (October 1943). But he doubted that Tucker would be lured to the operatic stage. “Tucker was brought up in liturgical music,” he concluded, “and the synagogue is both his spiritual and artistic home.”
Due to the continuing world war, the Metropolitan Opera struggled to find tenors to replace its former European stars who could not travel to American shores. Edward Johnson, general manager of the Met from 1939 to 1950, was encouraged to go to hear Tucker sing at his synagogue on a Friday evening.
After the service, Johnson told Tucker, “If you can satisfy the critical ears of 2,000 people in this prestigious temple, you can satisfy any audience at the Metropolitan Opera House.”
Soon after, Tucker sang the aria “Cielo e Mar” from La Gioconda for Johnson at an audition, and his debut at the Met was set for January 1945 in that opera.
However, with a Met contract in hand, his future at the Brooklyn Jewish Center was now in doubt. Tucker was torn, since his operatic career was not yet firmly set. He wanted to hold on to his income from the synagogue, but deep down he felt that it would not be proper to continue there.
The center’s rabbi, Israel Levinthal, asked some of his rabbinic colleagues for their opinions, including the distinguished scholar Rabbi Dr. Louis Ginzberg, whose reply is printed in a collection of his responsa.
“I am sure that people would find it quite strange to see their cantor one day recite the ‘Neilah’ prayer and the following day sing a love duet with some lady,” Ginzberg wrote.
Tucker first took a leave of absence, then resigned.
Legendary energy
Tucker’s Met debut was a great success. Crowds of friends and supporters from Brooklyn and the garment industry were there to cheer him on. Remarkably, he was not nervous, and this innate confidence and self-assurance became a hallmark of his career.
The audience gave him a huge ovation, and the critics wrote of “his lyric voice of a lovely quality and fullness” and that “his highest tone was pure and steady.” Met historian Irving Kolodin recorded that he “shone as pure gold” and concluded that “the Metropolitan acquired its most beautiful voice since Gigli’s.”
But Kolodin also noted that “Tucker’s scant stage experience was evident in his awkward movements.” On the shorter side of average, and a little chubby, he wasn’t the image of a romantic hero. “He acts with all the recklessness of a bank president,” observed the Herald Tribune.
According to The New York Times, he would “raise one arm to express mild emotion and two arms to suggest deeper matters.” His theatrical skills, however, greatly improved as his career blossomed; but whenever he sang, his emotions could be intuited from his facial expressions, as well as in his voice.
Tucker’s work ethic was prodigious and his stamina legendary. In his book Tenor, History of a Voice, John Potter writes: “Tucker’s voice was a magnificent instrument, in the European post-Caruso mold, and he flung himself into every role he attempted.” James Levine, the Met’s principal conductor, spoke of Tucker’s “sensationally endless energy and commitment, and tremendous technical know-how.”
Tucker also had a playful sense of humor and loved pranks. The story is told that during the drawn-out death scene in Verdi’s Don Carlo, Tucker once leaned over to his close friend baritone Robert Merrill and whispered, “I’ve got to catch the train home to Great Neck in 45 minutes. Will you hurry up and die?!” It was all Merrill could do to keep from laughing out loud.
As he became recognized as the Met’s lead tenor, appearing regularly in most of the great Italian and French operas, Tucker opted to perform abroad much less than most other stars. But his Italian accent and diction in the Verdi and Puccini operas he performed were impeccable. When asked where he learned Italian, he would answer, “In Brooklyn.”
When he did travel, he would often make contact with the local Jewish community and would sometimes daven for them on Shabbat. When he davened in the Stadttempel in Vienna, the only synagogue in the city to survive the Holocaust, he was clearly very conscious of what had happened to Austrian Jewry just a few years earlier.
“I will never forget the emotion and power of Richard’s prayers that morning,” Sara Tucker wrote. Tucker’s European representative John Gualiani felt that “he sang more powerfully than at any other time in my memory… and he told me he felt he had never sung better in his life.”
An opera star, but always a cantor
Tucker carried his Jewish identity very proudly.
In 1954, he was invited by Angel Records to sing the tenor roles in La Forza del Destino and Aida, to be recorded at La Scala Milan, with Herbert von Karajan conducting the orchestra. Karajan had joined the Nazi party in the early 1930s and was a favorite of the Nazi leadership.
Tucker made it clear that he would not work with the ex-Nazi and rejected the very lucrative offer. It turned out that Angel Records wanted Tucker more than Karajan, and the conductor was replaced.
Tucker’s cantorial training influenced and even enhanced his operatic prowess, particularly in his ability to sing trills, which are so prominent in cantorial music. When other tenors asked him how he did it, he would tell them to come to hear him in the synagogue.
Even at the height of his operatic career, he would serve as a cantor on the major Jewish holidays – for many years at Chicago’s Park Synagogue on the High Holy Days and at the Concord Hotel in the Catskills on Passover.
However, Tucker’s relationship with Jewish observance was very complex. Richard and Sara’s kitchen was strictly kosher, but they did not necessarily keep kosher outside the home, and he traveled and performed on Shabbat without any obvious hesitation. However, he prayed every day with tefillin and wore tzitzit under his shirt.
His son Barry tells of seeing his father’s tzitzit hanging for all to see in his dressing room when, still in costume, he would greet the celebrities who came backstage to congratulate him following his performances.
Barry also recalls that on one of his frequent trips to Israel, his father was invited to daven at a major Jerusalem synagogue. Tucker demurred, pointing out that he was not a strict Sabbath observer and was therefore unfit to lead the Orthodox congregation.
The shul seemingly had no such problem, so Tucker agreed on the condition that his participation would not be advertised. “I drove my father there,” Barry relates. “We parked a few streets away and walked the rest of the way. But when we got there, the crowd was so large that we had to push our way in.”
When playing a member of the Christian clergy onstage, Tucker would refuse to wear a crucifix as part of his costume. However, he had a close relationship with the leadership of the Catholic Church in New York and would sing at Catholic fundraisers.
At the funeral mass for Robert Kennedy in 1968, at the family’s request he sang the hymn “Panis Angelicus” from the choir loft in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. After Tucker’s own death, the cathedral held a memorial service for him because of “his good works for the Catholic Church and the people of New York.”
A rich and enduring legacy
Tucker’s career at the Met spanned 30 years, a record exceeded at that time by only two other artists. He gave 715 performances for the Met in New York and on tour; with his almost-photographic memory, he mastered 31 roles. He would give his all in every performance, and audiences rewarded him with bravos, ovations, and curtain calls.
He also appeared with other opera companies across the United States and made many recordings of opera, bel canto, Neapolitan songs, and cantorial works. He often gave concerts and recitals and was a popular guest on radio and TV shows.
Tucker understood that he was an entertainer, and he also sang and recorded many popular songs such as “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” the theme from the film Exodus, and “Sunrise, Sunset.”
His cantorial recordings include highlights of the Friday evening service, the Kol Nidrei service, and the Passover Seder – with a very operatic rendition of “Chad Gadya” – as well as a selection of “Cantorial Jewels.”
A recording of his davening is available on YouTube – the “Hineni” prayer of the cantor on the High Holy Days – a hugely powerful rendition that is full of kavanah (deep sincerity and devotion) and supplication.
In the early 1970s he was, by his own admission, “singing everywhere and packin’ in the crowds.” He had finally taken on the role of Canio, the tragic clown in Pagliacci, and threw himself into it with such intensity that colleagues begged him to tone it down.
Critics were amazed that his voice and power were scarcely different from when he was a young man, while some singers were already past their prime even in their forties. In an interview with National Public Radio, Tucker ascribed his vocal longevity to four factors: “A happy home, conditioning, guidance by my teachers to study the right roles and, of course, a little mazel – luck, as we call it.”
However, his mazel failed him when in 1975, on a concert tour with Merrill in Kalamazoo, Michigan, he suffered a fatal heart attack. He was 61. His funeral service was held on a bare stage in the Metropolitan Opera House – an honor never before extended to any singer – with more than 3,000 people filling its seats.
Rabbis and cantors officiated, and eulogies were delivered by Met general manager Schuyler Chapin, and Cardinal Terence Cooke. Cantor Herman Malamood chanted the “Kel Maleh Rachamim” prayer.
Looking forward to his eventual, inevitable retirement from the opera, Tucker once talked about leaving behind a shem tov, a good name, a result with which no one can argue.
After his death, his family established the Richard Tucker Music Foundation, which continues to support promising young singers, as he himself always did throughout his career. A small park in Manhattan, just opposite the Met, was named for him, and a bust of his likeness stands there.
There have been many great cantors who were offered careers in opera but almost all turned them down. In his own way, and with great determination, Tucker managed to combine the best of both worlds. Whether he was dressed in the clown costume of Canio in Pagliacci on the operatic stage, or in the cap and gown of the cantor on the synagogue bima, he would thrill audiences and inspire his congregations.
To quote the phrase that Richard Tucker always used when he spoke of someone who had passed away, “Rest his soul.”