Patrick Bade
Richard Tauber

Patrick Bade - Richard Tauber

- That is of course, the song that is most associated with Richard Tauber. It became his signature tune and it followed him through his career. “You are my heart’s delight” the English translation from Franz Lehar’s operetta “The Land of Smiles” that was first performed in 1929. Now, amongst the wider British public, Tauber is seen as an operetta singer, and sometimes I meet rather ignorant and snobby people who dismiss him. They say, “Oh, he’s not serious. He’s just an operetta singer.” I always get very snippy with them, and I say, “No, no, he’s not an operetta singer. He’s the operetta singer.” And he raises operetta to great heights of artistry as he does with everything he sings. He’s much, much more than an operetta singer. I mean, operetta was something that he came to only about halfway through his career. He’s a marvellous interpreter of German lieder, Schubert, in particular, of Mozart and of a wide range of operas. And then in his later career, of course, singing popular hits. Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hammerstein, as we shall hear later. But he is particularly associated with Franz Lehar. And they had a very close, almost a father-son relationship as I think you can tell from this photograph on the left hand side. And their friendship and their artistic collaboration dated from the year 1922. At that point, Tauber had been engaged by the Vienna State Opera.

He was world famous as an opera singer. But in the summer of 1922, there was a new operetta by Lehar that was presented at theatre an der Wien, It’s the other great historic theatre of Vienna where so many operettas from the “Vliedermaus” onwards were presented. Of course, it’s a theatre, I’m sure you know, that was built by Schikaneder with the profits from Mozart’s “Magic Flute” at the end of the 18th century. And so “Frasquita”, this operetta was actually not doing very well, but Tauber went to hear it and he thought, “Hmm, if I could only get my hands on that.” And he went to Lehar and he went to theatre and der Wien and he said, “Look, will you let me sing the main role in this?” And of course, they were astonished. Why would a distinguished opera singer with a thriving opera career want to take over a role, which he would have to sing every night in an operetta theatre, in an apparently failing operetta. But anyway, they let him do it, and suddenly theatre was full, and it was a tremendous success. And “Frasquita” then went to other cities, went to Paris, where for instance, Conchita Supervia sang in it, if only, oh, the idea of the two of them singing in the same performance. They did actually once sing in the same venue, which was the Albert Hall, in a prom concert, but they weren’t singing together. But they each sang a set of songs. So you can see, perhaps those of you can read German, but it’s quite difficult to read. Let me give you, that’s a bit closer.

So there, and he’s using du, the du form. So there’s really an intimate friendship here. You can see it’s the 24th of July, 1922. So when this amazing transformation of Lehar’s operetta had just taken place, that’s another point I wanted to make right at the beginning, Tauber brings just a touch of magic to everything, it becomes totally personal. It’s like he recreates, reinvents everything he sings. And I’m going to give you some very extraordinary examples of that later in the talk. So Lehar had been in a bit of a trough, really, professionally after the first World War, his great hits like “The Merry Widow” and so on, were pre-war. But so this association with Tauber reignited his creativity. And through the 1920s, he wrote a whole series of operettas that were tailored very specifically to Tauber’s talents. “Friederike”. What else? Yes, “Der Zarewitsch”. “Paganini.” And each of these operettas had what they called a Tauber lead. The New York critic Irving Collagen made a famous joke about this. He said, “Every Tauber lead a Tsauber lied, a magic song.” And what Tauber was famous for was doing multiple encores. He might do three, four encores, and each time he sang it, he would phrase it differently and he’d end it totally differently, even when he was singing under the baton of Lehar himself. So I’m going to next play you, oh, where has it gone? Where have I put it? I was going to play you. All the little icons seem to have disappeared. That’s very, very worrying. Oh, dear. Well, I was going to play you the serenade from, but I can’t find the icon that I have to go onto.

That is extremely worrying. And Yes, well, this series of operettas culminates in 1929 with “The Land of Smiles” which presented in Berlin at the Metropol Theatre. And here is Franz Lehar with Tauber on the night of the premier. You can see he’s surrounded by flowers. So Tauber, Lehar absolutely on a high. And the photograph you see on the left, it must have been taken in the very early 30s, before ‘33 in any case. And it’s taken in Berlin. And you see Lehar on the left hand side, you see the Hungarian Jewish star, Gitta Alpar, she was the toast of Berlin in the early 30s. Had a very brief, brilliant career in Germany. Of course, forced out immediately the Nazis took over. Tauber on the right hand side. And behind them on the right is Dr. Lerner Beder, who was the librettist of all those operettas of the 1920s of Lehar. Very close collaborator. Very funny man, very witty man. He unfortunately did not get out. He stayed behind. I think he probably just felt too German. He didn’t want to leave. And his whole career was writing in German. And on the right hand side, you can see this is actually from a French magazine of the late 1930s. And it says, the author of that’s “The Land of Smiles”, Dr. Lerner Beder has committed suicide in the concentration camp of Buchenwald, where he has been for the past 18 months. That was actually not true. He was still alive, and he later was sent to Auschwitz. Despite the efforts of Lehar. Lehar did everything he could to try and save him. And Lehar had the ear of top Nazis. He was favoured by Goebbels. Both Goebbels and Hitler adored his operettas, but he was unable to save Lerner Beder.

He was sent to Auschwitz, and he wasn’t murdered in a gas chamber. He was actually brutally kicked to death, apparently for making a joke. Now, so, well, I’ve got an icon here, so that looks like I’m good, I can play you something. I wanted to show you how Lehar, how Tauber rather, uses his creativity. So I’m going to play you two versions of the song, “Du bist meine Sonne”. This is from their final collaboration, the final operetta of Lehar, which was presented at the Vienna State Opera in 1934. Of course, it was an enormous, enormous honour for Lehar. You can see how many honours he had, all those medals on his jacket. He was world famous. And so normally you would not have, an operetta would not have been premiered at the Vienna State Opera. This is a very ambitious operetta. Lehar and Puccini of course, had a strong kind of mutual aberration. Puccini long to write an operetta and Lehar longed to write an opera. So in fact, although it’s an operetta, “Giuditta”, premiered in 1934, is really quite operatic. And it was presented with two very great singers, wonderful Czech, very beautiful Czech Soprano, Jarmila Novotna and Tauber, who plays an Italian officer in the Army who has a disastrous and tragic affair with a married woman. It was actually banned in Italy because Mussolini said, “Oh, no Italian officer would ever have an affair with a married woman.” But, so yes, the hits on the Tauber lead is “Du bist meine Sonne.” And first of all, I’m going to play you the commercial recording that Tauber made with Lehar himself, conducting.

• Next, I’m going to play you the same excerpt, the end of the song. And this was recorded secretly and illegally in the Vienna State Opera the following year in 1935, there was an engineer called Mai, Hans Mai, who was doing a lot of this. And I’m very grateful to him 'cause there’s something like well over 20 CDs of these excerpts of live performances recorded at the Vienna State Opera in the 1930s and 40s. They’re very frustrating 'cause the sound quality varies and they break off in the middle of an aria or whatever. But they’re a wonderful source or a wonderful archive of what performances were like in this very famous golden period at the Vienna Opera. So here we are live. Again, it’s Lehar himself conducting. And this time, this is one of the encores and Tauber takes the liberty to completely rewrite the end of the song, as you just heard it. He sings full out fortissimo at the end in the commercial version. But here he spins out exquisite pianissime and cressendi and so on, really recreating. And there is Lehar himself in the pit, presumably folding his arms and waiting for Tauber to finish these ravishing pianissime.

• Amazing to hear that live and to hear the enthusiasm of an audience of 1934. Now, before I move on to his operatic career, I want to play a another record of a song that’s not opera. It’s not an operetta song, it’s an independent song, really a kind of salon piece. Perhaps the most famous song by Paolo Tosti. It’s called “Ideale” in Italian, although Tauber sings it in German. And I want to play this to you as an example of his art at the height of his career, when his voice was still at its freshest. And to show that the sheer magic that he can create. Now, I wouldn’t claim that Tauber had one of the greatest voices of the 20th century. It’s not a very big voice. He didn’t have very brilliant top notes, unlike say, Gigli or Larry Volpe or other Italian tenors of his time. And it’s a very Germanic technique, which may or may not please you. That means that the voice is produced quite far back in the throat. It’s not an open throated sound as an Italian tenor would be. But so to me, his greatness, it’s not in the voice itself, it’s the exquisite artistry with which he uses it. Notice here this wonderful phrasing, a light and shade that he brings to this quite simple song.

• Wonderful use of falsetto there, but blended with the chest voice, absolutely perfectly. So he’s born in 1891 in Linz. So just two years after another child was born nearby, Adolf Hitler. They brought very different things to the world. Obviously. This is the plaque and this is the house where he was born. And this is the plaque that commemorates him, on that house. And his mother was a soprano. I don’t think she was a particularly successful one. He was illegitimate. His father was an actor and later theatre manager. His mother was Catholic and his father was Jewish. He was brought up as a Catholic. And my guess is that he probably never thought of himself as a Jew until the Nazis told him he was one. Here he is as a child and there is his rather handsome father. And he had apparently had a very happy childhood with very loving relations with both his parents who weren’t actually together. And in fact, his father only officially acknowledged him and adopted him when he was 22 years old. But here he is later in life with his aged mother. So he studied music at the Frankfurt Conservatory, initially intending to be a conductor, but then his vocal talents were discovered. It took quite a lot of study to create his technique. He wasn’t one of those singers again, like Gigli, where it was just an extraordinary natural talent from the first, he really had to work at it. But he made his debut in Chemnitz in 1913 as Tamino in “The Magic Flute” and was immediately successful. And he was poached by the Dresden State Opera. So that was one of the world’s great opera houses. And his career really took off. And so from 1913 up until 1922, he is an opera singer. He’s not singing operetta or only very, very rarely. And here he is as a very young man before the First World War as Max in in “Der Freischutz”. And this, I love this photograph of him with Lotte Lehmann.

And they sang very often together in Vienna and sometimes in London too. There’s the two of them very young, again in “Der Freischutz”. And she remembers that he had an impish sense of humour and he liked teasing her by, he knew that she liked chocolate and he was hiding little bars of tempting chocolates and bars of chocolate around the stage during the performance. One operetta he did sing at this stage, “Gypsy Baron”. Wonderful records from that that he made. And as I said, he was very distinguished as a Mozart tenor, very famous as Don Otavio and Tamino. And operas that he of course never sang in England. And that most people would not associate with him like Don Jose in “Carmen.” Again, there are a couple of fine recordings of the big aria from “Carmen” and a rather heroic role, really almost a heldentenor role of Pedro in Eugen d'Albert’s “Tiefland” on the right hand side. “Tales of Hoffman”, which he sang a lot in Austria and Germany, singing it in German. This is my next excerpt I’m going to play to you 'cause I love this record so much. It’s so beautiful. He sings it in German as and he sings it in a very special way. If you know this piece, if you know “Tales of Hoffman” well, you won’t probably have heard it like this unless you’ve heard Tauber or other German tenors of this vintage. It’s the dynamics of this, the way, after the climax and he begins the repeat, he goes to a, he pulls the voice back into a pianissimo, a very hushed pianissimo, very, very beautiful. And as a couple of other German tenors of this period, Marcel Wittrisch, for instance, do the same, I wonder whether these dynamic markings are actually in the German editions of the “Tales of Hoffman.” Sometimes German editions of operas, even Italian operas, Puccini operas were quite different from the editions in other countries. So here is Tauber in “Tales of Hoffman.”

• Wonderful light and shade that he brings to it. Now rather astonishingly, he sang in both the Dresden and the Vienna premieres of Puccini’s “Turandot” in 1927. He was of course, the most famous tenor in the German-speaking world. So it was, I suppose a given that he would be offered the great honour of the premier of Puccini’s last opera. And again, he did actually record the two arias. And as far as I know, his version of “Nessun Dorma” is the only one where he sings what Puccini wrote. The great famous climax, you know, everybody knows it from Pavarotti’s version of “Vincero Vincero”, I Will Conquer. Of course the word stress on the word vincero is on the last syllable. It doesn’t make sense linguistically to sing Vince-e-ro, which was what Pavarotti and every other singer does. And in one way, you could say it’s very typical of Tauber, who’s always very concerned about the text. He’s very respectful of the text and he really engages with the text. But it may just be that of course he didn’t really have those kind of ringing top notes. Interestingly, he sang the Vienna premiere with the greatest German soprano of the period, Lotte Lehmann. She was also, I would say, it was the same thing, you know, she was so famous and so adored that she was offered the role, but it really wasn’t a role for her. And she only sang it a couple of times before giving it up. Now he, as I said, it’s not a heroic voice. It wasn’t a huge voice and it didn’t have ringing top notes. So he was not suited to Wagner. But as a very young man, he idolised a Wagnerian tenor called Heinrich Hensel. And he longed to sing Wagner. He desperately wanted to sing Wagner. Luckily he had very wise teachers who told him, no, that would be a very foolish thing to do. You’ll ruin your voice. And as far as I know, he never sang a Wagner role on stage, but he did record excerpts from both “The Meister Singer” and amazingly this excerpt from “Die Valkure”, Act one. So I’m going to just play you a little bit of that to show you what he would’ve sounded like if he had sung Wagner. Of course that is a rather lyrical passage. It’s hardly able to bring his customary and lyricism to it. As far as London concerned, or the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden, he was especially cherished as a Mozart tenor.

And he sang in “Don Giovanni”, “Die Zauberflote” in London in the 1930s. That “Don Giovanni” cast is very mouthwatering, isn’t it? Ezio Pinza, who’s the sexiest Don Giovanni ever, probably most wonderful interpreter of that role. Elizabeth Rutberg. It’s a marvellous cast. The lovely Italian soprano, Mafelda Favero, must have been adorable as Lina. And Beecham conducting. One of those performances was actually recorded live by H M V. And I hope that one day somebody is going to discover a copy of it and it will be published. That would be wonderful to have. We don’t have a complete Mozart opera with Tauber. We should have done, I feel quite cheated and actually I feel quite angry with Sir Thomas Beecham, who HMV planned to record “The Magic Flute” complete in 1937 was to have Tauber as Tamino, Kipnis, great Ukrainian Jewish bass, Alexander Kipnis, undoubtedly the greatest Germanic bass of his period, as Sarastro and Herbert Janssen as the speaker. But Beecham was lured by, he was bribed, what can I say? He was bribed by Goebbels. Goebbels said, well, I’ll lend you the Berlin Philharmonic for this recording, but you have to make the recording in Berlin. And Beecham, this was of course, for a British conductor to be allowed to conduct the Berlin Philharmonic was just, you know, such a coup that he happily jettisoned Tauber, Kipnis and Janssen. None of those three could go to Berlin to make the recording. Tauber and Kipnis being regarded as Jewish by the Nazis and Janssen being notoriously anti-Nazi. But so in fact, I have my own version that I’ve made of the Beecham complete recording where I have substituted singers. I’ve put in this aria I’m going to play you, the bildnis aria, the portrait aria. And I’ve also replaced the Nazi with the lovely Lotti Shirna in the pamina aria. And of course I’ve also put in, Strinz was another big Nazi, I’ve replaced him in his two arias by Kipnis. So if anybody desperately wants a doctored version of the Beecham, a kind of de-Nazified version of the Beecham “Magic Flute” get in touch with me and I’ll make you a copy. But, so here is the wonderful version of the portrait aria with Tauber.

• Here is Tauber at the height of his fame. I’m not quite sure how these three came together. I presume this photograph was, oh yes, it does say it was in London. So you’ve got three super stars. Gigli, the most admired Italian tenor of the period, the great Shalyapin and Tauber. I’ll tell you why I find it a little surprising is that they, I don’t know when they would’ve met, and they all recorded for, well for different, both Shalyapin and Gigli recorded for HMV and Tauber at this time was recording for the company of Odeon. Here is Tauber, living the good life on the beach and driving expensive cars. Of course, he was really earning a lot of money in the late twenties, early thirties. Here he is on holiday with his lover, the singer Mary Losseff, you can hear them together. She was in several recordings made in the late twenties. They never married. Then of course, the disaster, the disaster of the Nazi takeover. Tauber, as I said, who I’m sure never thought of himself as Jewish, immediately forced out. He actually, he was so, in a way innocent, that he went back to Germany and was beaten up in the street by Nazi thugs. So then he knew he had to go. And for some reason or other, the Nazis, my icon, I dunno if I can move it, so you can see it, the whole picture here, or perhaps you can move it. This is an image of the notorious Entartete Musik exhibition in 1938 that toured Germany. And you can see there’s an image of jazz making it very clear that jazz is unwanted, because it’s, as far as the Nazis are concerned, Jewish Negro music. And on the right hand side is an image of Tauber who was also held up as an example of bad Jewish influence, an excoriated by the Nazis. He had an Austrian passport. So that was good until 1938. And of course with the Anschluss, that was no good to him anymore. And he eventually got a British passport.

So I want to say a little bit about his films. His first film was a film of the “Land of Smiles,” “Das Land des Lachelns.” And this dates from 1930. So it was really, the operetta was kind of hot off the press. It had only been premiered the year before. But it was this huge, huge international success. And I believe that “Das Land des Lachelns” made in 1930 is the first full length sound film to have been made in Germany. And it still exists. And if you want to see it, you can see it on YouTube. And for me it’s very fascinating because these very first sound movies, they hadn’t yet developed techniques of dubbing. So what you see is an actual recorded live performance that’s fascinating from a number of points of view. Also, you may be shocked, I have to warn you, really, that it is grossly racist. The stereotyping of Orientals, every cliche, every negative cliche is in this movie. Personally I would say that shouldn’t stop you from watching the movie, in a way that’s interesting in itself. It tells you a lot about attitudes of the time. So after 1933, Tauber was largely based in England and he made a series of very popular movies, the most successful of which is the 1934 movie, again, you can easily find that, you can get a DVD or you can watch it or parts of it on YouTube, is “Blossom Time”, which is a highly fictionalised account of the life of Franz Schubert. And 1936, he made a film of “Pagliacci.” It is quite extraordinary. He managed to, apart from the soprano arias, he sort of appropriates every aria. He sings the baritone prologue. He sings Beppe’s aria as well as singing all his own music. It was while he was making this film that he met the woman who was to be his wife. She was the actress Diana Napier. And I remember, ooh, must be back in the 1970s going to the National Film Theatre to see a showing of this film. And I happened to sit behind this elderly woman who got very agitated every time Diana Napier came on the screen.

So I realised it must be her. And I leaned across and I said, “Are you Diana Napier?” And she was of course, very thrilled to be recognised and gave me her autograph. The other thing I remember from that occasion was that some person, at the National Film Theatre, you know, they always give out notes about the movie and said that Bertolt Brecht, who was also in exile, had fled from Nazi Germany. He was in England, and we know that he was employed by the studio and worked on this movie. And the man who wrote the notes said, well, you can see the fingerprints of Bertolt Brecht in the way that the character comes in front of the curtain and addresses the audience directly. Well, everybody who’s ever seen “Pagliacci” knows that that is not Bertolt Brecht, that was Leoncavello himself. So here is Tauber, nicely settled in England with a cottage with his wife, Diana Napier. And he tours the British Empire, goes to America quite a lot too. The photograph on the right is in a first World War memorial in Melbourne, in Australia. Then in fact, he’s in South Africa when war breaks out in 1939. And he had a choice. He was very popular in America. He could have had a very comfortable, safe, prosperous war in the United States if he’d wanted to. But he was very grateful to Britain and he felt it was his duty to come back. So he endured the Blitz and he endured the Second World War in Britain. And according to his wife, Diana Napier, there was not one single day of the Second World War when he didn’t sing somewhere in public, you’d think it must have taken the most, it really says much for the reliability of his vocal technique that he was able to do this. So he was frequently touring, often in the “Land of Smiles.” You can see Golders Green Hippodrome there. He performed “Land of Smiles” during the war. Odd when you think of it, that Lehar, who was the favourite composer of Goebbels and Hitler and was left behind in Austria throughout the Nazi period, that his music was so popular and so loved in wartime Britain.

And so not only was he constantly giving concerts and touring with the “Land of Smiles,” he wrote his own operetta “Old Chelsea” in 1942. Do I have time to pay a little bit of this? I think perhaps I’ll skip that. This is actually, this is a recording, I’m sure you can find it again on YouTube, that was made live at the time. But it was made for the entertainment of the troops in North Africa. So there was a very strict ban as far as the BBC was concerned and as far as the record companies during Second World War were concerned of the use of either Italian or German. You could record in Russian or French, but not in the languages of enemy nations. So Tauber was a very prolific artist, a recording artist, all the way through the Second World War. But everything had to be sung in English. Even if he was singing Schubert lieder, they were recorded in English at this time. And, you know, he did his best what I think he thought it was his duty, to raise the morale of the British by singing all sorts of popular material. And I’m going to play you a version I simply adore of Cole Porter’s “Night and Day.” Of course it was quite a recent song. It was written, I suppose, about four or five years earlier for the film, “The Gay Divorce.” And it was written for Fred Astaire. And just as Lehar that was writing for the specific vocal talents of Tauber, Cole Porter was writing for the specific vocal talents of Fred Astaire. Well, Fred Astaire had a very narrow vocal range. So the song really pretty well revolves around one note. And it doesn’t go much higher than that or much lower than that. Fred’s version is inimitable. It’s the best version ever. He’s such a great artist.

But Fred Astaire’s whole persona was one of nonchalant elegance. The words, although if you really look at them, they’re very passionate words about being totally obsessed, erotically obsessed by somebody. But he has this wonderful kind of nonchalant throwaway manner. Well, Tauber, I think one of the great things about Tauber, as I said is that he becomes so engaged. He really looks at the text of everything he sings and he really means it. He sounds as though he means it. So instead of sounding quite nonchalant about, you know, being obsessed by this person, when he sees the words, I mean he was a great lover of course. So when he sees the words “I want to make love to you,” he sings it as though he “I want to make love to you night and day.” He sings very, very passionately.

♪ Night and day ♪ ♪ You are the one ♪ ♪ Only you beneath the moon ♪ ♪ And under the sun ♪ ♪ Whether near to me or far ♪ ♪ It’s no matter, darling where you are ♪ ♪ I think of you night and day ♪ ♪ Day and night, why is it so ♪ ♪ That this longing for you ♪ ♪ Follows wherever I go ♪ ♪ In the roaring traffic’s boom ♪ ♪ In the silence of my lonely room ♪ ♪ I think of you night and day ♪ ♪ Night and day, under the hide of me ♪ ♪ There’s an, ooh, such a hungry yearning ♪ ♪ Burning inside of me ♪ ♪ And this torment won’t be through ♪ ♪ Till you let me spend my life making love to you ♪ ♪ Day and night, night and day ♪

• I’d like to play you another even more recent American hit “Oh what a beautiful morning” from “Oklahoma,” that was premiered in New York, 1943. So again, it was really hot off the press, I think you can say. Rodgers and Hammerstein’s first collaboration. And so, well again, Tauber makes something totally different of it. 'Cause the New York production was sung by the great Broadway baritone Alfred Drake, sort of a kind of masculine, manly way of singing. Tauber singing about a beautiful morning, he sounds like he’s wandering across the American prairies in a tuxedo and with his monocle, he’s a very elegant cowboy. And he also manages to, it sounds quite Viennese, he manages to give it a kind of waltz-like lilt.

♪ There’s a bright, golden haze on the meadow ♪ ♪ There’s a bright, golden haze on the meadow ♪ ♪ The corn is as high as an elephant’s eye ♪ ♪ And it looks like it’s climbing clear up to the sky ♪ ♪ Oh, what a beautiful morning ♪ ♪ Oh, what a beautiful day ♪ ♪ I’ve got a beautiful feeling ♪ ♪ Everything’s going my way ♪

• At the end of the war he was almost like Vera Lynn. He was a very, very much loved person by the British public. And he had his own radio programme, a weekly programme, the “Richard Tauber Hour” which was immensely popular. He was the housewives favourite. So here is the opening, this is the BBC Langham Place recording studio where I think this is likely to have been recorded. And here is the opening of the “Richard Tauber Hour” in 1947.

• [Announcer] Presenting the Richard Tauber programme. We welcome back the celebrated tenor in the first of a new series of programmes and the orchestra directed by George Melachrino.

• In 1946, he was able to travel back to Europe and he went to Switzerland and he was going, he happened to be in Zurich when Franz Lehar was there. So they met up again, this is a photograph taken on that occasion and it was a very joyous reunion for the two of them. And they spontaneously gave a concert together for the Zurich Radio. And it ended with “You are my Heart’s Delight” sung in four different languages. It’s sung in English, French, German, and Italian. And I think like many, we have such a different view of all of this now, but I think for many Jewish refugees who survived the war and perhaps they didn’t really know of the full horror of the Holocaust, what they wanted was to move on and they wanted reconciliation. And I take this four language version of “You are my Heart’s Delight” to to be an expression of that feeling.

♪ You are my heart’s delight ♪ ♪ And where you are, I long to be ♪ ♪ You make my darkness bright ♪ ♪ When like a star you shine on me ♪ ♪ Shine, then, my whole life through ♪ ♪ Your life divine bids me hope anew ♪ ♪ That dreams of mine may at last come true ♪ ♪ And I shall hear you whisper, I love you ♪

• We got the English, German and Italian verses there. And that was on the 3rd of June, 1946 in Zurich when Tauber and Lehar performed together for the very last time. He still sounds pretty great and one would never know that he was actually already mortally ill. I mean he didn’t know it himself. I think he never knew. But in September, 1947, the Vienna State Opera came to London for a series of performances. Again, I think it was intended as a gesture of reconciliation. And Tauber begged to be allowed to sing once again with the company where he had given many of his greatest performances in the 1920s and 30s. And the tenor, Julius Patzak, who was supposed to sing Don Ottavio graciously agreed to give up one performance and Tauber stepped in to sing Don Ottavio. So this is live that I’m going to play you. That performance was broadcast from Covent Garden.

And we hear Tauber in one of Ottavio’s arias. This is the very, very last time that Tauber sang in public. He’d had lots of very worrying symptoms and he was due to go into hospital and in fact he gave this one performance and he went into hospital the very next day. He was operated on, they opened him up and they found astonishingly, well he had lung cancer and that one lung was completely atrophied and out of order. So it is pretty miraculous and extraordinary that he was able to sing like this with just one functional lung. So he died a matter of weeks after that performance and he’s buried in Old Brompton cemetery which is very close to where I used to work for Christie’s South Can. So I used to go on May the 16th, which is his birthday to the cemetery and it was always very touching, you found, I don’t know if it still happens, probably everybody who heard Tauber live, pretty well everybody, must be dead by now. Not very many people left. His grave would be covered with love letters and bunches of flowers and little tributes to the great Richard Tauber. So I’m going to open up now.

Q&A and Comments:

Bernard Victor, your mother, like everybody’s mother, adored Tauber and here is somebody who did, was dragged a along to see him and you still love operetta. I’m glad to hear that.

So here is somebody who actually heard him. I’d love to hear your memories in more detail. Lehar, yes, Shelly, Lehar had a Jewish wife and of course and Strauss had Jewish grandchildren. You are quite correct in both things. And it was very touch and go for Lehar’s wife. The Gestapo came on two occasions to arrest her and it was only because Goebbels had given Lehar his personal telephone number that he was able to save his own wife.

And this is Babette Lichtenstein. My father was conductor of the Fritz Hirsch operetta in the Hague and conducted the premier of in London with Tauber singing. How wonderful. That is really historic and amazing. And he knew Tauber already in Germany. Maria, it’s probably just my pronunciation. Although it’s interesting, I was talking to some German ladies in Luca last week and there are parts of Germany where the dialect is where you say she rather than ghe. Ghe is an effort for me. But they were from Frankfurt and obviously that is the local dialect is to pronounce she rather than ghe.

Another person. Everybody’s mother loved. Actually, I don’t think my mother did particularly love Tauber. My grandmother did. Hans Liechtenstein. Tauber took him to Lehar’s home and introduced him. Kapell-shin. That’s very charming. Kapell-shin. I must remembered that. My little capell meister that is Kapell-shin. If Tauber were, well, it’s theoretically possible.

It’s very interesting, Shelly, you know, there’s every possibility that they could have gone to the same school, 'cause there is that famous photograph, school photograph isn’t there with Wittgenstein and Hitler in the same class.

Thank you Rita. Your father, Dr. Hans Point, used to give concerts with friends throughout North London Jewish refugee community. He used to visit an elderly gentleman in a care residence in Finchley Road who been one of Lehar’s Librettists. That’s very interesting. I wonder who that was.

Peter. Hi, Peter. Tauber was a hero of your parents. I recall my first visit to a London theatre. The lyricful performance of “Land of Smiles” must have been about 1942. So here’s another person, Peter. Would’ve never have guessed you were old enough to have heard Tauber sing live. It is a very recognisable timbre. Well, I see what you mean. I mean actually the timbre is totally different from Tito Skipa, very different timbre, but I think they do have things in common. They’re both of them such exquisite artists and it’s the artistry rather than the voice that wins you over. And both of them have wonderful diction and both of them are extremely attentive to the text. So I see many parallels between them, even though they don’t sound like one another to my ears. Oh, a recording of singing from the Friday night service, I didn’t even know that existed. Another memory from David Boynes. My grandparents had a hotel in Bayswater near the park. They used to hear Tauber practising when in London. Rumour had it that he had a girlfriend. I think that’s very likely. I saw an interview with Diana Napier and I think they had a very open marriage. I think there was quite a lot going on in both there.

Q: How would I compare him to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau?

A: I really wouldn’t. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau is not a favourite singer of mine. And I better not elaborate on that for fear of offending a number of people who love him.

Yes, Beecham could be extremely crass. He was not, I think a very decent human being. Well, he was a wonderful conductor. There is actually a surprisingly good record of Yunis Kaufman doing the Tauber repertoire. There’s a whole CD of him doing the Tauber lieder and doing them remarkably well. I think he really understands the Tauber idiom. He sang in Blackpool. You heard him there, but can’t remember the date. Would’ve been just after the war. He certainly travelled the length and breadth.

And thank you Rita, for a link to a video about Tauber. Yes, he was, Tauber was on tour in South Africa. He was giving concerts at the outbreak of war.

This is Elli Strauss, my mother had a great opera voice and sang that Oklahoma song the same way. Yes, I mean it’s definitely middle Europa rather than Midwest, isn’t it? The way that Tauber sings it. Thank you Rita. And thank you for your nice comments. Well, just send an email with your address, your postal address to Lauren. She’ll pass it to me and I’ll send you a cd.

And this is Leo saying that people still leave flowers on Tauber’s grave. I’m very glad to hear this. And I agree Tauber, I’m never bored with him. Everything he does is fresh, everything is new. He makes you hear things with fresh ears.

And thank you Ellie, and onto a very different iconic musician on Sunday with Irving Berlin.

Thank you everybody. Bye-bye.