The almighty Canadian tenor — the supreme Grimes, the supreme Florestan and Énée, among the greatest of Otellos and Tristans — has died at the age of eighty-eight. He had a voice of sounding steel, but he was never content simply to flatten the ears of his audiences; he was an energetic, detailed actor who made a close study of his roles. His first five words in Grimes, sung monotone (“I swear by Almighty God"), establish the character in a single stroke: the otherness, the loneliness, the smoldering hurt. If Vickers sometimes went over the top, as a generally admiring Andrew Porter declared, it was never merely for effect; the excess came from a surplus of conviction. The desperate aliveness of Vickers's recordings, the sense of a man singing at knife's edge, means that they will never sound dated, even as they continue to be debated. How I wish I could have heard him live; I came along a little too late.
More: Tony Tommasini, William Braun, James Jorden (with audio of a great Tristan from Chicago), Frank Granville Barker and Alan Blyth, Richard Osborne, Bruno Serrou, Jens Malte Fischer, Manuel Brug, Lisa Hirsch, Dallas Morning News (recounting the famous "Shut up with your damn coughing" incident of 1975).
Previously: Murder Will Out.