100Singers's video: 100 Singers - STEFAN ZUCKER

Stefan Zucker (*1949) Donizetti: LA FILLE DU RÉGIMENT "Pour mon âme" Recorded live 1979 at Abraham Goodman House N.Y. My personal opinion: Halloween is the right time to have a look on horror, supernatural creatures and spooky singers in opera: In Mozart's DON GIOVANNI, a stone statue comes to life. The elegant Lord Ruthven in Heinrich Marschner's DER VAMPYR is in fact a bloodsucking undead. Wagner's scary FLYING DUTCHMAN is damned to sail the seven seas in all eternity. Verdi's MACBETH begins with the prophecies of eerie witches; later the ruthless King of Scotland has an uninvited guest: The dead Banco whom he murdered. In Gounod's FAUST, the devil himself appears as a gentleman - with dubious intentions ... Dr. Miracle in Offenbach's LES CONTES D'HOFFMANN uses black magic to kill the young innocent Antonia with song and music. The betrayed and deceased Anna returns in Puccini's first opera LE VILLI as a zombie to take cruel revenge on her unfaithful fiancé Roberto. Also the old Countess in PIQUE DAME by Tchaikovsky comes out of the crypt to punish Hermann. It's all half bad, because the witch in Humperdinck's HANSEL UND GRETEL is a vile cannibal - and her favorite food are children! In Stravinsky's L'HISTORIE DU SOLDAT, the devil offers a devious business to a soldier, while the Duke in Bartok's only opera BLUEBEARD'S CASTLE has preserved the dead bodies of his former wives. And just like Strauss' SALOME, also the Princess TURANDOT in Puccini's last opera has a weakness for severed heads ... Sometimes, opera can be real shocking, can't it? But what about the promised spooky singers now? For example there are the recordings of the last castrato Alessandro Moreschi (1858-1922) that make some listeners shudder. Consider the mysterious appearance of tenor Joseph M. White (1891-1959), who wore a silver mask and whose identity was revealed only after years. The hair-rising soprano Florence Foster Jenkins (1868-1944) was firmely convinced of her talent, while male soprano Michael Aspinall (*1939) has oriented his performances in drag as a parody of 19th century prima donnas. Other quirky specimens are Lionel Stoffel (*1991), whose weird soprano-voice causes more amazement than emotion, and Kazakh singer Dimash Qudaibergen (*1994) with a vocal range of 6 octaves. But surely the most bizarre of them all was the American Stefan Zucker (*1949), who was listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the 'world's highest tenor' for having hit and sustained an A above high C for 4 seconds during a 1972 concert at Town Hall in New York City. Unlike Aspinall (a highly educated music historian), Zucker was not a parodist, much more he was a self-described "opera-fanatic" (Wikipedia), editor of a same name magazine and a singer who claimed that he and his mother Rosina Wolf are the last in a line of singers using the method of singing style taught by Giovanni Battista Rubini (1795-1854). After studying for a year with Tito Schipa (1888-1965), the legendary tenor wrote a recommendation: "I find that Mr. Zucker is worthy to receive all possible encouragement. He represents me and the true school of beautiful singing." Obviously Schipa's mind was befogged, he was drunk or made a bad joke ... What Zucker offered the audience can only be taken as faux pas, no matter how seriously he took himself. His unpleasant voice was bleating, and his high notes remind us of "scratching of fingernails on a blackboard (as Donal Henahan put it in "The New York Times"). Under contract to RCA, Zucker recorded the album "The World Highest Tenor" in which he successfully destroyed well-know pieces like "Ah, mes amis" from Donizetti's LA FILLE DU REGIMENT and "Son geloso" from Bellini's LA SONNAMBULA. The record company exposed him as "The Singing Sensation Of The Century", while "Newsday" called him "a freak" and "The San Francisco Chronicle" noted that "his sound is like the croaking of a hoarse crane ..." We hear Zucker and may wonder if it was all meant seriously - or did he try to tell us something whose meaning does not reveals itself immediately? In his own words he wanted to draw attention to the old 19th century school of singing, but his recordings make us doubt the sincerity of this statement. Fact is, the terrible way Zucker sang, no one has knowingly sung before in the history of opera. This beyond all measure exceptional singer (for sure not an unintelligent man), can be viewed with one eye crying and one eye laughing. "Suffer, laugh or feel enlightened, just as you want. With a phenomenon such as Zucker, every listener must be his own critic ..." ("The News World"). Anyway, I hope this post was spooky enough for Halloween ...