Before Elvis, before Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby, there was John Count McCormack. Born in 1884 in Athlone, the heart of Ireland, John would go on to capture the hearts and minds of millions throughout the world. He was the pop idol of his time, selling millions of records to an insatiable public.
John Francis McCormack was the fourth of eleven children of a Scottish couple, Andrew and Hannah McCormack, workers at the local mill. Hannah could only sign the certificate with an ‘X’ at the time of her marriage. McCormack, however, made the best of the educational opportunities that came his way. From the Marist Brothers in Athlone, he won a scholarship to, and further scholarships at, Summerhill College in Co. Sligo, from where his paternal grandfather had emigrated to Scotland. On leaving school he joined the Palestrina Choir of the Pro-
Cathedral in Dublin whose choirmaster, Vincent O’Brien, entered him for the Feis Ceoil of 1903. At nineteen McCormack was the youngest competitor but he won the gold medal. Contrary to what is sometimes thought, James Joyce did not compete against McCormack but entered the Feis the following year to take the bronze medal. His singing ambitions waned soon after, but he avidly followed McCormack’s career. McCormack’s name appears in Ulysses and in Finnegan’s Wake he appears as the model for the character Shaun the Post.
In 1904 McCormack headed off to St Louis to appear briefly at the Irish Village at the World Fair; and in the same year, at the tender age of twenty, he made his recording debut in London, exploiting the slaphappy days of the infant recording industry by recording, and indeed repeating much of his repertoire, for several rival recording companies. Sister companies, the Gramophone & Typewriter Co (later HMV) and Zonophone overcame the difficulty of duplication by issuing Zonophone recordings of McCormack under the pseudonym John O’Reilly, a common enough ploy at the time.
McCormack was to continue to make recordings, both in England and in the States, for the next thirty-eight years, producing one of the most extensive discographies of the century – more than eight hundred records in all. To have a ‘McCormack Red Seal record was as usual in the average American home, during the second and third decades of the century,’ wrote the American critic Max de Schauensee, ‘as father’s slippers by the fire or the family ice-cream freezer.’ The dates are significant, for McCormack’s greatest celebrity occurred between the decline of opera as a contemporary art form, marked approximately by the First World War, and the rise of the crooner, Crosby and Sinatra among them, and American
popular music in the thirties.
In 1905 McCormack headed for Milan for training with Vincenzo Sabatini, with whom he had less than a year of formal training. On January 13, 1906, at the Theatro Chiabrera, Savona, he made his opera debut in the title role of Mascagni’s L’Amico Fritz, his own estimation acquitting himself well. He had high hopes for what he might achieve in Italy. On a postcard of the Theatro all Scala he wrote back to his friend, the baritone J.C. Doyle: ‘I hope to sing here before I die’. But auditions at La Scala came to nothing, and further minor engagements seemed to offer little encouragement.
He headed again to London and in a few short months, he had established himself on the concert circuit in London and the provinces and made a hit with Samuel Liddle’s new song ‘A Farewell’ at the Queen’s Hall. All the while he had his eye on Covent Garden and wrote with remarkable confidence to J.C. Doyle: ‘I did the air of La Bohème for them, then they told me that it would depend entirely on my success in Faust whether they would give me a three-year contract for the big summer season playing second to our mutual ideal Caruso.’ He was then all of twenty-two but not far wide of the mark. On October 15, 1907 in the role of Turridu in Cavalleria Rusticana McCormack made his Covent Garden debut, at twenty-three the youngest tenor ever to sing a leading role there. A few weeks later he sang Don Ottavio in Mozart’s Don Giovanni and was, said The Times, ‘a great success’ noting his ‘vocal finish.’ This was to be the first of eight consecutive years as a primo tenore at Covent Garden, during which the tenor held his own against some of the greatest tenors of the time, including the great Caruso.
In 1909 McCormack crossed the Atlantic again, to sing this time at Oscar Hammerstein’s Manhattan Opera House. New York took the handsome Irishman to its heart and McCormack took New York’s to his. ‘The broth of a boy’ as the New York Herald described him on his debut opposite Luisa Tetrazzini, was an immediate hit. The following year, 1910, he was singing with Melba at the mighty Metropolitan Opera House and in 1911, toured Australia as her leading tenor in the Melba-Williamson Opera Company.
McCormack had quickly established himself as a world-class operatic tenor on three continents (he might have sung in Russia and South America too but for contractual obligations). But there were those who felt his true métier lay elsewhere, among them the American impresario Charles L. Wagner who organized a short concert tour for McCormack in the States in 1912. It proved so successful that the experiment was immediately repeated and thereafter opera appearances became sporadic while the tenor established himself, with extraordinary rapidity, on the concert circuit.
By the middle war years, McCormack could fill any auditorium in the States, north or south, to capacity and indeed over capacity. Standing room and seats on stage became the norm. McCormack had become a phenomenon of his times. In New York, he would sing up to twelve times in a single season – without repeating a single item, except encores. In Boston, he could sing up to four times in a single week and did so
for several years running. No singer today would undertake his workload: for years he would cram eighty and more concerts into a six-month season; often singing every other day, with relentless travel schedules by rail and car between.
His final operatic appearances were in Monte Carlo in 1923, when, in addition to singing in Madama Butterfly, Il Barbiere di Siviglia and a single performance of Martha, he created the role of Gritzko in the world premiere on March 17 of Mussorgsky’s La Foire de Sorochintzi: ‘A helluva day for an Irishman to create the art of a Russian peasant,’ he wrote back to Wagner. The critic, André Corneau, thought so too: ‘The romance in Act I “Pourquoi mon triste coeur”, he sang divinely with a sigh of exquisite melancholy, tinged with tenderness, quivering with a nostalgic Slavonic charm.’ Sadly McCormack recorded nothing from La Foire de Sorochintzi nor from Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte in which he had appeared in Monte Carlo with enormous success in 1921.
Corneau’s words go far to explain why McCormack became so greatly loved, so much of an icon to Irish emigrants with their troubled history: the exquisite melancholy tinged with tenderness, in a voice quintessentially Irish, in song and ballad he expressed the truth that tears lie at the heart of things. If it was a truth especially felt by the Irish abroad, McCormack’s appeal was universal and by no means confined to an Irish fan base, far from it. He sang in Japan and China in 1926, and toured South Africa in 1934 with enormous success.
As a point of interest during the four concerts he gave at the Imperial Theatre, Tokyo, he sang arias by Leonardo Vinci’s (c.1690-1732) Artaserse and Jacopo Peri’s (1561-1633) Euridice, as well as arias by Handel from Alceste and Giustino, none of which found its way onto a record. His repertoire of seventeenth and eighteenth-century music, and indeed nineteenth-century art song, was far greater than his discography would suggest. His popularity in singing Irish and Irish-style ballads was such that his other achievements are often overlooked. He included, and finished an evening with ballads, but did not confine his concerts to them.
John playing one of his many pianos that were a mandatory feature in his numerous homes
A tour of Middle Europe in 1923 produced a series of triumphs. With the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Bruno Walter, McCormack sang the aria from Beethoven’s Christus am Ölberge. ‘I had a great ovation at the close of it,’ he wrote to his friend Archbishop Curley. He followed this appearance with a solo recital in Berlin largely comprised of Schubert and Wolf and again triumphed. Denis McSweeney, the tenor’s manager on the tour, wrote to Lily McCormack: ‘We have witnessed great demonstrations at the Hippodrome [New York], Symphony Hall in Boston, Sydney and elsewhere, but I can truthfully say the ovations in both Berlin and Prague were greater.’ In Paris, in a concert at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, he sang French songs
that included works by Fauré; Paladilhe and George Hué, as well as César Franck and Padre Martini. In 1924 he again toured Britain to acclaim.
The previous year he had been made a Freeman of Dublin. He received an honorary doctorate of music from the National University of Ireland in 1927. In 1928 for services to charity, he was raised to the Papal Peerage and in 1932, resplendent in his papal uniform, it was as John Count McCormack that he sang Cesar Franck’s ‘Panis Angelicus’ at the Pontifical High Mass which closed the Eucharistic Congress, to an audience in Phoenix Park estimated at one million.
McCormack made one feature film: Song O’ My Heart (1929) directed by Frank Borzage, notable for its unbroken concert sequence. The nineteen-year-old Maureen O’Sullivan made her film debut in Song O’ My Heart. But the forty-six-year-old McCormack, still handsome if a trifle overweight, was adamant that he would not play the screen lover, nor did he. In a storyline largely made up as the film went along, Maureen O’Sullivan played the role of Eileen, one of the children of the hero’s childhood sweetheart Mary O’Brien. The film had charm, but probably on account of its lack of love interest failed to make money. McCormack was paid $500,000 for six weeks work.
John in a scene from Fox Pictures’
Song O’ My Heart
He sang in America until 1937 and made a final tour of Britain and Ireland culminating in farewells at the Theatre Royal Dublin on October 8 and at the Royal Albert Hall on November 27 1938. He came out of retirement to sing for the Red Cross in Britain during the Second World War and continued to make records until 1942 when the development of emphysema made further singing impossible. He retired to the Shelbourne Hotel, Dublin, then to ‘Glena’ in Booterstown, Co. Dublin. He died there on September 16, 1945. He was sixty-one. In accordance with his wishes, he was buried in his Papal uniform, in Dean’s Grange Cemetery.
While it was as an opera singer that McCormack first made an international career for himself, he was no actor. When clothed in an opera role he had a sometimes awkward and inhibited deportment on stage, which he never overcame. By contrast on the concert platform by himself, as himself, McCormack was the very soul of warmth and genial charm, who could hold an audience in the palm of his hand as few other singers could. This is how one eyewitness remembered him: ‘He just went and leaned up against the piano and, if he’d been in his own parlor at home, he couldn’t have been more simple. It seemed as though we were all one big family, and he was just talking to us, quietly, with his head on one side, and his eyes closed, telling us fairy stories as they came into his mind, making us smile and sigh by turns, weaving spells about us, and sometimes wringing our hearts by the pathos of his tones.’
Much has been made of the importance of McCormack’s diction, which was indeed exemplary, but he had a feel for words that went far beyond merely good diction. You can hardly think of a McCormack song without also thinking of the words of it: ‘though years have stretched their weary lengths between, I hear you calling me…’ He could converse on a musical line, combining effortlessly the rhythms of speech with the implicit rhythms of music, resolving the inherent conflict between the two as if there was no conflict to resolve. His ability to communicate with an audience brought with it a rare sense of intimacy. More than one commentator has remarked on the illusion that the tenor was singing to them personally, no matter how large the auditorium. The same intimacy is apparent on record: McCormack transcends the limitations of sound recording and reaches out to his unseen audience in a heartfelt and personal way.
His discography of some eight hundred discs stands testimony to his remarkable versatility and musicianship. During his prime years, he possessed a voice of great purity from top to bottom, combined with a consummate vocal technique. He was among the least self-indulgent of singers, whose arching legato line, exquisite sense of rubato and perfectly judged portamenti and pianissimi were not employed to draw attention to himself, but rather served to point up and to synthesise the words and music. He was one of the most compelling vocalists of the twentieth century.
Gordon T. Ledbetter, Author of The Great Irish Tenor
Mayor’s Committee on National Defence during a cruise around New York Harbor for recovering marines and sailors of WW1.
John McCormack – His Own Life Story
If you’d like to read about John McCormack’s life from the perspective of the man himself then you can read his autobiography which was published in 1918. Pierre V R Key was assigned the job of putting shape to the singer’s musings and reflections.
If you have any questions, let us know.
John McCormack Society 