Song O’ My Heart

John McCormack as Film Star, Sort of

By Will Crutchfield

• New York Times, Aug. 4, 1991

John McCormack, who lived from 1884 to 1945, is not quite the earliest great singer for whom we have a memento on film. Fyodor Chaliapin (1873-1938) made a movie late in life, and I believe there is footage of Ernestine Schumann-Heink (1861-1936) singing in great old age. But “Song o’ My Heart,” shot in 1929 and released the following year, must be the first sound film to record a great singer in his element, with extensive and representative musical selections.

As a film (written by Tom Barry and directed by Frank Borzage), it is very slight. McCormack plays an Irish tenor named Sean (if there is a patronymic, I missed it) who has long since given up a promising career and is persuaded to return to it, pausing first to take under his wing the orphaned children of an old flame who had jilted him years ago. The important point is that he also sings 14 songs, six of them in an (almost) uninterrupted recital sequence during Sean’s triumphant return to New York.

Now the film has been reissued on video (Video Artists International 69067). Of course, it is a must for everyone interested in McCormack or good singing.

If it seems incredible that the producers of a commercial film should see fit to include such a long stretch of mere singing, we should recall that McCormack’s recitals were a highly commercial proposition themselves; at the height of his popularity he would sing as many as 12 per season in New York (where his preferred forum was the Hippodrome, with a capacity half again as large as that of the Metropolitan Opera today), 10 in Boston, 4 in Chicago, 2 in San Francisco and so on down to Hutchinson, Kan., and Holdredge, Neb. He always sold out, and he made an enormous fortune; the producers of “Song o’ My Heart” thought it worthwhile to pay $500,000 for his participation.

The film was originally released in two different versions: one a “talkie” throughout, one silent except for the musical portions. Video Artists has combined the two, since the part-silent version had time for two songs that were omitted from the version with dialogue. The latter was long thought to have been lost forever, but a copy was discovered in 1970 by Mr. and Mrs. Donald J. Quinn of Kansas City, Mo.; it was restored and shown at the Museum of Modern Art the following year and – except for the recital sequence, taken from the part-silent version – is the source of the present release.

The singing is not quite prime McCormack. For whatever reasons (a grave illness in 1922, the effects of tobacco, the wear and tear of all those gruelling tours or possibly some inherent flaw in voice or method), the tenor’s singing in the later 1920s lost something in sheer beauty and finesse. One can hear in these songs the occasional nagging quality of the bright vowels and some constriction in full-voiced high notes. But a singer of McCormack’s accomplishments can lose a lot and still stand head and shoulders above the ordinary. And his expressive qualities, which were also great, suffered no diminution; if anything, they grew steadily throughout his life.

And of course, there is still a lot of voice. The sound of a first-class lyric tenor rising into the upper middle range – sunny, golden, liquid, free – is a continual joy here. The soft top notes are marvellous; the recital ends with the last of McCormack’s seven recordings of “I Hear You Calling Me,” and he can still make those astonishing razor-sharp attacks on the pianissimo high A.

There are lessons to learn from every song. One of them is about natural freedom of rhythm. Secure in the movement of the music and the words, McCormack holds back or moves on exactly as he needs; nothing is governed by bar lines or note values. Technique plays a part here: if he needs only a 20th of a second to express a certain syllable, for that 20th of a second the voice will be there, smack in the centre of the pitch, the tone quality true and resonant, with no undue emphasis and no awkwardness over getting to the note, getting it started or reaching the next one. It is wonderful to see in the film how McCormack’s body language – without calling attention to itself – went along with those passionate accelerations we hear on the records.

This kind of freedom would be considered intolerable outside pop music today, and few classical singers would even feel natural attempting it, accustomed as they are to conductors and sometimes even pianists who do not know how to accompany.

Another object lesson lies in the endings, where McCormack will often make a diminuendo, on one note or spread over several, drawing the volume down in the finest gradations without breathiness or loss of support or colour. The same control informs any number of subtly, spontaneously shaped phrases within each song. A good model for anyone to emulate; it is scarcely an overstatement to say that it is this capacity that enables a voice to make music (instead of just making sound and declamation), yet one can spend many nights at the opera these days without encountering a singer who even seems to aspire to such a level.

There remains the question of McCormack’s taste. Record collectors have always lamented that out of the tenor’s hundreds and hundreds of disks, so few should have been devoted to the music we would most like to hear him sing. (He is probably the best Mozart tenor on records, but he recorded only one Mozart aria, and so on.) There has always been the counterargument that a lot of his pop ephemera and folk-Irishry is delightful in its own way, and that, as Ernest Newman memorably put it, “he never stooped to small and modest things; he invariably raised them and with them the most unsophisticated listener, to his own high level.”

All true; still, I wish there were a little Handel or Schubert in “Song o’ My Heart.” The most “classical” fare is an aria from Michael William Balfe’s “Bohemian Girl” (second verse only), an old German folk song, Martini’s “Plaisir d’amour” and Stefano Donaudy’s “Luoghi sereni e cari.” Shouldn’t complain, though: the Balfe is splendid; “Plaisir” has a beautiful trill, elegant turns, classical simplicity; the Donaudy is a demonstration of rubato worthy of Paderewski, Casals or Callas.

Among the rest, there are “Kitty, My Love, Will You Marry Me,” a spinning pinwheel of a patter song that McCormack did not otherwise record; “The Rose of Tralee” and “I Feel You Near Me,” most eloquently shaded; an unforced patriotic thrill in “Ireland, Mother Ireland,” and moments to commend even in “Just for Today,” “Little Boy Blue,” “A Pair of Blue Eyes” and “A Fairy Tale by the Fire.” And if there aren’t any coloratura arias, there are some fluent scales as McCormack warms up backstage for the recital. The only complaints I am left with are that cropping for the small screen produces a few awkward moments, and the sound is not as clear as on Pearl Records’ release of the songs from the soundtrack (as part of the six-LP set “The Gentle Minstrel,” GEMM 183/8; snap it up if you can find it).

Meanwhile, as a pleasant reminder that not all the arts are in decline, there’s the rest of the film. It’s all meant in good spirit, but I doubt that one could find working actors today who would turn in such awkward, self-conscious and inept work as Alice Joyce, John Garrick, the very young Maureen O’Sullivan and the others do here. McCormack considered himself a bad actor, and some opera critics agreed, but he is by a comfortable margin the best actor in “Song o’ My Heart.” His speaking voice is cheerful and natural, and his laugh is a happy man’s laugh.

The other participant who scores a success, probably by not trying to act at all, is Edwin Schneider, McCormack’s real-life accompanist. He handles his dialogue competently, and the visual impact of the song sequences is immeasurably enhanced by his presence: we see the real thing happening.

Operatic history buffs will note with pleasure the cameo appearance of Andres de Segurola, a veteran of some 478 Metropolitan Opera performances, as an old singer named Guido. He and McCormack hold a brief conversation in Italian (!), and de Segurola disappears with a conspiratorial look into the office of the concert manager. Typically, nothing further is made of the episode. Too bad they didn’t give him a song.