A film celebrating the great tenor John McCormack seeks to restore him to his rightful place, writes Arminta Wallace
'An Irishman singing an Italian opera in New York? I don't think so." Such was the reaction of one Oscar Hammerstein of the Manhattan Opera House, when one of the top sopranos of the early 20th century suggested a fresh-faced Irish lad for a part in a forthcoming production. Hammerstein couldn't have been more wrong. Within 20 years the Irishman had become a phenomenon. He was a regular on the opera stage in London and New York, packed huge stadiums to capacity and sold vast quantities of records; he even, thanks to a beguiling comedy double act with Bing Crosby, became a radio celebrity.
For most Irish people under the age of 25, it probably comes as something of a shock to discover that we were exporting musical megastars long before U2 or Sinéad O'Connor or even Thin Lizzy. Most of them probably haven't even heard of John McCormack, who made his operatic debut in the Italian city of Savona 100 years ago this year, but whose name has recently slipped below the parapet. "The trouble is that he's remembered in Ireland mostly for his recordings of ballads, which aren't really rated nowadays," says the film-maker Martin Dwan, who has made a documentary about McCormack's life and work, which is shortly to be issued - along with 250 minutes of music on four CDs and a 100-page book - as a box set.
"But there's much more to McCormack than that. He really was one of the biggest stars Ireland has ever produced." Dwan and his father Peter, a Dublin businessman, have been instrumental in organising a gala tribute concert at the National Concert Hall tonight, when the tenor Anthony Kearns will be joined on stage by the soprano Elizabeth Woods, the baritone Giuseppe Deligia and a 40-piece orchestra conducted by Robert Houlihan. There will also be a screening of two rare performances by McCormack himself.
The Icon of an Age concert aims to raise enough money to fund a commemorative statue of McCormack in Dublin. "He had a magical voice and he's part of our musical heritage," says Peter Dwan, who recently purchased a boxful of McCormack's letters at auction because he didn't want them to leave the country. "I think the American tenor Robert White expressed it perfectly on the documentary when he said that, in his day, McCormack was like Pavarotti, Madonna and Johnny Carson rolled into one. No other Irish tenor will ever be another McCormack. He was a one-off."
Dwan has also acquired sponsorship to the tune of €100,000 for a McCormack bursary. "The company IAWS has agreed to provide €10,000 a year for 10 years," he says, "and musicians of all kinds - not just singers - will be eligible to apply." McCormack would doubtless have approved. He adored children; on the DVD, his granddaughter describes how he once came across a baby crying in its pram on a New York pavement. He promptly went into the nearest shop and bought a rattle - to the consternation of the infant's mother, who returned to find "this enormous creature" ooh-ing and aah-ing into her baby carriage.
BUT AS THE documentary makes clear, McCormack was no saint. He could be argumentative and aggressive; "difficult" is how his grandson puts it. He could also be the epitome of charm. "The tone of his letters really made an impression on me," says the tenor Anthony Kearns, who - in one of the DVD's nicely sidelong touches - plays the part of the "speaking" McCormack. "From the first one, where he reports that his singing teacher says he may be singing opera within 18 months - imagine the excitement of that for a 20-year-old from Athlone, back in the day - to the last one where he says, 'I'm like the minstrel; I've hung up my harp and my songs are all sung'. It's very moving."
For a 21st-century tenor, it's also something of a lesson in how to measure a "successful" career. "This man was able to fill Symphony Hall in Boston for four nights in a week, one after the other," Kearns observes. "I know what it's like to fill it once - and it's bloody hard work." The secret of McCormack's success can be summed up in a single word: crossover. Not the phoney sort of crossover that sees classical singers try to warble their way through pop songs or rock musicians write ballets; McCormack was singing in the days before the rise of the crooner, when the lines between popular and classical music were considerably more blurred than they are nowadays. And McCormack could do it all. He could toss off a song such as The Kerry Dances with enviable lightness, but as his legendary recording of the aria Il Mio Tesoro from Don Giovanni shows, he could do the same - with flawless stylistic accuracy - for Mozart.
"No one can listen to his records without being aware of the sheer consistency of his art," is how the author of a book on McCormack, Gordon Ledbetter, puts it, "and the idiomatic security of everything he sang." According to Kearns, who will be singing everything from Handel to Donizetti via Rachmaninov at the Icon of an Age concert, his illustrious predecessor had an innate understanding of music that was completely natural and unforced. "But he also worked very hard. There are stories about him spending a day working on one song just to get it right - to get the feeling and the emotion across.
"He had a palette of colours in his voice and he could hit all the right emotional buttons. But the real secret is that he brought the audience in to him and made the experience seem one to one. If he was singing to 11,000 people, everyone in the house felt he was singing to them. That's the key to it."
FOR A BOY born into a family of 11 children in the backstreets of Athlone in 1884, it was heady stuff. Small wonder that when McCormack was made a papal count by the Vatican for his services to charity - France also awarded him the Légion d'Honneur - he lost the run of himself slightly. He wanted to wear the papal robes to his daughter's wedding - as spirited as himself, she told him in no uncertain terms that he was to dress like everyone else, in a presentable suit - and bought a cavernous country house in which he never seemed to settle.
Contemporary superstars would, no doubt, recognise the symptoms. If McCormack were around today he would, in all likelihood, turn up on reality telly shows, eating maggots or wrestling with reptiles. "He was a genuine icon of his age, rivalled only by his friend Enrico Caruso," says Martin Dwan. "It doesn't seem right that he should be widely regarded as one of the greatest concert recitalists of the 20th century, but is mostly forgotten in the land of his birth. That's what we're trying to put right."
The Icon of an Age concert is at the National Concert Hall, Dublin, tonight. The People's Tenor box set goes on sale next Friday. For information on the McCormack statue, write to: The McCormack Foundation Trust, 2 Ardilea, Stanford (off Roebuck Road), Clonskeagh, Dublin 14