Barry McDaniel

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Barry McDaniel (born October 18, 1930 in Lyndon , Kansas ; † June 18, 2018 in Berlin ) was an American opera singer ( baritone ), whose career took place almost exclusively in Germany. In addition to his stage work, he also appeared as a concert and lied singer.

Life

Barry McDaniel was born into a very music-loving family in which his talent was recognized and encouraged at an early age. As a child he received intensive lessons in singing, piano and percussion and as a boy soprano was a sought-after soloist in church and at private concerts. After changing his voice, he studied singing first at the University of Kansas and then with the respected baritone and singing teacher Mack Harrell , who brought him to the Juilliard School of Music in New York in 1950 . After completing his studies there, he came to the Stuttgart Conservatory in 1953 with a Fulbright scholarship , where he continued his studies with Hermann Reutter and Alfred Paulus and further expanded the extensive German repertoire that became the foundation of his later career. This was followed by a first engagement at the Mainz Opera , then - after a two-year hiatus due to military service in the US Army - engagements at the Stuttgart State Opera (1957 to 1958) and from 1959 at the Karlsruhe State Theater . There he was discovered in the autumn of 1961 by Egon Seefehlner , the deputy director and talent scout of the Deutsche Oper Berlin , which reopened in its new house in 1961 , and committed to Berlin.

Barry McDaniel remained a permanent member of the DOB ensemble from 1962 to 1999 and worked there with directors such as Gustav Rudolf Sellner , Götz Friedrich , Günther Rennert , Filippo Sanjust and colleagues such as Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau , Elisabeth Grümmer , Josef Greindl , Ernst Haefliger and James King , Lisa Otto , Catherine Gayer , Pilar Lorengar and Edith Mathis . His stage repertoire comprised 98 roles, from Gluck and Mozart to the Italian Belcanto and Richard Strauss to contemporary composers, several of whom he designed for the first time on stage.

As in opera, his range as a church music and song interpreter ranged from the baroque to the present day. In church music, the focus was on Johann Sebastian Bach (cantatas, Christ in the St. Matthew Passion ) and Georg Philipp Telemann, in the song Franz Schubert with his great song cycles, Robert Schumann , Gustav Mahler and Johannes Brahms . French melodies played another important role . B. by Claude Debussy , Maurice Ravel or Francis Poulenc , and modern compositions z. B. by Aribert Reimann , Hermann Reutter, Anton Webern , Günter Bialas , Luigi Dallapiccola , Carl Orff and Richard Rodney Bennett .

In addition to his more than 2100 stage and concert appearances in Berlin, there were numerous guest performances, for example in Vienna from 1969 to 1979, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Munich (for 11 years he was a regular guest at the Munich Opera Festival ), Geneva, Amsterdam, Mexico and Japan. In 1964 he appeared at the Bayreuth Festival in Wagner's Tannhäuser as Wolfram, in 1971 at the Schwetzingen Festival in Aribert Reimann's “ Melusine ”, and in 1972 at the New York Metropolitan Opera as Pelléas. In total, Barry McDaniel has performed live a good 3400 times. In addition, between 1954 and 1984 he recorded several hundred songs, sacred works and opera titles for radio and played leading roles in several television productions of operas and operettas in the 1960s and 1970s.

In 1970 he was awarded the title of Berlin Chamber Singer by the Berlin Senate .

From the end of the 1980s, Barry McDaniel gradually began to reduce his theater and concert activities, and finally retired from active music life in 1999 after a series of American songs. He lived with his partner in Berlin, where he died in June 2018 at the age of 87.

Stage roles (selection)

Voice and discography

The voice of Barry McDaniel was a lyrical baritone with a range of 2½ octaves, a sophisticated singing and breathing technique (e.g. he was able to perform the 9-bar melisma in the introductory phrase of the cross-bar cantata BWV 56 in a single breath singing) and a sound beauty that is repeatedly emphasized by experts. The New Groves Dictionary of Music and Musicians certifies him a "very pleasant voice" as well as "a pronounced feeling for phrasing and a high degree of text understanding and text projection". Wolfram Schwinger wrote in 1971 about his role in Reimann's Melusine: "Such cantable poetry, such lucid operatic poetry is unrivaled today, and hardly anyone can sing it as beguilingly as Barry McDaniel." The voice increased in depth over the years and color nuances, but always retained its youthful, lyrical character, and Barry McDaniel consistently avoided excursions outside his specialist boundaries, e.g. B. to difficult Wagner or Italian verismo games.

Barry McDaniel has made sound recordings from all areas of his repertoire as well as a number of television productions. Still in trade today are z. B. Recordings by Johann Sebastian Bach, opera roles by Mozart, Strauss, Weill and Henze and works of contemporary church music (which were often recorded with him for the first and only time). Although his record career as a song interpreter was hindered by the fact that he was always overshadowed by his two big competitors Hermann Prey and especially Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau on the limited market of commercial productions , there are not only two recordings of the " Winterreise ", but also numerous Song recordings - partly studio productions, partly live recordings - in the archives u. a. of the SWR , the BR , the WDR , the SFB (today RBB ) and the BBC . Pelléas - one of his most important opera roles and celebrated by Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt after its premiere in Berlin in 1963 as “a perfect achievement” - has also been received as a radio recording of a performance at the Metropolitan Opera in 1972.

For a full list of Barry McDaniel's sound recordings and television productions, see Web Links .

literature

  • Gerhart Asche: American Papageno with Viennese charm. In: Opera world. August 2004
  • Karl-Josef Kutsch , Leo Riemens : Large singer lexicon . Volume 2. Bern 1987, Sp. 1918-1919
  • The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Volume Fifteen, Second Edition, London and New York 2001, p. 456
  • Ingo Kühl Winterreise - 24 pictures for the song cycle of the same name by Franz Schubert - based on poems by Wilhelm Müller - painted based on the interpretation by Barry McDaniel, vocals - Jonathan Alder, piano. Berlin 1996.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Baritone Barry McDaniel (87) has died. In: musik-heute.de. June 20, 2018. Retrieved June 20, 2018 .
  2. ^ Performances with Barry McDaniel. In: Schedule archive of the Vienna State Opera. Retrieved June 21, 2018 .
  3. ^ Allan Blyth: The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians . 2nd edition, 2001.
  4. ↑ Wolfram Schwinger in: Die Zeit , May 7, 1971.
  5. ^ Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , March 4, 1963.
personal data
SURNAME McDaniel, Barry
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American opera singer (baritone)
DATE OF BIRTH October 18, 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH Lyndon , Kansas
DATE OF DEATH June 18, 2018
Place of death Berlin