Jacques Urlus
Jacques Urlus , also Jakob Urlus (born January 6, 1867 in Hergenrath near Aachen , † June 6, 1935 in Noordwijk , Netherlands) was a Dutch opera singer ( hero tenor ).
Life
Urlus was born to Dutch parents in Hergenrath, Germany at the time, and grew up in Tilburg , the Netherlands . Although his musical talent was recognized early on, he first had to earn his living as a worker in a steel factory and could not accept the offer to study at the Conservatory in Brussels.
That is why he was actually self-taught when he made his debut in Amsterdam on September 20, 1894 - at least 27 years old - where he made a great development over the next few years. In the following years he first appeared at various Dutch opera houses and was best known as Lohengrin .
In 1898 he sang for the first time as a guest in Germany - several performances of Lohengrin and Tannhäuser at the Hanover Opera House . This earned him the invitation to audition in Bayreuth Cosima Wagner , the composer's widow and strict ruler of the Bayreuth Festival, for an engagement the following year. Although he learned his Wagner roles in German for this purpose, Urlus was not engaged.
Nevertheless, he did not give up hope and even turned down - although he is now the father of three children - a very well endowed offer from the Frankfurt Opera for a permanent engagement of several years, because the contract did not provide for the possibility of exemption for the time of the festival. Instead, he first returned to Holland.
From 1900 to 1914 he was the first tenor of the Leipzig Opera , but already during this engagement he began a lively guest performance throughout Europe, including at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden in London, in Munich , Vienna and Berlin .
In 1911 and 1912 Urlus' dream of the Bayreuth Festival came true.
A series of performances of Tristan and Isolde in Boston in 1912 brought Urlus a contract with the Metropolitan Opera in New York, where he - also as Tristan - made his debut on February 9, 1913.
The evening turned into a scandal and a catastrophe for the singer, because Urlus appeared in spite of a severe cold and in the second act he refused to speak, so that in the third act he could only act in silence. The triumph was all the greater when he appeared three days later - healthy again - as Siegfried . Until 1917 he remained the leading Wagner tenor of the MET. It was only when the United States entered the First World War that this engagement ended, because afterwards Wagner's works in particular were frowned upon in the United States.
Urlus returned to Leipzig, from where he continued to go on major concert tours, including a. to Scandinavia for the first time. Until the end of his career he performed regularly in his homeland, the Netherlands.
The Wagner Festival at the Sopot Forest Opera, founded in 1922, had one of their great draft horses in it, which made it a serious competitor for the Bayreuth Festival.
It was not until he was 64 that he finally withdrew from the stage - for health reasons, not because his voice required it.
When Jacques Urlus died four years later, the whole of Holland mourned him like a national hero and the rest of the opera world mourned one of their most popular singers.
meaning
Although he had a very wide-ranging repertoire, which the Evangelist in the St. Matthew Passion by Bach also included as Haydn's Seasons , Mozart's Tamino , Italian ( spinto -) such roles as Manrico in Il Trovatore and Radames in Aida by Verdi , French as Don José in Carmen and the entire German subject from Fidelio to Freischütz , he was above all the leading heroic tenor of his time.
He was the counterpart to the typical heavy German hero tenors of his time, an elegant, intelligent singer with Italian singing technique. Because of this excellent technique, his voice retained its soft luster and quality even at an advanced age, so that it still sounded fresh even in the 1920s when the singer was in his mid-50s. When he was over 60, he was still celebrated as Tristan.
Today Urlus is considered to be one of the most important hero tenors of the 20th century.
literature
- Ludwig Eisenberg : Large biographical lexicon of the German stage in the XIX. Century . Verlag von Paul List , Leipzig 1903, p. 1 ^ 061, ( Textarchiv - Internet Archive ).
Web links
- Jacques Urlus at cantabile-subito.de
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Urlus, Jacques |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Urlus, Jacob |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Dutch opera singer (hero tenor) |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 6, 1867 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Hergenrath near Aachen |
| DATE OF DEATH | June 6, 1935 |
| Place of death | Noordwijk , the Netherlands |