Broadcast tenor
In the heyday of radio in the 1920s and 1930s, a radio tenor was a tenor singer who made a career primarily on the radio and less on the stage.
The most famous radio tenor was undoubtedly Joseph Schmidt , who became famous mainly through the radio since 1929. Because of his height of 1.58 m, a stage career was closed to him. In the Almanac Künstler am Rundfunk , a bright future as a radio broadcaster was predicted for him in 1932, but this was overtaken a year later by the racial politics of the National Socialists. Schmidt had to emigrate.
But other singers also concentrated (almost) entirely on radio recordings and the associated recordings. Joseph Schmidt's fellow singer Franz Baumann , whose career continued unchecked even after 1933, is considered to be the most successful radio performer in the long term. Further representatives of this species were, for example, Erwin Hartung , Eric Helgar , Richard Fritz Wolf and Willy Weiss .
There were also singers of other voices who were mainly active in the radio, but they did not develop a generic term of their own. The tenors had a special position because they sang the most popular songs and hits of the time on the radio and on records.