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The Melchiors' homes are three: the Manhattan hotel apartment, a Copenhagen hideaway and a 3,000-acre estate in Germany, at Chossewitz. There, though Tenor Melchior does not sing in Germany any more, he spends his summers. On an island in the middle of a lake, near the former Polish border, he inhabits what was originally the fortress of a medieval robber baron. All summer long, Lauritz Melchior invites his soul in this rustic barony. He likes to dress in Lederhosen, hunt his own land for rabbit, red deer or pheasant. On these expeditions he always carries his little brass hunting horn, blows a blast on it like Siegfried himself.
Heldentenor. Lauritz Melchior is not a natural tenor. Jealous Italians refer to him sniffily as a misplaced baritone. Actually, he is an authentic example of a very rare type of singer: the true Wagnerian Heldentenor (heroic tenor). Most tenors have fairly light voices: their honey-voiced wailing is orchestrated to an accompaniment that will not drown them out. But Wagner had no use for such lightweights: the true Heldentenor must be able to out-boom a phalanx of trombones. Richard Wagner's heroes are strenuous fellows, who would willingly break a blood vessel to get to Walhalla, and Wagner saw to it that their tones should ring with desperate effort. Prince of Heldentenors is Lauritz Melchior. His triple-brass larynx (which earns him the same top Metropolitan pay that Flagstad gets: $1,000 a performance) can stand the wear & tear of Siegfried's "Forge Song" and Siegmund's stentorian "Wälse Wälse" without straining a capillary. But what impresses Wagnerites is his ability to color Wagner's mystical, mountain-glade poetry with just the right shade of Teutonic Weltschmerz, his solemn evocation of all the Nibelungenlied's nature-nourished gnomes and demigods. When Melchior sings, Wagnerites forget the Metropolitan's tattered backdrops and seem to see the green Rhine and the doom-cragged, primeval mountains of Gothic legend.
Like many another Heldenienor (including the late, great Jean de Reszke), Lauritz Melchior started his career as a baritone. Born in 1890 in a family of Copenhagen schoolteachers, he broke away as a youngster to earn his own living in a music publishing house, meanwhile studying singing and dramatics with local teachers.
Contrary to popular opinion, great opera singers are almost never discovered ready-made in fish markets and prairie ranches. They get that way only after years of hard training and plugging practice. No exception to this iron rule, Lauritz Melchior spent eight years before he rated a contract (in Copenhagen's Royal Opera) and a regular salary—1,000 kroner (about $200) a year. While he was still singing baritone roles at the Royal Opera, the eminent, U. S.-born vocal expert, Mme Charles Cahier, heard him, and wrote the director of the opera that Melchior was really no baritone but a tenor with the lid on. After he had practiced lifting the lid, he was allowed to sing his first tenor role: Tannhäuser.