Nicolai Gedda
Singer who overcame a difficult upbringing to become one of the world’s leading operatic tenors
NICOLAI GEDDA, who has died aged 91, was one of the greatest tenors of all time; his velvet tones, exquisite phrasing and voice of liquid beauty brought him admirers the world over.
The remarkable tale of his rise to fame only added to the allure: a bank clerk who studied singing in his spare time, he was drafted into his national opera house in Sweden to sing a fiendishly difficult role. The evening was a triumph and within weeks he had been signed up by the opera producer Walter Legge, who introduced him to Herbert von Karajan.
Gedda was from a generation that included Carlo Bergonzi and Alfredo Kraus, and came of operatic age long before the Three Tenors, Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo and Jose Carreras. Arguably he was the most versatile of all, performing more than 100 roles during a career that spanned almost half a century.
His voice was blessed with an unusual degree of power, even by the standards of the opera house, and he brought to his interpretations a rare and insightful intelligence. He was helped by his fluency in several languages, which made up for what some felt was a lack of natural acting talent.
Legge, the powerhouse behind EMI, had been in Stockholm in May 1952 with his wife Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. At the time he was searching for singers with a knowledge of Russian for the first complete recording of Boris Godunov. Within months of hearing Gedda, Legge had brought him to Paris to record the role of Dimitri in Boris with the Bulgarian bass Boris Christoff under Issay Dobrowen.
Then came Bach’s B Minor Mass in London with Schwarzkopf, Marga Höffgen and Heinz Rehfuss under von Karajan. However, the conductor soon took to belittling his acting and from 1962 Gedda refused to have anything more to do with him.
At Covent Garden, where he made his debut in May 1954 as the Duke in an English translation of Verdi’s Rigoletto under John Pritchard, Gedda was adored. “His phrasing, and his musicianly enunciation of English, are exemplary, whether in aria, recitative or ensemble,” wrote one critic. Yet he would not return until 1966, this time in the title role of Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini, again under Pritchard. Meanwhile, he appeared in recital at the Festival Hall and in Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust at the 1963 Edinburgh Festival.
It was said that when he created the role of Anatol in Samuel Barber’s Vanessa, at the Met in 1958, his pronunciation was far clearer than that of his English-speaking colleagues. Such vocal dexterity was also heard in Bernstein’s Candide, the composer’s final recording in which Gedda sang several parts. Those aside, he eschewed both contemporary opera and Wagner, save for Lohengrin in Stockholm.
The key to his success, he told the journalist Alan Blyth in 1969, was never to treat a performance as routine. “Every night I am singing to a different public and every night, though I may not show it, I’m as nervous as if I was singing whatever part it may be for the first time.”
He was born Harry Gustaf Nikolai Gedda in Stockholm on July 11 1925. His unmarried teenage mother, Clary, was a Swedish waitress and Nikolai, his half-Russian father, was unemployed. He was destined for a children’s home until, when he was six days old, his father’s sister, Olga, and her husband Michail Ustinov, cantor of the Kuban Cossacks, a Russian émigré choir (and a distant kinsman of Sir Peter Ustinov), stepped in.
The Swedish authorities refused Olga and Michail permission to adopt the boy on account of their poverty. Nevertheless, as he recalled, “they had the courage to raise me illegally”. The details of Gedda’s parentage were only revealed to him in adult life, causing much distress, especially when his natural father tried to capitalise on his success. He only met his natural mother once, in the late 1970s.
Gedda was four when Michail was invited to form a choir at the Gedächtniskirche in Leipzig. He took the family with him, enabling young Nicolai to add German to his Swedish and Russian. By the age of five Gedda could read music and play the piano, and was singing in a children’s quartet.
Yet life in Germany was turning sour: at school “we were lined up in the school playground, where we would stand with our right arms outstretched to salute the Nazi flag and sing Deutschland über Alles,” he recalled. The family returned in May 1934 to Sweden where Gedda now learnt English, French and Latin.
During national service in 1946-47 he learnt to drive a truck and sang for his comrades. Afterwards he began working in the Sörmlandsbanken, while singing at weddings and funerals to make extra cash.
Among the bank’s customers was a French horn player at the Royal Opera House in Stockholm, and one day Gedda asked if he could recommend a singing teacher. He was sent to see Carl Martin Öhman, who had achieved fame for his interpretations of Wagner in the 1920s. Soon Gedda was at the Royal Academy of Music in Stockholm. He won the Christina Nilsson prize, which enabled him to pay Öhman for lessons, yet well into his twenties he slept in an alcove in the family kitchen.
In August 1951 he was the understudy for Giuseppe di Stefano in L’elisir d’amore at the Edinburgh Festival and the following April at the Swedish Royal Opera, while still a student, he sang Chapelou in Adolphe Adam’s Le Postillon de Longjumeau – widely regarded as one of the most taxing roles for any tenor. It was a triumph. Legge heard him sing the following month and was soon recommending him around Europe.
In 1953 Gedda appeared as Don Ottavio in Don Giovanni at La Scala, and the following year accepted a permanent contract at the Paris Opera, starting with Alfredo in La Traviata. The early critics compared him favourably with the great Jussi Björling, his compatriot.
Within 12 months of being “discovered”, Gedda was delighted to be lined up for a series of six Viennese “champagne” operettas with Schwarzkopf and Erich Kunze.
His US debut was in Faust at Pittsburgh Opera in 1957 with George London as Mephistopheles; later that year he sang the same role at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, under Dimitri Mitropoulos, the first of hundreds of appearances at the Met. Among his many triumphs were Carmen with Victoria de Los Angeles under Thomas Beecham in Paris in 1959 and The Dream of Gerontius with an 86-year-old Adrian Boult in 1975. He recorded Verdi’s Requiem in the early 1960s with Schwarzkopf, Christa Ludwig and Nicolai Ghiaurov under Carlo Maria Giulini and sang with Galina Vishnevskaya in Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtensk conducted by Mstislav Rostropovich.
Gedda returned to Covent Garden in 1972, singing Alfredo opposite Montserrat Caballé, and nine years later sang a memorable Nemorino in L’elisir d’amore there. He made more than 200 recordings for EMI, including several of Russian church music – a “small expression of gratitude” to God.
As late as 1997 he was the Archbishop in Pfitzner’s Palestrina at Covent Garden, and in 2003 was the High Priest in a recording of Mozart’s Idomeneo. In a memoir, Nicolai Gedda: My Life and Art, translated into English in 1999, he revealed frank details of childhood neglect, emotional abuse and beatings with Michail Ustinov’s narrow Cossack belt – as well as the solace he found with his pet canaries.
Introverted and modest, Gedda was well read and a connoisseur of painting and sculpture. He especially enjoyed animals, once admitting that only his travel commitments prevented him from keeping a menagerie. In retirement he enjoyed a quiet life overlooking Lake Geneva.
Gedda’s first two marriages were dissolved. In 1997 he married, thirdly, Aino Sellermark, a Swedish journalist, who survives him.
Nicolai Gedda, born July 11 1925, died January 8 2017