La Cieca reports the death of the great American baritone Cornell MacNeil on July 15 at age 88.
Before his lengthy career (nearly 30 years) at the MET began in 1959 (as a substitute, also the year and means of his La Scala début), he sang in musical theatre, for Gian Carlo Menotti, creating the role of Sorel in The Consul in 1950, the now much-beleaguered New York City Opera for several years, San Francisco Opera, and then had a cavalcade of roles at Lyric Opera of Chicago in the 1957 and 1958 seasons, all with all-star casts, including Puccini's Lescaut, Alfio in Cavalleria rusticana, Silvio (with the Prologue) in Pagliacci (all fall of 1957); Ford in Falstaff, Sharpless in Butterfly, Silvio again, and sharing a two performance run of Rigoletto with Tito Gobbi, opposite Jussi Björling and Anna Moffo (and with future impresaria Ardis Krainik in the cast as Giovanna!), all in the fall of 1958.
He returned to Chicago in Rigoletto in 1965 with Alfredo Kraus and Renata Scotto, in 1976 in Gobbi's staging of Tosca with Pavarotti and Carol Neblett, and for the last time at Lyric, in Pagliacci, this time as Tonio, with Jon Vickers as Canio, in 1982, at 59.
A native of Minneapolis, MacNeil started out in craft school to be a machinist. He then studied voice on scholarship at the Hartt School of Music in Hartford, Connecticut, and eventually joined the remarkable line of American Verdi baritones that started with Lawrence Tibbett, and came to include Leonard Warren, Robert Merrill, MacNeil, and Downers Grove-native Sherrill Milnes. Another example of how opera, with dance, is perhaps the most democratic of the fine arts.
I heard him sing in his late career but met him only in passing and for backstage congratulations. I admired him greatly.
The Internet holds many clips of MacNeil singing. Here's just one example of how he held his legato line over his unusually wide range well into his 50s, a 1978 performance of Iago's "Credo in un Dio crudel" from Verdi's Otello.
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