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Alberto Remedios, tenor – obituary
Alberto Remedios, who has died aged 81, was a dockyard welder from Liverpool who rose to become one of the great Wagnerian tenors; he made his name in Reginald Goodall’s highly acclaimed Ring Cycle with English National Opera in the late 1960s and went on to work with many of the leading singers of the day, including Joan Sutherland, Luciano Pavarotti and Montserrat Caballé.
It was a remarkable journey, comparable in many ways with Jon Vickers’s transformation from Canadian lumberjack to acclaimed Heldentenor. And if at times Remedios could be raw in both voice and temperament, even the sternest critics were quick to forgive him. William Mann wrote that “if there were a prize for the singer who has gone farthest artistically most quickly, [Remedios] would qualify”.
His was a deliciously syrupy voice. In his prime he could not fail to make the hairs stand up on the back of the listener’s neck with his sheer vocal power, a power that was tempered by both glorious phrasing and careful attention to line. One critic who heard him in Ariadne auf Naxos at Sadler’s Wells in 1968 reported in complimentary terms how his “voice had grown so large that the sheer volume of sound in that resonant auditorium was almost painful in its intensity”.
Later he was the first English tenor to sing the role of Wagner’s Siegfried at Covent Garden since Walter Widdop in the 1930s. He also sang Mark in Michael Tippett’s Midsummer Marriage at Covent Garden with a cast that included Joan Carlyle, Raimund Herincx and Elizabeth Harwood, while his other major parts included Samson in Samson and Delilah, Alfredo in La Traviata, Bacchus in Ariadne auf Naxos and the title role in Peter Grimes.
Yet it was in his many appearances as Wagner’s hero that he made the greatest mark. “He has in his voice an extraordinarily touching quality that makes Siegfried seem both the more human and the more heroic in his achievements,” wrote Gramophone of his 1974 recording.
Alberto Telisforo Remedios was born in Liverpool on February 27 1935 . He was the eldest of three children; Rámon, his brother, also became an opera singer.
Their grandfather was a Spanish seaman who had settled in Liverpool and their father, Albert, joined the merchant navy and later cleaned railway carriages. Alberto’s Irish mother, Ida O’Farrell, worked in a series of jobs – waitressing in a Chinese restaurant, serving in a green grocer’s – to pay for her sons’ singing lessons.
Running water, Alberto liked to recall, meant his mother running up and down stairs with a bucket. His father would scour second-hand shops for cut-price 78s to bring home for the opera-mad scallywag who could not remember a time when he did not enjoy singing and dressing up.
Saturdays were spent in the Kop at Anfield, while on Sundays he was a choirboy at St Saviour’s Church. His vocal talents were soon spotted and his parents were urged to take him to Edwin Francis, a well-known local teacher who also coached the soprano Rita Hunter.
Leaving school at 15, Remedios played football semi-professionally for New Brighton at Wallasey, and joined Cammell Laird shipyard on Merseyside, often singing the Anvil Chorus for his sceptical workmates. Meanwhile, he continued to take singing lessons, sometimes going straight from the dockyard in his oil-soaked dungarees.
By Remedios’s own account, one day he took the bus to London and made his way to the stage door at Sadler’s Wells to request an audition. Norman Tucker, the general manager, overheard the conversation and invited him in. He sang three arias, including the Flower Song from Carmen, and Tucker told him to return after his National Service, which was with the Army Catering Corps and was where Remedios developed his excellent culinary skills.
He did just that, singing a number of minor roles, starting with Tinca in Il Tabarro. In return the Wells helped with his coaching, sending him to the Royal College of Music, where he won the Queen’s Prize in 1957. He took first prize in the Bulgarian International Opera Contest in 1963.
During one season he was understudy for Kenneth Macdonald’s Alfredo in La Traviata. One Saturday he had just returned home after screaming himself hoarse as Liverpool beat Arsenal at Highbury when his landlady knocked on the door to say that Sadler’s Wells was on the phone and he was needed immediately.
There was no time to take the bus so Remedios, his wife and landlady raided their emergency coin jars to pay for a taxi. Thereafter he was more muted, though no less passionate, in his support for the Reds.
On another occasion, he was in an Italian restaurant in London where the owner did not believe that he was a singer and jokingly offered him a free meal if he could prove his credentials. Remedios stood up and sang for his supper but, unknown to him, Joan Sutherland was also dining there. She subsequently invited Remedios to join her and Luciano Pavarotti on a tour of her native Australia in 1965 that included Lucia di Lammermoor and Eugene Onegin.
He made a handful of appearances in the US, including at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, in 1976 singing Bacchus opposite Caballé, although the American critics rather sniffily preferred their Liverpudlian singers to come as Beatles. Leonard Bernstein is said to have wanted him to sing Tony in the 1985 recording of West Side Story, but when he told the record company to “get the tenor with the Spanish name” they hired José Carreras.
Despite his thrilling voice, Remedios struggled with memorising his lines. Once during Siegfried the front-row audience at ENO could hear frequent whispers from the prompt box. As the applause thundered at the end he picked up one of the flowers that had been thrown on stage and strode over to the box to present it to the unseen prompter. The audience cheered even louder until Remedios helped the prompter on to the stage to take a well-earned bow.
He often worked with Rita Hunter, with whom he was close, and much fun was had by their respective families when they appeared together and she sang the line: “Oh Siegfried, don’t you know how much I love you?” On another occasion, when he was singing Erik in The Flying Dutchman at Covent Garden, Hunter’s character Senta had to leap from a cliff to her death. He forgot that they were on stage and called after her: “Are yer al’ right, Scouse?”
His recording of You’ll Never Walk Alone in 1982 was a rare appearance with his brother, and in 1994 he sang Nessun Dorma for thousands of Liverpool fans at the Last Night of the Kop, although he was now past his prime.
Remedios, who appeared on This is Your Life in 1976, was appointed CBE in 1981.
He retired in 1999 to his second wife’s native Australia, where he suffered a stroke in 2003. He married Shirley Swindells in 1958. That marriage was dissolved and in 1965 he married, secondly, Judy Hosken, who survives him with their son and daughter and a son from his first marriage.
Alberto Remedios, born February 27 1935, died June 11 2016