The Wagner Society of Washington DC had another open meeting at Funger Hall
on the George Washington University campus last evening (1/13/00) which I
(a non-member, as I always feel compelled to explain) attended.

J.K. Holman, the society's chairman opened the meeting with a few special
announcements, one of which might be of special interest to readers here.
The society has obtained an undisclosed number of tickets for this summer's
Bayreuth festival available only to paying members of record as of February
15, 2000.  They are available as a set of three (for Parsifal, Lohengrin,
and Meistersinger) and/or four (The Ring).  It is expected that the number
of requests will exceed the number of available tickets and the society is
"working hard to develop the fairest possible way to allocate" this limited
number of tickets among its members.

He then introduced the evening's speaker, Jeannie Williams, a columnist
for *USA Today*, who has written for *Opera News*, *Opera Monthly*, *Opera
Quarterly*, *BBC Music Magazine*, the magazine of Lyric Opera of Chicago,
and *New York Magazine*.  She has also written an (as she pointed out)
unauthorized biography of Jon Vickers entitled *Jon Vickers: A Hero's Life*
about which she spoke with illustrations from some taped recordings.

In the past, I have attempted to give a somewhat detailed account of these
get togethers because I believed that it might interest some readers (even
if all of it might not interest all readers) and while I found this evening
as interesting and instructive as earlier ones I had attended, I don't
think I can write about it in the same way.

Vickers apparently is a private person and did not want the biography
written (and had bragged about never having had to pay a publicist),
declined to help Ms. Wilson, and referred to it as that "bloody book".
She was so fascinated, however, by this man that she set out to write this
biography anyway, based on her own research elsewhere, a job that took her
many years, partly because she was still working at her day job at *USA
Today*.

Her presentation seemed to be biographical highlights taken from her book.
He was born in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, the son of a minister, and
was taught that his singing was a gift from God for which he should not be
taking money (a doctrine he later forced himself to abandon).  His ambition
to study medicine was thwarted by the heavy competition for school
vacancies from returning WWII veterans and he went into business instead.

Somewhere along the line he won himself a scholarship to the Toronto
Conservatory in 1950 and Ms. Williams played for us a tape of him singing
Walther's "Prize Song" from *Meistersinger*.  (She clearly lived and loved
this and other taped excerpts of his singing and would sway to the music
and lip synch the texts.)

We were given more biographical details, times and places of performances
of roles by no means confined to Wagner, with representative tapes, many of
which I suspect are not available commercially.  One non-Wagner excerpt was
from Berlioz' *Troyens*, which may be from the Sir Colin Davis recording,
but I don't recall.

I'll content myself with just a few examples of biographical information
that I found interesting.  Her book would contain them and more, and the
cold dates can of course be found in entries for him in the musical
dictionaries.

He had a feud with Georg Solti and refused to sing with him.  It was never
resolved.

He would not sing *Tannhaeuser*, at least after a while, because he found
Elizabeth's intercession to secure Tannhaeuser's absolution blasphemous.
Apparently, he couldn't explain why his religious qualms didn't prevent
him from singing Sigmund who sires a son with his sister.

Similarly, an apparent anti-gay bias gave rise to problems w/ Britten.
Although Vickers' *Peter Grimes* is famous, he maintained that Grimes was
an outcast character pure and simple and insisted on singing the part free
of homoerotic implications.  [Naive me, I never heard the opera any other
way.] Similarly, he would not sing the part of Captain Vere in *Billy
Budd*.

In response to a questioner after her presentation she pointed out that
what may have made her fix on Vickers as a subject of biography was that
he, probably unlike any other singer, was able to sing a definitive
Tristan, Sigmund, Aeneas, Otello, and Peter Grimes.

Walter Meyer