Nelson Eddy Drive Dedication

Transcript of an excellent presentation given at the dedication of Nelson Eddy Drive by John Glenn Paton, Emeritus professor, University of Colorado, Lecturer, University of Southern California.

Nelson Eddy as a Recitalist.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.

Here we are in Hollywood, where Nelson Eddy made the films that made him the hero of fans around the world. You no doubt know that before he became a movie star he had a fine career in opera, primarily with the Philadelphia Grand Opera Company, but also performing on stage with the Los Angeles Grand Opera at the Shrine Auditorium.

I have the honor to speak for a few minutes about a third aspect of Mr. Eddy’s performing career, the concerts that he gave over a span of many years and all across the United States.

The Cinema & Television Library of the University of Southern California houses a collection of Mr. Eddy’s concert programs. It is obviously not a complete collection, but a few days ago I was able to examine over 100 programs of concerts that Mr. Eddy sang between 1928 and 1950. Some programs relate to oratorio performances, such as the solo roles in Mendelssohn’s Elijah. Some relate to operas or to operatic arias sung with orchestras, including the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra. But the majority of the programs list the songs and arias that Mr. Eddy sang with the collaboration of his faithful pianist-partner, Theodore Paxson.

In the 1930s and 1940s there was an active system for bringing famous musicians of many kinds to smaller cities through the Community Concert Association under the Arthur Judson management. I was a child living in New Castle, near the western border of Pennsylvania. New Castle had 50,000 inhabitants, an excellent Masonic auditorium, and direct passenger rail connections to Cleveland and Pittsburgh. Through our concert series we heard artists like violinist Isaac Stern, the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra, and touring ballet and opera companies. It was a magnificent experience to hear a great voice, unamplified, in our 2,000-seat auditorium, and among the singers that I heard as a young person were the great mezzo-soprano Risë Stevens and the concert baritone Nelson Eddy.

Poring through the programs preserved at USC, I hoped in vain to find a program for the concert that I had heard Mr. Eddy sing. Unfortunately, no one in my family still has the printed program, and because I was very young at the time, I no longer remember the more serious classical solos that he offered us. But two of Mr. Eddy’s encores stick in my mind, the folksong Shortnin’ Bread and Alfred Hay Malotte’s setting of The Lord’s Prayer, after which we went happily and quietly on our way home.

Sometime after that concert I bought a record album for the first time with my own money: songs from The Chocolate Soldier with Miss Stevens and Mr. Eddy. In 1950 I bought the only Nelson Eddy souvenir that I still have, a book called Your Nelson Eddy Songs. I learned every song in the book, the best I could.

I made a copy for you of the earliest Community Concerts program that is in the USC collection. It comes from the 1931-32 season, when Mr. Eddy was 30 years old. This program would have been printed in large numbers and given to audiences in all of the cities where it was sung. We have no way to tell where or how many times the program was sung. (I didn’t hear this one; I wasn’t born yet.) I think that the years written at the top may be in Mr. Eddy’s handwriting. The other words seem to say “Please return to” an unknown person.

The first group on the program is a recital rarity: an extended piece in five sections by Francis Hopkinson, an American composer who was also a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Mr. Eddy used Hopkinson’s Ode to open many concerts, even as late as ten years after the program reproduced here.

The second group of songs nearly always featured foreign languages. On this program Mr. Eddy sang six love songs in six different languages. As you know, he spoke German and studied Russian while he was studying voice in Dresden, Germany.

Before intermission Mr. Paxson always offered one or more piano solos, and he liked to surprise the audience by speaking to them, so that they would know he was a human being, too. After intermission, Mr. Eddy returned to the stage, with a popular French aria in this case, but on other programs the group after intermission was more ambitious. Sometimes he sang a Reader’s Digest version of Wagner’s opera The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, boiling down the four-hour opera to nine melodious excerpts. Nowadays that would be in poor taste, but Mr. Eddy was offering music that audiences in small towns would not get to hear in any other way.

The final group of a concert was nearly always a series of British and American songs, usually amusing in tone. On the program before you, the character of the songs is predominately British, but later Mr. Eddy included more and more American subjects in his closing groups. Occasionally he sang songs that were composed in Black dialect, but the only authentic spiritual that I found in his programs was “I Want Jesus to Walk With Me,” which he sang in 1941.

I’d like to read to you a wonderful quotation that was printed in a program from February 2, 1938. Mr. Eddy made this statement: “If I have any spark of vanity at all, it lies in the fact that I would like some day to be remembered as the most American of singers. I should like to reach the state where the spirit of my country breathes through me, to my audiences.”

That inspiring statement harmonizes completely with the impression that Mr. Eddy made on his audiences. But someone who reads that statement could get a wrong impression: there was nothing jingoistic about Mr. Eddy. His vision of America assumed that this nation would be enriched by the great art of the world. On that same program in 1938 he sang songs in German, French and Italian as well as English. Even during World War II, Mr. Eddy continued to sing classic songs by German composers, with the difference that he translated the songs and sang them in English to avoid the chance of offending anyone with the sound of the German language. Among all of the programs I examined there were no explicitly patriotic songs. When Mr. Eddy sang “Beautiful Dreamer,” you could feel proud that an American wrote that song, but there was no flag-waving. His first teacher, David Bispham, had studied in Italy and England, and Mr. Eddy’s life was too richly nourished by the classical art of Europe for him to be narrowly nationalistic in his attitudes.

That point is confirmed by the selections contained in Your Nelson Eddy Songs. Compiling this book in 1948, only three years after the war, Mr. Eddy included seven songs with German texts, two French and one Italian. A song by Tchaikovsky had texts in both German and Russian, and there two other songs in Russian. Mr. Eddy himself made the phonetic transliterations from the Russian alphabet into our alphabet. He also put his own creativity into the book, providing new English texts for several of the foreign language songs. The fact that he was able to do so comes as no surprise: his outstandingly clear diction also revealed how much he cared about using language intelligently and expressively. To find another artist who invested his own creativity in a published song album, there is a precedent in this book, edited in 1897 by Mr. Eddy’s teacher, David Bispham.

Another beautiful book in my collection is a Marian Anderson Album. That book reminds us that the greatest American contralto of the 20th century was born in 1899 and was growing up in Philadelphia at the same time as Mr. Eddy. They may have passed on the street or shopped in the same music store. But the idea of a Negro person singing opera was not accepted in those years, and Miss Anderson had to take quite a different career path from Mr. Eddy. The album of songs from her repertoire was edited by her longtime accompanist, Franz Rupp.

Earlier I mentioned the absence of patriotic songs from Mr. Eddy’s programs, and yet you all know that Mr. Eddy went on several exhausting tours to sing for our military personnel during the war years. In those tours, there was no condescension, no slumming. He gave his best to those audiences like any others, and they responded warmly to him.

When I try to imagine that happening now, I have a troubling thought: Most of the young men and women who served in World War II had received music instruction in their schools. When Mr. Eddy sang “Beautiful Dreamer” for them, it was a song they had heard before. Just try that now! Sadly, many California schools have no music teachers at all, and only a few schools give the arts as much attention as parents and children are wishing for.

A significant way to honor Mr. Eddy’s memory would be for us all to take an active role in promoting arts education, so that another generation of talented youngsters can grow up to be as proud of America’s cultural heritage as he was.

John Glenn Paton
Emeritus professor, University of Colorado
Lecturer, University of Southern California