Triumpf and Tragedy - His Greatest Performances - Ausschnitte Aus Oper, Musical, Lied Und Requiem (10 CD)

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Triumph and tragedy are never far apart, and there can be few singers who experienced that bitter truth more keenly than George London. Impressive for his height, his lean athletic figure, his elegant deportment and his sheer masculinity, he was also blessed with a magnificent voice, which in three brief years catapulted him into the operatic firmament as one of the top singers of his time. Wieland Wagner called him “the answer to all my prayers”, Birgit Nilsson wrote: “I had many wonderful colleagues who fascinated me. Some had great voices, others had a fine sense of music, then there were wonderful actors and great personalities. But George London - he had it all.”

The young London had begun his career by learning the ways of America‘s music business. He could duel like a movie idol and dance like a Broadway star, but for a singer hungry for the opera stage, there were few opportunities in the USA. London headed for Europe. When the Vienna State Opera was on tour in Holland and Belgium in 1949, he auditioned for conductor Karl Böhm in Brussels. George London entered upon the most fortunate decade of his career - long before the onset of medical problems that compelled him to retire from the stage in the mid-1960s.

Vienna, Bayreuth and New York were the stages where he experienced his greatest successes, and he was the first non-Russian to play the role of Boris Godunov in Moscow‘s Bolshoy Theatre.

The recordings on this album present George London‘s vocal legacy from Broadway to Bayreuth, from Mozart to Mussorgsky. They document a chapter in the story of 20th-century operatic singing and the achievement in that sphere of an exceptional artist and individual.