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While her career was relatively short, Welitsch was a legend in her own time, with a strikingly beautiful stage presence (and a figure she was never hesitant to show off to its best advantage onstage) and a powerfully-focused, though not huge, voice. For many, her Salome has never been vocally or dramatically surpassed.

She studied in Sofia under Gyorgy Zlatov, and made her debut as one of the seamstresses in Charpentier's Louis at the Sofia Opera in 1934. Her first lead role was as Nedda in Pagliacci in 1936 at the Graz Opera. In 1937, she became part of the Graz opera company, where she remained until 1940. As her career developed, her roles ranged over the lyrical and the spinto repertoire, including such heavy roles as Senta and Aida. In 1944, she sang Salome in a performance conducted by Strauss himself, and after joining the Vienna State Opera in 1946, made her Covent Garden debut in the same role the next year. Her Metropolitan Opera debut was in 1949, also as Salome. (This was also conductor Fritz Reiner's Met debut.) As early as 1953, her voice was showing pronounced signs of wear, though her total artistry was still commanding, and she began to appear in smaller roles, including comic character parts. In 1959, she made her farewell to the opera stage in Egk's Der Revisor at the Vienna State Opera, though she returned to the Met in 1972 to perform the comic speaking part of the Duchess in a production of Donizetti's La Fille du Regiment.

In common with many other heroic tenors, Ramón Vinay began his career as a baritone. After two decades as a leading tenor, he stepped back into the baritone register and continued to sing for several years. Still, it was as a tenore robusto that Vinay earned his status as a major figure in the works of Wagner and in the most strenuous roles of the Italian and French repertories. Recordings of his signature role, Otello, exist with the two great antipodes of the era ending in the mid-'50s: Toscanini and Furtwängler. Although Vinay's singing as sheer vocalism never matched the best work of other great Otellos, his interpretation held an Olympian pathos; there was a grandeur about it almost impervious to criticism. Likewise, his Tristan, though never displaying the tonal sheen of Melchior's, compelled attention through its urgency and dramatic conviction. In its prime, no doubt existed about the size of Vinay's dark and somewhat veiled instrument; it was fully heroic in dimension.

Vinay's mother, who died when he was only five, encouraged her son's interest in music through her love of the art. Vinay's father, French-born, fought for his native country in WWI and after, sent for his three sons to join him there. Between 1920 and 1926, Vinay lived in Digne and pursued his interest in electrical engineering. At 15, his father sent him to Mexico City for training; he later began studying singing with José Pierson, appeared as Alphonse in 1931, and in 1934 joined a touring opera company, singing di Luna in Il trovatore. Unable to support himself with the modest fees, Vinay turned to business, establishing a successful box company. Persuaded to return to singing, he was heard by Broadway producer Lee Schubert who engaged him for the New York revue The Streets of Paris.

When the show ended its run, Vinay returned to Mexico and continued to sing baritone roles. Finding that he could just about manage roles in a higher range, he re-trained and made his tenor debut as Don José in 1943, undertaking Otello the next year. His success led to an engagement with the New York City Opera in 1945, where he appeared as Don José. The good impression he made there and in several subsequent roles resulted in a Metropolitan Opera contract for the following year. Once again, the role was Don José in a February 22 Carmen, as Vinay won positive notices for his appearance, musicianship, temperament, and the potential heard in his dark-timbred voice. A period of time had to pass before Vinay's huge instrument was sufficiently pulled upward from its baritone roots, but with increasing numbers of Otellos, his sovereignty in that role began to be manifested. At La Scala, Vinay sang his Otello to open the 1947 - 1948 season. Salzburg heard his Moor in 1951, while London had to wait until 1955 and Paris until 1958. Meanwhile, he had made himself a central figure at Bayreuth (1952 - 1957), performing Tristan, Tannhäuser, Parsifal, and Siegmund, all of them preserved on recording. His Tristan was an especially compelling realization, caught opposite the contrasted, but equally impassioned Isoldes of Martha Mödl and Astrid Varnay. By 1962, increasing strain in the top register led Vinay to move back into the baritone register. He returned to Bayreuth as Telramund and sang elsewhere in such roles as Scarpia, Iago, Dr. Schön, and Falstaff.

American baritone Robert Merrill, born Moishe Miller in Brooklyn on June 4, 1917, wavered -- in genuine New Yorker fashion -- between a professional baseball career and one in opera before being pushed into vocal studies by his mother. During an intensive period of study with vocal coach Samuel Margoles, Merrill worked as a pop singer at a Catskills resort to gain experience; he occasionally included the famous "Largo al factotum" from Rossini's Il Barbiere di Siviglia in his programs, earning great applause. Undiscouraged by his failure to win his first Metropolitan Opera audition, he continued to sing; two years later, auditions director Wilfrid Pelletier asked him to try again. This time he was ready; as a winner of the Metropolitan Auditions of the Air, he made his Metropolitan Opera debut on December 15, 1945, as Germont père in La Traviata, opposite the Violetta of Licia Albanese and Richard Tucker's Alfredo. It was a role he was also privileged to sing under Arturo Toscanini.

Despite immediate audience popularity and the enthusiasm of Met management, Merrill pursued his career cautiously, staying with less demanding parts -- Renato in Un Ballo in maschera, Rodrigo in Don Carlo, Valentin in Faust, and Marcello in La bohème -- until he felt prepared for such larger roles as the Count di Luna in Il Trovatore, Barnaba in La Gioconda, Amonasro in Aida, and, eventually, Iago in Verdi's Otello. Large or small, nearly everything he sang made an indelible impression. For instance, his Marcello for Sir Thomas Beecham's 1956 recording of La bohème, with de los Angeles and Björling, brings interest and character to a part often eclipsed by the principals. Gradually, his repertory broadened to include some 20 roles, and over a career of 30 years, he was heard at the Met 750 times. Merrill's most notable foreign appearances were both as the elder Germont (a mainstay) -- in Venice in 1961, and at London's Covent Garden in 1967.

Escamillo, in Carmen, has been one of Merrill's most spectacular characterizations -- one which, at the Met, he came to own, so to speak; he recorded the role in 1959 opposite the legendary Carmen of Risë Stevens, with Jan Peerce as Don José. Fritz Reiner conducted. Five years later he repeated his triumph in another Carmen for Herbert von Karajan, with Leontyne Price and Franco Corelli. Among other superstar recordings from the Met's Golden Age, Merrill's lustrous baritone graced major roles in Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Cavalleria Rusticana, I Pagliacci, Il Trovatore, Rigoletto (twice), La Traviata, and Sir Georg Solti's 1962 Aida with Leontyne Price, Rita Gorr, and Jon Vickers -- often cited as among the half-dozen or so greatest takes on this oft-recorded perennial. In addition to the Beecham recording, he also appeared in a notable disc version of La bohème opposite Anna Moffo and Richard Tucker, conducted by Erich Leinsdorf. It goes without saying that his work was a vital part of what made the Met's Golden Age so golden; he was highly valued there for his vigorous, powerful, and technically unshakable singing, if not for his acting skills (which were never a priority). In 1993, he was awarded the United States Medal of Arts.

Merrill recalls, as an eight-year-old, having been let in to the outfield to see Babe Ruth play. "Well, he was the Caruso of baseball and I never forgot that feeling." Appropriately, in 1986, for the Yanks' opening game at Yankee Stadium, Robert Merrill became the first person ever to both sing the Star Spangled Banner and throw out the first ball. He continued to appear at Yankee Stadium occasionally until a few years before his death on October 23, 2004.

New York's Metropolitan Opera Orchestra dates back as an established ensemble almost to the Metropolitan Opera's founding in the 1880s. The orchestra has been led by legendary conductors of the 20th and 21st centuries, including Arturo Toscanini, George Szell, and James Levine.

New York upper-crust families launched an effort to establish a world-class opera company in 1880, and the Metropolitan Opera was launched with the 1883-1884 season. August Vianesia was the music director but was soon replaced in 1886 by Anton Seidl, a protégé of Wagner who molded the orchestra into a first-class group along German lines before departing in 1897. Other important early conductors included Alfred Hertz, Gustav Mahler (1908-1910), and Toscanini, who headed the orchestra from 1908 to 1915. Orchestra members by the 1930s earned starting salaries of some $10,000, less than the superstar singers the company engaged but more than what most other orchestras paid, and ever since then, a seat in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra has been a plum assignment for orchestral musicians.

Through the middle of the 20th century and beyond, the Metropolitan Opera was led by European-born conductors who were also prominent in the field of orchestral music, including Szell, Bruno Walter (1941-1951), Fritz Reiner, Erich Leinsdorf, and Dmitri Mitropoulos. The company pioneered operatic broadcasts on radio (from 1930) and television (from 1940), which arguably increased the prominence of the orchestra since audiences experienced no visual component; broadcasts, now including those via the Internet, have remained important to the Met's mission. Doubtless, the most significant of the orchestra's more recent conductors has been James Levine, whose career ended under a cloud but who shaped bold interpretations, many of them in part orchestrally based, for decades. Levine was succeeded by Fabio Luisi and by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, music director since 2018. The orchestra has issued several recordings independent of operatic productions, including one of Wagner's orchestral music and, in 2022, A Concert for Ukraine. ~ James Manheim

The Chorus of the Metropolitan Opera has been instrumental in the establishment and continuation of excellence that has marked the Met as one of the premier opera houses in the world. With a flexible roster of professional singers, the Chorus is able to adapt to meet the demands of one of the integral parts of opera performance since the genre's birth. With the Met's continued outreach and ability to incorporate new media, the Chorus has been heard on hundreds of recordings and seen by audiences around the world on video, including a groundbreaking live-broadcast stream to movie theaters.

The Metropolitan Opera was founded in 1883 after an effort led by New York's Roosevelt, Morgan, and Vanderbilt families to establish a world-class company. Right from the start, the new company was a success, and its Orchestra and Chorus have remained vital to its mission. Auguste Vianesi was the company's first music director, and a long list of notable names have followed, including Arturo Toscanini, Bruno Walter, and James Levine, among many others. The role of chorus master of the Metropolitan Opera Chorus has also been held by a distinguished list, most notably Kurt Adler, who held this title, as well as that of principal conductor for a time, from 1943 until 1973.

The Metropolitan Opera has been on the leading edge of technology practically since its founding. In the first years of the 20th century, around 140 recordings of the Met were made on phonograph cylinders, named the Mapleson Cylinders, between 1901 and 1903. In 1910, the company began broadcasting, with live performances transmitted to a relatively nearby area. However, in the 1930s, these live productions were broadcast nationally by several major networks and eventually by the Met itself on its Metropolitan Opera Radio Network. Similarly, with the advent and wider preponderance of television, the Met began broadcasting live performances to households in the 1940s while also dabbling in distributions to movie theaters. These traditions have continued and evolved with technology and, as of the early 2020s, include live performances simulcast in high definition to movie theaters, taped performances broadcast on television, a dedicated streaming radio station, and a litany of well-regarded recordings. Yannick Nézet-Séguin has served as the Met's music director since 2018, and as of 2023, Donald Palumbo held the title of chorus master. ~ Keith Finke

Jerome Hines was one of the best known and most durable of American bass-baritones, known for his rich, powerful, unforced voice and his psychologically penetrating acting performances.

Jerome Albert Link Heinz (as he was born) loved singing but was turned down by his junior high school glee club because his voice didn't blend.

He studied at the University of California Los Angeles, with a degree in science, having taken chemistry, physics, and mathematics. He taught chemistry at UCLA for a year, then worked as a chemist for an oil company.

However, while he had been at UCLA he took singing lessons from Gennaro Curci, and at the age of 20 debuted at the San Francisco Opera in 1941; during that season he sang as Monterone in Verdi's Rigoletto and in Tannhäuser. After that, he was invited to sing with several orchestras, including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and with the New Orleans Opera, which convinced him to concentrate on singing as his career. He won the Caruso Award in 1946, resulting in his Metropolitan Opera audition and debut in 1947 as The Sergeant in Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov. Irving Kolodin's review made as much mention of his tall height as of his "able singing." In December, he was given the role of Méphistophélès in Gounod's Faust. The New York Times judged that the role was "still somewhat beyond him" but praised his singing ability and said that "much can be expected" of him.

He soon proved himself a reliable comprimario singer the next season, appearing 45 times in ten roles, including the Grand Inquisitor in Don Carlos, Don Basilio in Il Barbiere di Siviglia, the Commendatore in Don Giovanni, and Nick Swallow in Peter Grimes. He also appeared in these years in Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, and Mexico City. His reputation soared when he was selected by conductor Arturo Toscanini to sing some of his concerts and appear in his 1953 recording of Beethoven's Missa Solemnis.

Also in 1953 he made major European appearances at the Glyndebourne and Edinburgh Festivals.

Complications in his career development arose in 1951, when the Montreal-born American bass-baritone George London appeared at the Met. With the presence of London, Hines, and Ezio Pinza -- singers so great that in a later day they would surely have been marketed as the "Three Basses" -- it took Hines a few more years before he moved out of roles like the Grand Inquisitor and the Sergeant into the leading roles, like Philip II and Boris himself.

In the mid-1950s, he added the major Wagnerian bass-baritone parts to his repertoire, including Gurnemanz, King Marke, and Wotan, all of which he sang at Bayreuth. In 1962, he became the second American singer to portray Boris Godunov at the Bolshoi Opera in Moscow; George London had preceded him in 1960.

Hines went on to sing 45 roles in hundreds of performances at the Metropolitan. He holds the record for the most consecutive seasons there by any major artist at 41. His last appearance was on January 24, 1987 as Sparafucile in Rigoletto.

He was a highly religious man who is reputed to have walked out of a production at the Met due to his objections over the "lewd" qualities of the choreography. He wrote an opera, I Am the Way, on the life of Christ. His autobiography, This is my Story, this is my Song, was published in 1968, and he wrote two highly regarded books on the art of singing, Great Singers on Great Singing (1982) and The Four Voices of Man (1997).