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Hilde Gueden (born Hulda Geiringer) was among the extraordinary young Mozart/Strauss singers who emerged from Vienna immediately after WWII and who dominated Mozart performance well into the 1960s. Gueden's considerable ease in the top register destined her to sing the lighter roles of Richard Strauss and she made a mark in operetta as well, achieving celebrity in the works of Johann Strauss, Lehár, and others. She was a trim, sparkling personality on stage; as a Decca artist, she left numerous recordings of her best roles.

Of Austrian, Italian, and Hungarian ancestry, Gueden's parents mixed finance and the arts: Gueden's father was a banker, while her mother was an actress. Gueden began her musical training at age seven with piano lessons, and began to study voice seven years later. When she was only 16, she was brought to the attention of operetta composer Robert Stolz who offered her a part in his Servus, servus; Gueden's performance immediately endeared her to the Viennese public. During the performance run the young soprano studied ballet privately and took courses in acting at the Max Reinhardt Academy, all with an eye toward the operatic stage.

With the Anschluss, Gueden escaped to Switzerland where she auditioned for the Zurich Opera. Engaged on the spot, Gueden made her debut in 1939 as Cherubino in Le nozze di Figaro. Numerous other roles came in the aftermath of her success and she remained in Zurich for two years. Family matters called her back to Vienna in 1941 and, finding herself unable to leave her home country, she accepted an engagement in Munich where she appeared first with conductor Clemens Krauss as Zerlina in Don Giovanni. Composer Richard Strauss attended a performance of Così fan tutte and, struck by the beauty and splendid vocal resources of the young singer, urged Gueden to study the role of Sophie in his Der Rosenkavalier. After taking his advice, Gueden made her Italian debut as Sophie at the Rome Opera in December 1942. Given her intense dislike for the Nazi regimes in both Austria and Germany, Gueden elected to remain in Italy. When the Nazis occupied that country, she simply withdrew from performing for the duration of the war, seeking shelter first in Venice, then in a rural town near Milan.

Following the conclusion of hostilities, Gueden returned to Austria and was invited to the Salzburg Festival in 1946 where she debuted in the signature role of Zerlina. That same year, she was engaged by the Vienna Staatsoper where she remained a treasured artist until 1973. In 1947, she sang at Covent Garden for the first time and, in 1951, she began a relationship with the Metropolitan Opera which lasted for nine seasons and embraced more than 100 performances in 13 roles. For the Metropolitan, she created the role of Anne Truelove in Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress in a production coming shortly after the work's Venice premiere. Among other roles in New York, Gueden sang both Musetta and Mimì in La bohème, Zerlina, Susanna, Sophie, Zdenka, and Rosalinde.

At Salzburg, Gueden offered a saucy performance of the title role in Strauss' Die Schweigsame Frau in 1959, and, in Vienna, a radiant Daphne in 1964, both productions captured on disc. Her cherishable Sophie was preserved on commercial recording under Erich Kleiber.

Nicolai Gedda -- possessor of one of the widest-ranging repertoires ever, phenomenal technique, and a bright, resonant voice with clarion high notes and a seductive mezza voice -- had one of the finest singing careers of the 20th century. He excelled in music of English, French, German, Italian, Russian, American, and Swedish composers, and was equally adept in traversing styles from the Baroque to the contemporary; he was as noted a performer of oratorio and songs as of opera. His performances were masterpieces of authentic style, from language and diction to phrasing. While performing Samuel Barber's Vanessa, in which he created the role of Anatol, critics consistently acclaimed his diction as the finest in the cast, even though he shared the stage with Rosalind Elias and Eleanor Steber -- both native speakers of English.

Gedda's father was Russian, his mother Swedish, and in 1929 his parents moved to Leipzig, where his father became cantor and choirmaster of a Russian Orthodox Church. As a child he sang in the church and performed Russian songs at weddings and parties. Having no wish to remain in Germany as the Nazi party rose to power, the family returned to Sweden in 1934.

As a teenager, he developed a strong ambition to become an opera singer, but unable to come up with the money to fund his studies, he became a bank teller, though he continued to participate in singing competitions. A wealthy bank client who was also an instrumentalist with the Stockholm Opera happened to hear Gedda mention his aspirations, and asked Karl-Martin Oehmann, a music teacher who had himself been an operatic tenor, to take him on as a pupil. Gedda later credited the development of his spectacular technique to Oehmann's teaching. Shortly thereafter, he won the Christine Nielsson Scholarship, which enabled him to begin music studies at the Stockholm Conservatory as a full time pupil in 1950.

In 1952, Gedda's recording and performing careers began simultaneously. Walter Legge, the famous producer for EMI, was in Sweden, and agreed to audition some of the students. He was immediately bowled over by Gedda's voice, musicianship, and technique; given that Gedda spoke fluent Russian, he signed him on the spot to take on the role of Dmitri in his upcoming recording of Boris Godunov, starring Boris Christoff -- all despite the fact that Gedda had yet to make his stage debut (which came only a short time later, in a production of Adolphe Adam's Le Postillon de Lonjumeau)! This began a lifelong association with EMI.

He made his La Scala debut in the 1952-1953 season as Don Ottavio (Mozart's Don Giovanni), and Carl Orff asked him to create the role of the Bridegroom in Il Trionfo dell'Afrodite; his Paris Opera debut in 1954 was as Huon in Weber's Oberon, and his Covent Garden debut in 1954 was as the Duke of Mantua. These were soon followed by debuts at Salzburg (Don Ottavio, 1957) and the Metropolitan Opera (Faust).

His life-long association with EMI made him one of the most widely-recorded tenors, though in the compact disc era, EMI had been rather dilatory in re-releasing many of his recordings.

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).

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