TAUBER THE TENOR

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32903, 29 April 1972, Page 10

TAUBER THE TENOR

This Was Richard Tauber. By Charles Castle with Diana Napier Tauber. W. H. Allen. 209 pp. The author of this biography of the singer Richard Tauber was also the writer and director of a 8.8. C. television film produced last year to mark what would have been Tauber’s eightieth birthday. With the assistance of the singer’s widow and drawing on interviews- with Tauber’s friends and theatre colleagues, Mr Castle has produced a titillating picture of a man who was not only one of the greatest tenors and Mozart singers of his time, but also the star of films, operettas and musical comedies in Europe and America.

Presumably the television film was aimed at the wider viewing public, for the book itself seems to be more concerned with the singer’s humble background, sexual inadequacies, marital troubles and financial difficulties than his musical gifts and achievements. Tauber was the illegitimate son of a Jewish actor and Roman Catholic soubrette. Bom in Austria in 1891, he was sent to a foster home when three days old, although his mother visited him daily. At the age of six he was claimed by his father who encouraged his son to take up a musical career. After two years singing study he gained a five-year contract with the Dresden State Opera. This was followed by guest appearances in the capitals of Europe and, as his fame spread, success after success. As well as being a well known opera singer, Tauber became an acknowledged interpreter of German Lieder, and in 1924 began his long association with the composer Franz Lehar who composed many melodies specially for Tauber. After starring in Lehar’s operettas, Tauber moved on to films and musical comedies. His private life, however, was not as successful. His first marriage, to singer Carlotta Vanconti, lasted only a year and was followed by successful attempts by his ex-wife to blackmail him by threatening to publish details of his sexual inadequacies. At the age REPRINTS AND NEW EDITIONS Creative Metal Craft. By Heinz Ullrich and Dieter Klante. Batsford. 119 pp. Illustrated. Intended especially for teachers and other interested adults, this volume (a reprint of a book which first appeared in 1968) offers a useful guide to decorative work in wire, tin, and metal fabric. As well as relief work, jewellery, lattice work, and'figures, constructive work (both spatial and dynamic) receives appropriate attention, and makes this a book which will be of as much interest to the artist as to the aspirant craftsman. The notes on the numerous illustrations are businesslike and easy to follow, and the book eludes with a brief appendix of "technical tips.”

of 37, he was seriously ill with arthritis and the illness left him permanently lame and also with stiff wrists. In 1936 he married British actress Diana Napier, who claims to have cured the sexual deficiencies but who, on the outbreak of war, became an army nurse and left her husband to his many amours. Their friendship and affection continued though, and the book includes a good deal of correspondence between Tauber, his wife and bis mistress of eight years standing, Esther Moncrieff. Despite his fame and success, when Tauber died of lung cancer in 1948, he owed £22,000 in taxes to the British Inland Revenue. During one season in America his telephone bill alone came to over SUS3SOO and he once telephoned from New York to let his barber at the Dorchester Hotel (where he kept a suite) know when he would be arriving in London. Richard Tauber was certainly a larger-than-life personality, and his biography includes comments and tributes from celebrities such as singers Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, Carole Lynne, and Vanessa Lee, the conductor Eric Robinson, and Sir David Webster, a former General Administrator of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. There are lots of black and white photographs and an index. Surrealism Paris Peasant. By Louis Aragon. Translated and edited by Simon Watson Taylor. Cape. 222 pp. This book, which has for a long time been very difficult to procure, is one of the seminal works in French surrealism; once this context is properly understood, it is not too difficult to understand how it can be termed a novel. The first two sections, "The Passage de I’Opera” and "A Feeling for Nature at the Buttes-Chaumont," take the outward form of a fantastic tour of the two places, with the consciousness of the guide drifting off at varying removes from their physical stimulus. Interspersed among this are numerous passages of philosophising, some of which are very abstract, and these take control of the brief, final section, “The Peasant’s Dream.” In his introduction, Taylor quotes Aragon as saying that he was trying to write a novel “that the critics would be obliged to approach empty-handed . . . because in this instance the rules of the game would all have been swept aside.” He also explains that he was attempting to produce a novel that would present itself as a mythology, “a mythology of the modem.” It is difficult to be sure of precisely what Aragon means by this term, but one suspects from the distinct period flavour that the work now has that he was not wholly successful in his aims. Only the more adventurous readers are likely to appreciate this book, but those who respond to French surrealist poetry will find this novel a fascinating and stimulating experience.—H. D. McN.