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Robert Merrill
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Robert Merrill (June 4, 1919 – October 23, 2004) was an American operatic baritone. Although his birth year is often given as 1917, his birth certificate clearly states 1919.
Merrill was born Morris (Moishe) Miller in Brooklyn, New York, to shoe salesman Abraham Miller, originally Milstein, and his wife Lillian, née Balaban, immigrants from Warsaw, Poland. Lillian claimed to have had an operatic and concert career in Poland (a fact denied by her son in his biographies) and encouraged her son to have early voice training: he had a tendency to stutter, which disappeared when singing. Merrill was inspired to pursue professional singing lessons when he saw the baritone Richard Bonelli singing De Luna in a performance of Il Trovatore at the Metropolitan Opera, and paid for them with money earned as a semi-professional pitcher. In his early radio appearances as a crooner he was sometimes billed as Merrill Miller. While singing at bar mitzvahs and weddings and Borscht Belt resorts, he met an agent, Moe Gale, who found him work at Radio City Music Hall and with the NBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Arturo Toscanini. With Toscanini conducting, he eventually sang in two of the famous maestro's NBC broadcasts of famous operas, La Traviata (in 1946), and Un Ballo in Maschera (in 1954). Both of those broadcasts were eventually released on both LP and CD.
Merrill's 1944 operatic debut was in
Verdi's
Aida at
Newark, New Jersey, with the famous tenor
Giovanni Martinelli, then at the end of his long stage career.
Merrill, who had continued his vocal studies under Samuel Margolis made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera in 1945, as Germont in La Traviata. His role in the musical comedy film Aaron Slick from Punkin Crick (1952) led to conflict with Sir Rudolf Bing and a brief departure from the Met in 1951. Merrill sang many different baritone roles, becoming, after the on-stage death of Leonard Warren in 1960, the Met's principal baritone. He was described by Time as "one of the Met's best baritones". He also continued to perform on radio and television, in nightclubs and recitals. He retired from the Met in 1976. For many years, he led services, often in Borscht Belt hotels, on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur.
Merrill married soprano Roberta Peters in 1952. They parted amicably; he had two children, a son David and a daughter Lizanne, with his second wife, Marion, née Machno, a pianist. Merrill liked to play golf and was a member of the Westchester Country Club in Rye, New York, for many years.
He wrote two books of memoirs, Once More from the Beginning (1965) and Between Acts (1976), and he co-authored a novel, The Divas (1978). Merrill toured all over the world with his arranger and conductor, Angelo DiPippo and performed at concert halls throughout the world. He always donated his time on the Cerebral Palsy telethon with Dennis James. Merrill received the National Medal of Arts in 1993.
Relatively late in his singing career, Merrill also became known for singing "
The Star-Spangled Banner" at
Yankee Stadium. He first sang the
national anthem to open the 1969
baseball season, and it became a tradition for the
Yankees to bring him back each year on
Opening Day and special occasions. He sang at various Old Timer's Days (wearing his own pinstriped Yankee uniform with the number "1 1/2" on the back) and the emotional pre-game ceremony for
Thurman Munson at Yankee Stadium on
August 3,
1979, the day after the catcher's death in a plane crash. A recorded Merrill version is sometimes used at Yankee Stadium today. He preferred a traditional approach to the song devoid of additional
ornamentation, as he explained to
Newsday in 2000, "When you sing the anthem, there's a legitimacy to it. I'm extremely bothered by these different interpretations of it."
Death
Robert Merrill died at home in
New Rochelle, NY, while watching Game 1 of the 2004 World Series between the
Boston Red Sox and the
St. Louis Cardinals. He is interred at the
Sharon Gardens Cemetery in
Valhalla, NY, which is a subdivision of The
Kensico Cemetery. His headstone features an opera curtain that has been drawn open. In keeping with Jewish tradition, small rocks rest on top of the headstone.
His epitaph states:
- Like a bursting celestial star, he showered his family and the world with love, joy, and beauty. Encore please.
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