Considering his standing in the 1920s and ’30s, Richard Crooks has gone into something approaching (to purloin the title of one of his frequent oratorio and concert offerings) total eclipse. His popularity, achieved through recordings, radio broadcasts, and oratorio and recital appearances, rivaled that of Pinza or Tibbett. As with other singers of his time, his repertoire included ballads, romantic parlor songs, operetta extracts, and “sacred solos” mixed in with opera arias and Lieder. But he was well regarded as opera and Lieder singer, both here and in Europe, where his operatic debut took place in 1927. Recordings from that time show a fresh, ringing, pliant voice that records well in both purely lyric and Jugendlich excerpts (best of all, I think, an “Una furtiva lagrima,” in German, that has not more than two or three peers I can call to mind). He sings a poised, well-knit legato with admirable command of dynamics from a true (not falsetto) mezza-voce to a satisfying forte, raising concern only with the tendency of open vowels to not quite gather themselves at full voice till a step or so above the optimal pitch.

Crooks reached the Met in February, 1933, when he was 32, as Massenet’s Des Grieux. For several years thereafter his performances, especially in French roles, were extremely successful with both the public and the critics. Unfortunately, health problems forced him to curtail his operatic appearances by 1942, and he retired from even his beloved Voice of Firestone radio home base by 1945, when he should still have been in his vocal prime.^(I) He was still in that prime in this performance. By 1940, the tendency to sing “too open” above the passaggio had started to thin out many a G and A-flat and knock the support from under the mezza-voce (quite similar to the unfortunate route traveled by Giuseppe di Stefano’s voice some 15-20 years later), and he had resorted to a not-uninteresting voix mixte for the C in “Salut, demeure.” In ’37, the voice is holding together much better, the C is convincingly full-throated, and the performance as a whole is more resonant and confident. The voice is of such loveliness, the rubato and responsiveness to musical atmosphere of such instinctive rightness, as to bring us close to an ideal Faust. His traversal of the opening scene captures through purely musical means (for the voice is youthful) the old man’s world-weariness, and differentiates the succession of episodes, as well as any I can recall, and the tenderness of his courting in the Garden Scene is heart-melting. I am compelled to note one bad stylistic habit—his overuse of the descending portamento, which becomes almost his default manner of connecting downward intervals. But perhaps you’re even fonder of portamenti than I.