Joseph Schmidt

To encounter Joseph Schmidt’s voice today through any of the more than eighty songs and arias he preserved is to confront one of the most resplendent yet heartbreaking narratives in musical history. During the 1920s and 1930s the tenor, frequently hailed as “the Jewish Caruso,” enthralled listeners across Germany and the rest of Europe for roughly ten years; because he stood less than five feet tall, however, he was barred from the operatic stage and earned the additional nickname “the pocket Caruso” while touring America. His German citizenship proved disastrous once the Nazi regime consolidated power. Although he continued occasional joint recitals with his colleague Richard Tauber, Schmidt could no longer live or work in Germany and therefore traversed Belgium, France, and finally Switzerland. There his health collapsed; he perished inside a refugee internment camp, one among countless victims of that country’s policies toward Jewish exiles.

Born to Wolf and Sarah Schmidt, he grew up as one of three children in a Cernowitz community comprising Poles, Romanians, Ukrainians, Germans, and Roma. As a teenager he mastered Romanian, German, French, and Hebrew while singing in the local synagogue, where his vocal promise quickly became apparent. He soon added operatic arias to the Jewish folk songs already in his repertoire. Voice study in Berlin was interrupted by three years of military service in the late 1920s; after discharge he returned to Cernowitz as cantor. A Berlin appearance that grew out of that post led to a radio broadcast in which he sang the role of Vasco da Gama in Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine.

The broadcast ignited an international recording career, prompting several companies to secure his services. Early contracts with Ultraphone and HMV gave way to the Odeon and Parlophone labels, both EMI subsidiaries, for the bulk of his work. In 1931 he entered films with a supporting role as a singing bartender in Der Liebesexpress; several subsequent starring vehicles, also issued in English-language editions, enjoyed comparable success.

Schmidt attracted substantial followings in England, the United States, the Netherlands, France, Belgium, much of the remaining European continent, and South America, yet his greatest fame resided in Germany—the very nation whose political order placed him in mortal danger. He attempted to weather the post-1933 prohibition on Jewish performers with assistance from allies such as Richard Tauber, though film work ceased. In 1937 he embarked on an extensive American tour, appearing in concert with Metropolitan Opera soprano Maria Jeritza, film and concert artist Grace Moore, and Erna Sack.

He later settled in Belgium and then the Netherlands, touring wherever conditions still permitted, before missing by mere days an opportunity to sail for America. Seeking refuge in Switzerland without valid papers, he was confined to the Gyrenbad internment camp for Jewish refugees, where conditions bordered on brutal. Global appeals for his release arrived too late amid the worldwide conflict; Schmidt died inside the camp and was interred in a Jewish cemetery near Zurich.

Few tenor voices captured on disc have matched the sheer force Schmidt commanded. Even the recordings made during the 1930s reveal one of the century’s most extraordinary instruments. Had he survived another decade he would have been ideally placed to record the major lyric tenor roles of Italian, French, and German opera and operetta on late 78 rpm discs and early LPs; had he reached a normal lifespan into his sixties his voice would still have contended with every rival through the emergence of Luciano Pavarotti in the 1960s. Sufficient physical stature would likewise have secured for him the unchallenged ownership of those same parts that Caruso held at the start of the century and Pavarotti reclaimed in the 1960s and 1970s. What remains are the discs he made principally for EMI between 1929 and 1937, documents that continue to radiate overwhelming beauty.