Robert Merrill

Born in New York on June 4, 1917, Robert Merrill received his earliest vocal instruction from his mother, the concert singer Lillian Miller Merrill. Samuel Margolis became his first external teacher. After launching a career as a radio vocalist, Merrill made his operatic stage debut in Aida in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1944. He captured first prize in the Metropolitan Opera Auditions of the Air, then stepped onto the Met stage for the first time on December 15, 1945, in the role of Germont in La Traviata.

For the remainder of his lengthy career he remained principally associated with the Metropolitan, where audiences valued his vigorous, unwavering delivery even though his acting and interpretive choices were rarely adventurous. Despite possessing a well-schooled and naturally endowed voice, he seldom projected striking dramatic imagination. Merrill’s first European appearance came in 1961, again as Germont, in Venice; six years later he sang the same part at Covent Garden. He continued as a central figure at the Metropolitan, reaching his 500th performance there on March 5, 1973, without any audible loss of vocal strength. That consistency and dependability endeared him to the public.

In addition to opera, Merrill appeared frequently on radio and television, took part in several films, and performed in stage musicals, among them Fiddler on the Roof. His principal roles belonged to the standard baritone repertoire performed at the Met—Tosca, Carmen, Otello, The Barber of Seville, and Falstaff, in which he portrayed Ford. He left an extensive discography that includes early recordings made when Arturo Toscanini selected him for a Traviata broadcast. For a short period he was married to soprano Roberta Peters, another leading artist at the Metropolitan. Merrill published two volumes of memoirs: Once More from the Beginning in 1965 and Between Acts in 1977.