Richard Crooks (1900-1972)
Le Rêve
Manon
by Jules Massenet
American tenor Richard Crooks studied with Sidney H. Bourne and Frank LaForge in New York. After several busy concert seasons as an oratorio and song recital specialist, including participation in the American premiere of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, he traveled to Germany where he made his operatic début in Hamburg as Cavaradossi in 1927. Following appearances in Berlin and other European centers, he returned to the US, making his American début in 1930 in Philadelphia as Cavardossi. In 1933 he made his Metropolitan début as Massenet’s Des Grieux and remained with the company for the next ten years as well as singing in other houses.
Although limited in the upper register, Crooks possessed a voice of uncommon sweetness mixed with virility, and he learned to produce the top notes as cleverly mixed head tones. Max de Shauensee remarked that Crooks was “admired for [his] consistently high standard of tone and [vocal] production. He was a sound musician but an indifferent actor.” On this latter point, Peter Davis remarked in The American Opera Singer that “from his photographs at least, Crooks always gave the impression of a friendly insurance salesman. But the voice was by far the most attractive among the American tenors of his generation.”
Crooks gained his greatest fame through his huge number of ballad recordings and hundreds of radio broadcasts, especially as a regular on The Voice of Firestone (“If I could tell you . . .”) beginning in 1932. It was during a 1945 Firestone program that Crooks lost a top note—muscular support had become increasingly difficult after a series of operations for peritonitis—and he retired on the spot.
