 Walter Cassel and his wife Gail Manners Cassel | Born: May 15, 1910 Council Bluffs, Iowa Died: July 3, 2000 Bloomington, Indiana |
Walter Cassel’s Metropolitan Opera debut was in 1942 as de Bretigny in Manon (BEFORE his debut with the New York City Opera, which came in 1948.) He stayed at the Met until 1945. And though he returned there once again in 1955, and sang there until 1974 (he sang 275 performances at the Met and only 126 at the NYCO), Walter Cassel’s name will forever be associated with the “other” opera company, and then most especially for his signature portrayal of Baby Doe Tabor’s garrulous husband Horace.
Yet, despite his versatility in French, German and Italian repertoire, his notoriety for having performed opposite the great Maria Callas without any wounds to show for it, and prodigious feats like performing Scarpia, Kurwenal and Jochanaan all within the space of twenty-four hours, Walter Cassel remains relatively unknown, even among opera devotees. Indeed, almost his only extant recording is the definitive Baby Doe, with Beverly Sills and Frances Bible, done in a single take during the opera’s New York run in 1958.
Cassel grew up in Council Bluffs, Iowa, taking trumpet lessons and singing in his high school chorus. He intended to go into dentistry while attending Creighton University in Omaha, but changed his mind after an encounter with legendary baritone Lawrence Tibbett, a personality whose influence stayed with Cassel the rest of his life. Following Tibbett’s advice to go to New York to pursue a professional singing career, he arranged with a helpful freight agent to accompany a carload of cattle “on-the-hoof” to a yard in New Jersey, just across the Hudson from Manhattan. It was December of 1933. He spent an entire week in a cold caboose. But on his first day in New York Cassel got a scalper’s ticket to hear Tibbett in Aïda. Two days later he had a regular gig on an NBC radio show.
Cassel (who remembered, in retrospect, reading in 1935 about the death of the real Baby Doe Tabor) created the role of Horace Tabor in the world premiere night of The Ballad of Baby Doe at Central City, Colorado, July 7, 1956. (Dolores Wilson was Baby, and Martha Lipton was Augusta.) Though that performance is lost to history, some of the performances from that original season survive due to Cassel’s own ingenuity. He had the presence of mind not only to hook his tape recorder up to the opera house stage’s public address system (the means by which singers could hear the progress of the performance while still in their dressing rooms), but to give copies to the principals, after the fact, for their archives. As a result, at least two virtually complete recordings of those original casts, which include such other wonderful singers as Leyna Gabriele, Norman Treigle and Clifford Harvuot, are preserved in private collections to this day.
Not unlike the man he chose to play so often, Walter Cassel’s robustly-etched portrayal of Colorado’s richest miner will loom formidably over every performance by every baritone who attempts to follow in his shoes. During the thirty-five years following the opera’s premiere, he sang the Horace Tabor role hundreds of times: discovering a deeper connection with it in every performance. Or rather, spurred on by the powerful influence of the great Hanya Holm (Baby Doe‘s original stage director), Cassel became Horace Tabor hundreds of times thereafter. “It felt like we were turning into the people we were supposed to be playing,” Cassel later recalled of her meticulous and rigorous direction. An audience could hardly ask for more from an artist. And as a permanent legacy, both Walter AND Horace should be “mighty” proud.
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Walter Cassel starred as Sergeant Shane Rollins in the 1938 musical short Romance Road. The video is available on YouTube.
Romance Road entry on IMDB.