Robert White, who got his start as a child singer in the waning days of network radio and developed into a versatile tenor in the tradition of the Irish superstar John McCormack, with a repertory stretching from medieval times to contemporary premieres, alongside chestnuts like “My Wild Irish Rose” and “Danny Boy,” died on March 17 — St. Patrick’s Day — in Manhattan. He was 89.
His death, at a rehabilitation facility, was from metastatic prostate cancer, Carswell Berlin, a friend, said.
As a boy, Mr. White followed in the broadcasting footsteps of his father, a popular light tenor during the heyday of radio after World War I. But as his voice changed, he built a serious and wide-ranging classical career, collaborating with major artists like Eugene Ormandy, Leonard Bernstein and Yo-Yo Ma, without stinting the traditional ballads that McCormack (1884-1945) had brought to the masses.
“I don’t think anyone else understood how to carry a line with freedom, and yet with pulse and rhythm, the way he did,” the pianist and composer Stephen Hough, a friend who performed and recorded with Mr. White, said in an interview. “You had this sense that he was creating a song as he went along, as if he was making it up. But by the end you realized it had to be that way.”
Robert Francis White was born on Oct. 27, 1936, in the Bronx, one of six children of Joseph and Maureen (O’Byrne) White, an Irish immigrant from Galway. His father was born in New York City. Robert grew up in the borough’s Mott Haven neighborhood, then an Irish enclave.
In the 1920s, his father was a performer in a radio show and orchestral tour sponsored by the tire company B.F. Goodrich for its Silvertown tires. The show featured an unnamed tenor wearing a silver mask, and the mystery of who he was became a publicity gimmick, a century before “The Masked Singer” was a hit on TV.
Even after Joseph White’s identity was revealed, he continued performing as the “Silver-Masked Tenor,” singing mostly traditional Irish songs and contemporary ballads. His wife wrote lyrics that he set to music.
Robert grew up enraptured by McCormack’s best-selling records, and he recorded his first album, “Ring of Gold,” when he was just 7. As a child, he belted out ballads on popular radio programs like “The Fred Allen Show” and “Coast to Coast on a Bus,” hosted by Milton Cross, who referred to him as “our own little John McCormack.”
Mr. White, who had early vocal training from his father, received his bachelor’s degree in music from Hunter College in New York in 1959. While an undergraduate, he jumped in to replace an indisposed colleague in performances with Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, singing the role of Pilate in a rare Baroque Passion setting.
“Mr. White, who is an expert musician with a pure, sweet voice, made him a touching character,” Ross Parmenter wrote in The New York Times.
He became a specialist in early music, joining New York Pro Musica and the Renaissance Quartet in recordings and on tours. His work was varied from the start, though, and in 1963 he appeared in a pair of contemporary operas: the American premiere of Paul Hindemith’s one-act “The Long Christmas Dinner” and, as part of NBC’s televised opera series, the world premiere of Gian Carlo Menotti’s “Labyrinth.”
“One day the phone rang,” Mr. White recalled in an interview for the Gian Carlo Menotti Archive in 2020. “‘Hello, Bob, it’s Gian Carlo. I’d like you to be in my next opera for NBC.’”
When the score arrived in the mail, Mr. White found that Menotti had cast him as a 90-year-old chess player. “It took three hours to put the makeup on,” he said.
Mr. White continued his studies in Germany, Italy and France, and earned a master’s degree from the Juilliard School in 1968.
His career was moving along nicely by the mid-1970s, but he found himself wanting more. At a dinner after a concert, he was seated next to the arts patron Alice Tully, who bemoaned the fact that singers no longer covered the classic McCormack repertory, which was stereotyped as the province of nasal-toned crooners.
“Then she turned to me,” he recalled, “and said, ‘But maybe you can, Bobby dear.’ So I held her hand and sang ‘Mavis’ for her, and she had tears in her eyes. That’s when it occurred to me that if someone as eminent as Alice can be so moved, then I’ve got to do something with those ballads after all.”
For McCormack’s label, RCA, he recorded the ballads album “When You and I Were Young, Maggie,” released in 1976, and went on to perform those songs and others to acclaim on television, including in collaboration with the Irish flutist James Galway. He also began to incorporate the songs into recitals.
Reviewing a recital by Mr. White at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1978, Joseph Horowitz wrote in The Times that the Irish songs “were a particular tour de force.”
“Mr. White treated them with great affection,” he added, “brandishing a convincing brogue and elegantly dramatizing their stories.”
In 1992, the Times critic Bernard Holland called him “New York’s best Irish tenor.”
Mr. White taught voice at the Manhattan School of Music from 1986 to 1990 before joining the voice faculty at Juilliard in 1991. He retired in 2022. He leaves no immediate survivors.
Mr. White was long able to move freely among styles and eras. Reviewing a 1997 concert in The Times, Anthony Tommasini wrote that Mr. White “might seem an unlikely exponent of Renaissance music. Stylistically he is a throwback, a twinkly-eyed Irish tenor with a light, lyrical voice.”
Yet, Mr. Tommasini added, that approach to singing “is not far removed from the courtly minstrel tradition that produced a large part of the Renaissance song repertory.”
By the turn of the 21st century, some 50 years into his career, Mr. White had worked with many living composers, and he decided to ask a large group of them to write songs for him. The result was a recital of 19 premieres at the Metropolitan Museum in November 2001, including submissions from Milton Babbitt, William Bolcom, Lukas Foss, Menotti — whose contribution arrived on Mr. White’s fax machine just hours before curtain time — and John Corigliano.
“He had a unique sound,” Mr. Corigliano said of Mr. White in an interview. “The sweetness of his voice, I can recognize it anywhere — a distinctive sound.”
Mr. White’s words about McCormack could have applied to himself, too: “When he sang ballads, he did them with as much love and care and vocal polish as he gave the most exacting classical works.”
James Barron writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup of what’s happening in the city.
The post Robert White, Tenor Renowned for Irish Ballads, Dies at 89 appeared first on New York Times.
