David Rendall, a British tenor who gained starring roles in Mozart, Verdi and Donizetti on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to a light, clear voice, but who found life uncomfortably imitating art in a pair of career-altering stage mishaps, died on July 21 at his home in New Forest, England. He was 76.
His death was announced on Facebook and Instagram by Glyndebourne, the British opera company Mr. Rendall joined in 1974. His son Huw Montague Rendall, an acclaimed baritone, said in an interview that he had died after a “long complicated illness.”
Mr. Rendall was a regular at the Metropolitan Opera throughout the 1980s, singing in 134 performances as Ernesto in “Don Pasquale,” Tamino in “The Magic Flute,” Alfredo in “La Traviata,” Don Ottavio in “Don Giovanni” and in other works, and earning mixed reviews. He performed some of the same roles at the Royal Opera House in London in that decade, though British critics were generally more enthusiastic. He also sang at La Scala in Milan, the Vienna State Opera and Opéra Bastille in Paris, among other venues.
But it was in two stage accidents, the second of which, in 2005, curtailed his singing career, that Mr. Rendall gained notoriety and unwittingly illustrated the perils of operatic life.
In April 2005, Mr. Rendall was singing Radamès in Verdi’s “Aida” at the Royal Danish Theater in Copenhagen when part of the stage collapsed, destroying the set. He was “knocked down at least 15 feet and tried to crawl to safety to avoid being crushed,” he later told The Telegraph of London. “I thought I was going to die,” a fate that awaits Radamès in the opera but is not normally faced by tenors singing the role.
Mr. Rendall had knee and hip replacements and surgery to his shoulder after the accident. Directors stopped calling, and he had to put his home up for sale. “I can’t do what some directors want onstage,” he told The Telegraph. Mr. Rendall received some compensation from the theater but sued anyway.
Seven years earlier, life had also intruded on operatic fantasy, putting not Mr. Rendall but his partner at risk.
Mr. Rendall was singing Canio in “I Pagliacci” in Milwaukee in November 1998 — his ringing performance of the great Act I aria “Vesti la giubba” is particularly noteworthy — when he nearly stabbed to death the baritone Kimm Julian.
The last scene includes, in the libretto, just such a stabbing, when Canio kills Silvio, the lover of his unfaithful wife.
“I’d been given my props when we started rehearsing, and these included a knife for the stabbing scene,” Mr. Rendall later told The Times. “At the crucial moment, just as I’d done 12 times before, I pushed the button to make the blade retract. But when I looked down, I saw to my amazement that the blade was still out.”
Mr. Kimm, blood-soaked, collapsed. The blade had gone three inches into his chest and narrowly missed killing him.
When the police arrived the director inadvertently gave them the plot of “Pagliacci”; unfamiliar with the composer Ruggero Leoncavallo’s text, they believed Mr. Rendall had stabbed Mr. Kimm in a fit of jealousy.
“Farce was turning into nightmare,” Mr. Rendall told The Times. The police questioned him sternly, but eventually released him. Mr. Kimm underwent surgery and later returned to performing
“Horrific as it was, the incident led to fantastic publicity — the show suddenly sold out,” Mr. Rendall said.
On other occasions Mr. Rendall’s reception, especially from critics, was often less forgiving.
“Mr. Rendall’s Don Ottavio, on the other hand, had the fineness of articulation that bespeaks a real Mozartean tenor,” Bernard Holland wrote in The New York Times of a 1983 Met performance of Don Giovanni. “If only he had been able to sing more often in tune.”
“His is not really a tenor of the first quality,” Donal Henahan said of Mr. Rendall’s performance in Idomeneo at the Met in 1986.
The Times critic Anthony Tommasini found more to like in a 2001 Otello with Glyndebourne, where Mr. Rendall “brought a clarion voice and tormented volatility to his portrayal.”
British critics were more enthusiastic. “David Rendall endows the ineffectual Leicester with plenty of Italianate ardor,” the opera expert John Barry Steane wrote in Gramophone magazine in 1999 of his performance in a famous English-language recording of Donizetti’s “Maria Stuarda.” As Ferrando in “Così Fan Tutte,” Mr. Rendall was a “fresh, lyrical tenor also capable of producing the hints of passion needed in some of the recitative,” Stanley Sadie wrote in Gramophone in May 1978.
Of a 2003 Tristan at the English National Opera, Tim Ashley wrote in The Guardian: “Rendall sings with a combination of beauty, steadiness and great heft.”
David Malcolm Rendall was born in London on Oct. 11, 1948, the son of John Rendall, a stockbroker manager, and Phyllis (Anne) Rendall, a nurse. As a teenager, he attended a technical school in South London where he studied bricklaying among other things, his son Huw said. He sang with friends in pickup pop music bands, but had no intention of pursuing an operatic career.
He was working as a clerk at the BBC sorting records when a producer heard him singing the aria “Questa o quella” from “Rigoletto,” and suggested he get training.
He attended the Royal Academy of Music in London from 1970 to 1973, was named Young Musician of the Year by the Greater London Arts Association in 1973, and also studied at the Mozarteum in Salzburg.
He made his New York debut at the City Opera in 1978 as Rodolfo in “La Bohème” and in Don Pasquale at the Met two years later.
Among his other notable recordings were in Puccini’s “La Rondine” with Lorin Maazel in 1985 and Korngold’s “Die Kathrin” with Martyn Brabbins in 1998. After the accident in Copenhagen in 2005, Mr. Rendall was largely absent from the stage but did make occasional appearances, notably at a London concert in 2013 with his wife, the mezzo soprano Diana Montague.
Besides his wife and son Huw, Mr. Rendall is survived by three daughters, Eleanor, Amelia and Elizabeth; another son Edward; and two grandchildren.
“He poured every part of his personality, his soul, his experience into every role,” Huw Montague Rendall said. “He adored it, it really was part of him. He had a wonderful career until 2005.”
Mr. Rendall’s operatic career, as narrated in his blog, was punctuated by not always welcome intrusions of real-life passion. In Caracas in 1981, where he sang Faust in Gounod’s opera, the husband of the woman playing Siebel accosted him, after he had greeted her with a kiss on the cheeks.
“He basically accused me of having an affair with his wife,” Mr. Rendall wrote. “Then he reached inside his jacket, pulled out a gun, and pointed it at me.”
Adam Nossiter has been bureau chief in Kabul, Paris, West Africa and New Orleans, and is now a Domestic Correspondent on the Obituaries desk.
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