Jon Vickers

Born October 29, 1926;

Died July 10, 2015

Jon Vickers, who has died aged 88, was the grandest and most dramatic of operatic tenors, a granite-voiced exponent of some of the most macho roles - from Saint-Saens’s Samson to Verdi’s Otello, Wagner’s Tristan and Britten’s Peter Grimes - in the repertoire.

Nicknamed God’s Tenor, as much for his Christian beliefs as for his vocal splendour, he dominated the stages of Covent Garden, the New York Metropolitan, and La Scala, Milan, during his 30-year career, throughout which he remained a robust and fighting figure, quarrelling with conductors as eminent as Sir Georg Solti during rehearsals for Die Walkure in London and refusing to sing for him again.

In Dallas, during Act Three of Tristan and Isolde, he famously shouted at the audience, “Will you stop your damned coughing,” and when he caught the chorus munching peanuts during a performance of Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, he later complained “Either I sing or they eat.” There was no spirit of compromise in his personality.

In 1976 he backed out of two productions of Tannhauser because he had come to the decision that Wagner’s opera was blasphemous - “an attempt to strike at the very root of the Christian faith” - thereby leaving both Covent Garden and the New York Met without their star tenor.

When he agreed to sing an operatic version of Handel’s oratorio Samson at Covent Garden, the performance had to be on his, and only his, terms. He had no patience for what we now call “historically informed performances” with period instruments, despised counter-tenors, and refused to share a stage with such unsavoury singers.

Though his Canadian origins were humble - his father was a lay preacher in Saskatchewan and he himself worked as a farm labourer - his vocal talent was recognised early. As a boy chorister, he was famed for his top notes, and before long he made his first stage appearance in an amateur production of Victor Herbert’s Naughty Marietta. Serious operatic training began in Toronto, and when Sir David Webster, general manager at Covent Garden, heard him while talent scouting in America he was instantly offered a three-year contract.

By 1960, he was singing Riccardo in Verdi’s Masked Ball during a company tour to Cardiff and soon he was singing the title role in Don Carlos in London, with Carlo Maria Giulini as conductor. His voice, though it could sound raw and craggy at its loudest, had exquisite softer shades - a feather contrasted with a blunderbuss, as one critic put it.

By now he was an international name. Herbert von Karajan, one of his most ardent admirers, cast him as Don Jose in Carmen at the Salzburg Festival alongside Grace Bumbry in the title-role. The closing scene - in which, it was said, no other tenor had ever portrayed Jose’s murderous rage so vividly - can still be watched on a Deutsche Grammophon DVD of the performance. But his Otello, with Peter Glossop as Iago, was no less intense, and in Saint-Saens’s Samson and Delilah he was even better than in Handel.

Yet the operatic revelation of his career was surely Britten’s Peter Grimes with Sir Colin Davis conducting at Covent Garden. Never before had the role been so fiercely portrayed, and when Scottish Opera staged its own version of Grimes in 1968 - the Edinburgh Festival’s Britten year - the company had hoped that Vickers might sing it. But since the composer - under whose personal watchfulness the work was to be performed - preferred a different sort of tenor voice for the role, the company’s dreams were never fulfilled.

Edinburgh’s little King’s Theatre, in any case, was hardly the place for a personality on the grand Vickers scale. Everything he sang needed plenty of space, which meant that Edinburgh audiences had scant hopes of seeing him in any of his mature roles, though Glasgow seems to have heard him in what was said to be a semi-private performance of Schubert’s Winterreise song cycle towards the end of his career, when his voice had begun to dwindle and the songs were transposed to a lower key.

Jon Vickers neither wanted nor sought publicity. He once said that he might have had a better life as a Canadian farmer. He loathed television chat shows and seldom gave interviews. His career blazed without help. He was one of the most admired singers of his time, a heroic tenor to remember with awe.

He died in Bermuda, where he had been suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease. He was married first to Henrietta Outerbridge, the daughter of a missionary, in 1953, and had three sons and two daughters by her. Two years after her death in 1991 he married Judith Stewart. He is survived by her and by the children of his first marriage.