Peter Dawson

Peter Dawson
Background information
Birth name	Peter Smith Dawson
Born	January 31, 1882(1882-01-31)
Origin	Adelaide, Australia
Died	September 27, 1961 (Age 79)
Genres	Opera
Occupations	bass-baritone singer
Years active	1909 - 1950s

Peter Dawson (31 January 1882 - 27 September 1961) was an Australian bass-baritone who gained worldwide renown through his song recitals and the numerous recordings of classical arias, oratorio solos and ballads that he made in a career spanning almost 60 years.

Although his repertoire included a great deal of popular and light music, Dawson possessed a remarkable and impeccable vocal technique that was combined with an attractive dark timbre, an ideal balance of diction and vocal placing, a strong but integrated 'attack' without resort to intrusive aspirates, and a near-perfect ability to manage musical ornaments and roulades.

These qualities probably derived from his studies with Sir Charles Santley, the great English baritone of the Victorian era. If Dawson's interpretations were not profoundly penetrating, they were not shallow either; and in his chosen field of English concert repertoire of the vigorous, manly, outdoors' kind, he remains unequalled. The tremendously high technical quality of his Handel singing sets an unmatched standard, too.

In 1984, Dawson was chosen by the Guinness Book of Recorded Sound as one of the top 10 singers on disc of all time, alongside such luminaries as Elvis Presley and Enrico Caruso.

Dawson's early career

Peter Dawson was born of immigrant Scottish parents, Thomas Dawson and Alison, née Miller, in Adelaide, South Australia, the youngest of nine children. At 17 he joined a church choir and took singing lessons from C.J. Stevens. At 19 he won a prize for bass solo in a competition at Ballarat, Victoria, and began taking concert engagements.

He was sent to London to be taught by Charles Santley, who first sent him to F.L. Bamford of Glasgow for six months’ training and coaching in exercises, arias, oratorio and classical songs. He then studied from 1903-1907 with Santley, who gave him a thorough training in voice production and a meticulous understanding of the great oratorios, especially Handel's Messiah, Mendelssohn's Elijah and Haydn's The Creation. In 1904 he joined Santley on an eight-week concert tour of the West of England with Emma Albani.

He attended many performances at Covent Garden in the period and heard the leading singers of the age, including the baritones Titta Ruffo, Pasquale Amato, Mattia Battistini, Mario Sammarco, Marcel Journet, Edouard de Reszke and the bass Pol Plançon. Throughout his life he acknowledged the example of Battistini. In addition to Italian opera he also grew to admire the Wagner operas.

In around 1908 he married Nan Noble, daughter of the box-office manager of the Alhambra Theatre, who sang soprano under the name Annette George. A Russian specialist assisted him to extend his upper range, until his compass extended from E flat in the bass to a high A or A flat. In 1909 he appeared at Covent Garden as the Night Watchman in The Mastersingers of Nuremberg (beside tenor Walter Hyde as David) under Hans Richter. During one of these performances, after winning a large kitty at poker in the wings from Claude Fleming, he hurried on at his call and accidentally scattered his winnings over the stage. (Dawson, who had a lively sense of humour, was a master of such anecdotes, usually about other performers.) He did not find the opera stage congenial, and his career developed instead as a concert and oratorio singer.

The concert platform

He was approached to appear at the Queens Hall, but first (1909-1910) made a successful six-month tour of Australia with the Amy Castles company. On his return he began appearing in Promenade Concerts. A second long tour with his own company in Australia and New Zealand ended with the outbreak of war. He returned to England via South Africa, but decided to go back to Australia to enlist.

After the War and another South African tour he returned to a British tour with the International Celebrity Concerts (recitals of operatic numbers). With Gerald Moore he gave lieder recitals at the Wigmore Hall in 1924. His sixth Australian tour was in 1931, and he paid further visits in 1933, 1935, early 1939 and 1948-9. He made an extensive singing tour of India, Burma and the Straits Settlements during the 1930s. He also toured in Ireland. His first BBC radio broadcast was made in 1931 and included songs of Schubert and Brahms: he was afterwards a prolific broadcaster, and was still active ‘on air’ in the 1950s.

Dawson and the Gramophone

The Gramophone was a major factor in Dawson's career. Dawson made his first recording in 1904, and continued to release songs for EMI and HMV until 1958. A recent biography estimates that he issued in excess of 1,500 recordings. An estimate quoted in his autobiography suggests that he had recorded 3,500 different titles. His first were made for Edison Bell on wax cylinders in 1904. After a few experiments, Fred Gaisberg signed Dawson to an exclusive disc record contract for the Gramophone Company (HMV) in 1906; however he continued to record on cylinder for Edison until the company closed its London studios before World War I. Dawson's standard repertoire rapidly became a mainstay for HMV. In addition he recorded Scottish songs popularized by Harry Lauder under the pseudonym Hector Grant, for the sister Zonophone label.

In 1906 Dawson took part in the first series of partially complete Gilbert and Sullivan opera recordings, together with other studio artists. Beginning in 1919 he took part in an extensive series of musically complete recordings of Gilbert and Sullivan operas with members of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company under the supervision of Rupert D'Oyly Carte and conducted by HMV staff conductor George W. Byng. By 1920 he had achieved total record sales of five million discs. After the First World War, technology was improving, and he recut many of his titles during the early 1920s, his sales exceeding 8 million by 1925. With the introduction of electrical microphone recording in 1925, the core body of his work was committed once again to disc, including new Gilbert and Sullivan versions under Sir Malcolm Sargent. Dawson's electrical recordings from the late 1920s and early 1930s had the longest shelf-life, and most households owned at least one. By the Second World War his sales exceeded 12 million. He even recorded some stereo tracks in the 1950s.

Repertoire

Dawson's repertoire was essentially adapted to the purposes of the recital platform, growing out of the late 19th-century tradition of the smoking concerts and Chappell Recitals. He was an advocate of singing in English.

He owed to Santley a taste and technique suited to Oratorio, of which Handel's Messiah was his favourite work. Handel standards ("O Ruddier than the Cherry"; "Why do the Nations?"; "Honour and Arms"; "Arm, arm ye Brave" and "Droop not Young Lover") and Mendelssohn ("I am a Roamer" and "It is Enough" (Elijah)) remained constantly in his work, and he sang the Elgar roles, including "Oh My Warriors" from Caractacus. His concert operatic titles were principally "The Prologue" (Pagliacci), "Credo" (Otello), "Even Bravest Heart" (Gounod's Faust – originally written for his teacher Santley) - "Largo al Factotum" (Barber of Seville), "Non piu andrai" (Marriage of Figaro), "O Star of Eve" (Tannhäuser), "Toreador Song" (Carmen), "Pari siamo" (Rigoletto) and Sarastro's "Within this Hallowed Dwelling" (The Magic Flute).

The German Lied attracted him, notably Schubert ("Erl King", "Ave Maria", "Who is Sylvia", "Sei mir gegrusst", "Erstarrung", "Wasserflut", "Die Krahe" and "Ungeduld"); Schumann ("Die Beiden Grenadier", "Fruhlingsnacht"); Karl Loewe ("The Clock", "Edward"); Brahms ("Die Mainacht", "Botschaft", "Standchen", "Der Tod das ist die Kuhle Nacht", "Blinde Kuh"); Richard Strauss ("Traum durch die Dammerung") and Hugo Wolf ("Nun wandre Maria", "Verschwiegene Liebe"). Russian standards also appeared in his programmes, notably Tchaikovsky ("To the Forest", "None but the Lonely Heart", "Don Juan's Serenade"), Rachmaninoff's "Christ is Risen" and Malashkin's "O Could I But Express in Song".

However it was in English language and British song that Dawson was especially famous, and his career helped to preserve the concert recital, and many of the older ballad type of songs, at a time when other forms of popular music were displacing the Victorian fashion. He was particularly successful with the heartier, rollicking songs such as Off to Philadelphia, The Old Superb, or Up from Somerset. He sang a good deal of Stanford and Arthur Somervell, a few Sullivan warhorses, and had a select range of items by contemporaries such as Percy French, Peter Warlock, Liza Lehmann, Granville Bantock, Eric Coates, Roger Quilter, Thomas F Dunhill, Edward German, George Butterworth, Gustav Holst, Landon Ronald, Michael Head, Frank Bridge, Arnold Bax and W.A. Aitken.

Many songs became personally identified with him, including "The Floral Dance" (Moss), "The Kerry Dance" (Molloy), "The Bandolero" (Stuart), "The Cobbler's Song" (from Chu Chin Chow), "In a Monastery Garden" and "In a Persian Market" (Ketelbey), "The Lute Player" (Allitsen), "The Boys of the Old Brigade" (Weatherley), and "On the Road to Mandalay" (Speaks and Hedgcock versions). His performance of the "Four Indian Love Lyrics" (Amy Woodforde-Finden) and his "Roses of Picardy" (Wood) were famous. He composed a number of songs himself, under the name J.P. McCall, most famously his setting of Rudyard Kipling's "Boots", which won the author's approval and was one of Dawson's greatest successes.

His recitals were also enlivened by the inclusion of many Australian songs, notably "Waltzing Matilda", "Song of Australia", "Clancy of the Overflow" and "The Rivetter" (Albert Arlen's settings), "Six Australian Bush Songs", and also Alfred Hill's version of the New Zealand Māori song "Waiata Poi".

Sources

This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (February 2008)

• P. Burgis and R. Smith, Peter Dawson: The World's Most Popular Baritone.
• P. Dawson, Fifty Years of Song (Hutchinson & Co, London 1951).
• A. Eaglefield-Hull (Ed.), A Dictionary of Modern Music and Musicians (Dent, London 1924).
• M. Scott, The Record of Singing II: 1914 to 1925 (Duckworth 1979).
• John D. Vose, Once a Jolly Swagman, tribute to Peter Dawson, ISBN 0-9501036-2-4. U.K.1987

External links

• Peter Dawson at the National Film and Sound Archive
• Peter Dawson in AusStage
• Nine digitally restored Peter Dawson recordings