Quote of the day:

Whoever mocks the poor shows contempt for their Maker; whoever gloats over disaster will not go unpunished.
—Proverbs 17:5 New International Edition
[Authorized or King James Version: Whoso mocketh the poor reproacheth his Maker: and he that is glad at calamities shall not be unpunished.]

I’m not sure when I became aware of Kenneth Riegel but it was probably sometime in the mid-1970s when I heard his name mentioned as a tenor appearing on the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts. It must have been several years later that I finally heard that he hailed from Womelsdorf, Pennsylvania.

Womelsdorf, of course, is where I had spent the first seven years of my life, until we moved to Richland, so naturally, I felt a certain kinship with Mr. Riegel. 

A few years ago I obtained a copy of the the yearbook from my first grade at the Womelsdorf school, the Weicon ’56, my original copy having long since gone the way of all whatever. I was amazed to discover that during my first grade, Kenneth Riegel was a senior in high school, right there in Womelsdorf with me!

And already he was recognized a “terrific tenor”. I know that I had participated in at least a couple of programs where each class did some sort of number, so it’s even possible that I heard Kenny Riegel sing! If I had only known what was in store for him.

But that’s not all.

I decided to look up his family history to see what I could find, and I discovered that he was born in 1938 in Hamburg, Pennsylvania, but that in the 1940 census he and his family were living in—wait for it—Richland, PA! So Kenneth Riegel has had a connection to Richland, which I’ll always consider to be my home town.

I don’t know when his family moved to Richland, of course, or even where they lived. Their next door neighbors were the Krugers, but who knows where they were living in 1940, as they had not yet built their new house on East Linden Street.

In any case, I found some online yearbooks and by the time young Kenny was in fourth grade, he was living in Womelsdorf, so it’s understandable that he’d list Womelsdorf as his home town. Still, I think that Richland does have a claim on him.

During his active career, he performed in operas and concerts. In operas he was primarily a character tenor, meaning that he didn’t get the girl at the end. Actually, in opera generally nobody gets the girl at the end. Usually the tenor dies, and then the fat lady sings, and then she dies. So maybe he was better off as a character tenor. Just joking.

Actually, Kenneth Riegel tended to sing slightly less familiar music. I searched in vain to see if there is video of him singing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, for example. If he ever did sing it, I couldn’t find it.

But he sang leading roles at the New York City Opera and then moved on to the Metropolitan Opera, making his debut there in 1973 in Berlioz’s Les Troyens, going on to appear there over 100 times.

He made a specialty of roles like Herod in Richard Strauss’s Salome, which is difficult both musically and dramatically.

He also made something of a mini-career in the various versions of Faust, the story of the man who sold his soul to the devil. He sang the title role under Sir Georg Solti in Berlioz’s La damnation de Faust, and for Leonard Bernstein he sang the tenor parts in Liszt’s Faust Symphony and Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, which includes a setting of the final scene of Goethe’s Faust. Each of those pieces requires relatively large forces, including choruses, to perform, so they aren’t generally part of the basic repertoire but mostly special event pieces.

To the best of my knowledge he never appeared in a production of Damn Yankees.

Kenneth Riegel died quietly on June 28, 2023.

The quotation from the Mahler 8th Symphony on his gravestone, “Bliket auf, Bliket auf, Bleibe gnädig!”, translates into English as, “Look up, look up, stay merciful!” 

And here is a video of Leonard Bernstein conducting the Vienna Philharmonic, the Vienna Opera Chorus, the Vienna Boys Choir, Edda Moser, Judith Blegen, Gerti Zeumer, Ingrid Mayr, Agnes Baltsa, Hermann Prey, Jose Van Dam, and of course, Kenneth Riegel in two excerpts from the final movement of Mahler’s 8th Symphony. This recording was made in 1975.

The DVD with that performance is currently unavailable, but used copies might be found on eBay and elsewhere.

I have one or two more anecdotes and another video of Riegel’s that I’ll be posting soon.