Childhood Education in Stockholm and early years at the Royal Opera
“Yes, I am Jussi Björling from Stora Tuna“. With these words Jussi, with audible satisfaction in his voice, confirmed the importance of his origin in a small place in the province of Dalarna in central Sweden, during one of his last radio interviews in the autumn of 1959. The interviewer had just broached the subject of how, because of him, this village had become known to opera lovers the world over. One year later Jussi Björling was laid to rest in the churchyard at Stora Tuna, and in Borlänge, of which Stora Tuna now forms a part, there is a statue and, since 1994, this museum to his memory.
The presiding midwife’s notes state that Jussi Björling was born on 5 February 1911 in a house now demolished on Magasinsgatan in central Borlänge. However, the gravestone reads 2 February, the date which for some reason was later entered into the parish register, as the birth date of “Johan Jonatan Björling“, and this was the date which Jussi himself regarded as his birthday. In 1911 Borlänge was administratively distinct from Stora Tuna, where the family was then officially resident, although they were later to move to the house on Magasinsgatan.
In 1911, Jussi’s closest family consisted of his father David,
mother Ester, and older brother Olle. David’s father was a blacksmith from Hälsingland who had worked in Finland on a number of occasions, and where he married a Finnish woman. She it was who gave her grandson the Finnish nickname Jussi, and this soon completely replaced his proper name. Yet David’s roots were also in Dalarna. His ancestors, and those of Ester, who grew up in Stora Tuna, can be traced back to the 15th century. At first David was an industrial worker, but at the turn of the century he travelled to America, where he trained his fine tenor voice at the Metropolitan Opera School in New York. Following his return to Sweden and further studies in Vienna, he married in 1909 and settled in Stora Tuna. He was active as an opera singer only as part of a touring group, but became well-known as a concert singer and singing teacher. As such he set about the task of making singers of his children from their earliest years. This resulted in Olle, Jussi and Gösta, born in 1912, giving their first public performance in a church in Örebro as early as 1915, before Jussi’s fifth birthday. Their father proudly described them as “the world’s tiniest singers“.
Ester Björling had long suffered from tuberculosis, and only a few weeks after she gave birth to her fourth child, Karl, she died on her thirty-fifth birthday, in April 1917. Karl was brought up by relatives, while David continued to perform together with his older sons. In autumn 1919 he took them to America, and from then until 1921 “David Bjorling and Sons“ toured from coast to coast, performing chiefly in Swedish emigrant areas, where they were very well received. On their return to Sweden, they settled once again in Dalarna, this time in Leksand. After a year of schooling for the boys, they started touring again in Sweden. Yet tragedy was to strike the family once more: in August 1926 David died of a ruptured appendix in Västervik.
Education in Stockholm and early years at the Royal Opera (1927-1935)
In 1927 the vocal quartet (which had lately included Karl) was disbanded, and Jussi worked for a short time in Ystad as a shop assistant. Thanks to the local chemist and bass singer, Professor Salomon Smith, he soon managed to gain the promise of an audition from John Forsell, manager of the Royal Opera in Stockholm. When Forsell realised what a talent he had stumbled upon, and after the famous tenor Martin Öhman had proclaimed that in Jussi he had found the “best Swedish tenor voice of the century“, Jussi was able to take up a place at the conservatoire of the Music Academy in autumn 1928. There, as at the Opera School, Forsell was his teacher. Forsell arranged a scholarship for his new pupil, and also undertook to be his guardian.
Even before the start of his studies in Stockholm Jussi had taken part in his first radio broadcast. Following an audition at the Swedish Broadcasting Corporation in Stockholm, he performed two songs plus an aria for a fee of 30 kronor on 9 March 1928. In addition to his vocal and musical talents, Jussi Björling had a fine memory for roles. His studies were a success, and on 21 July 1930 he first appeared in a minor operatic role as the Lamplighter in Manon Lescaut. One month later, on 20 August, he appeared in a leading role as Don Ottavio in Mozart’s Don Giovanni. The reception to his debut was positive, if not sensational, and following his next “official“ debut as Arnold in Rossini’s Wilhelm Tell in December his singing was further praised, although he was criticised for his acting. One critic already recognised him as a “rising star among tenors“, but his real breakthrough was to occur outside Sweden, and on the concert platform.
In September 1929, almost a year before his opera debut, the young tenor had made his first gramophone solo recordings. (Six songs were recorded by the Björling boys already in 1920, during their tour with their father in the United States.) Almost from the beginning, the orchestra was conducted by Nils Grevillius, in 1930 appointed Royal Court Conductor. Jussi Björling would during his whole career have an unusually close and successful cooperation with Grevillius in the recording studio as well as in opera and concert. Most of Jussi’s many recordings during the 1930s and 1940’s were made with him for Skandinaviska Grammophon AB, the Swedish HMV affiliate.
After one of the heads of the Tivoli Amusement Gardens in Copenhagen had heard one of these recordings, Jussi was invited to perform a concert there on 29 July 1931. Afterwards, the Danish critics were unanimous that they had witnessed a sensational talent: the headlines spoke of a “rare experience“, “a world class voice“, a “tenor sensation“ and a “storming success“. In the years that immediately followed, Jussi Björling would return to Tivoli each summer for a series of concerts which were always sold out in advance.
At home in Sweden, Jussi had signed his first permanent contract with the Royal Opera in May 1931, and spent his next years concentrating on learning a large number of major and minor roles in a broad repertoire, all sung in Swedish, as was customary at the time. In 1931, for example, he sang Jonathan in Carl Nielsen’s Saul and David, two Wagner roles - Walther in Tannhäuser and Erik in The Flying Dutchman as well as Almaviva in Rossini’s Barber of Seville. In 1932 he was the Duke in Verdi’s Rigoletto - the first of Jussi’s showcase roles -, Wilhelm Meister in Mignon by Thomas, and Nemorino in L’elisir d’amore by Donizetti. 1933 saw Alfredo in La Traviata, Lenski in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, Romeo in Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet, Cavaradossi in Tosca and Tamino in The Magic Flute. The role of Romeo in particular, which was to become one of Jussi’s most performed roles in Stockholm, produced lyrical reviews, with one critic noting that Jussi Björling had “revealed completely new sides of his young artistry“.
In 1934 Jussi sang Martin Skarp in Kurt Atterberg’s Fanal, one of his most successful Swedish roles, for the first time. In the same year he gave a one-off first performance in Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera, made his debut as Gounod’s Faust, which, after Romeo was to become his other showcase French role, and included the two Puccini operas La bohème and La fanciulla del West in his repertoire. Rodolfo in La bohème was to become the most performed role in his repertoire. 1935 saw another Mozart debut, as Belmonte in Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Turiddu in Cavalleria rusticana, Florestan in Beethoven’s Fidelio, the two major Verdi roles, Manrico in Il trovatore and Radamès in Aida, plus his first operetta role, as Alfred in Die Fledermaus. In both Borodin’s Prince Igor and Faust he sang opposite the visiting Fyodor Chaliapin, the legendary bass singer.
In the same year an important change took place in Jussi Björling’s family situation. In June 1935 he married Anna-Lisa Berg, a soprano he had met when they were both students at the conservatoire. Three children were born in the marriage between 1936 and 1943, Anders, Lars and Ann-Charlotte, of whom the younger two both became singers. Anna-Lisa was to resume her career in the late forties, and to appear frequently together with her husband over a number of years. Otherwise, she was often his companion on tour, providing him with invaluable support. In 1928, Jussi had already fathered a son, Rolf, who was also to become well known as a tenor.
New roles in Stockholm in 1936 included Canio in
Pagliacci, Pinkerton in
Madama Butterfly and Tonio in Donizetti’s
La fille du régiment. However, the most important events of his career that year were the first of his solo tours outside Scandinavia, including concerts in Vienna and operas in Prague in March, and opera engagements in Prague, Brno and Vienna between May and June. Jussi Björling still only performed opera in Swedish, but he appeared with great success in
La bohème, Il trovatore and
Aida, the latter under the celebrated Italian conductor Victor De Sabata, and he was invited to return the following February to appear in eight different roles. En route for Vienna in 1937 Jussi Björling was a guest performer at several of the great German opera houses, and his international career had certainly taken off. In the same spring, Jussi’s first records in HMV’s international series with red label appeared, where he sang for the first time Verdi and Puccini arias in their original language. He had then already recorded about 75 popular songs, opera and operetta arias in Swedish for the Scandinavian ”X” series.
In 1937, Jussi Björling sang only one new role at the Stockholm Opera, Faust in Mefistofele by Arrigo Boito in a less successful production, but he also made his film debut in one of the leading roles in Fram för framgång (Head for Success). The comedy was favourably received by the critics when it was released in the following year.In late autumn, just after the filming had been finished, Jussi Björling travelled west. On 16 November he appeared for the first time in the UK in a concert in London, attracting the accolade “a new Caruso“. After this he and Anna-Lisa crossed the Atlantic to New York, beginning this America tour with the first of three radio concerts from Carnegie Hall. He went on to sing opera in Chicago - Rigoletto and Bohème, both for the first time in Italian - completing the tour with a voice and piano recital in the New York Town Hall before returning to Sweden in January 1938. He brought with him a contract to perform at the Metropolitan Opera. The tour had been a resounding success, and a worthy introduction to Jussi’s wide-reaching American career. One critic described the Town Hall concert as a success “seldom parallelled in our rooms of music, large or small“, going on to summarise the qualities of the singer’s voice as “not only having substance, sonority, and compass to recommend it“, but which was also “the absolutely unspoiled voice of a young man … his breath-support is truly magnificent … an extraordinarily even scale, his attack is remarkably pure, his mezza voce is exquisite“.
First Metropolitan period and war years in Sweden (1938-1945)
These successes in America made Jussi Björling confident enough to give up his contract with the Royal Opera from the 1939/40 season onwards. His new roles in 1938 included Barinkay in the operetta
The Gipsy Baron by Johann Strauss in the spring, and Vasco da Gama in Meyerbeer’s
L’Africaine in the autumn. This brought the total to 53 opera roles in his stage repertoire, to which he added only two in the years following the second world war. His next American tour started on 13 November with a radio concert in the Ford Sunday Evening Hour in Detroit, and on the 24th of the same month came his debut at the Metropolitan in Bohème, highly acclaimed by the general public and critics alike. This was followed in December by Il trovatore. Jussi Björling was to sing at the Metropolitan for a total of fifteen seasons, with 121 performances in New York or on tour.
Between February and May 1939 Jussi was back in Sweden for the last of his obligations under his old contract with the Stockholm Royal Opera, immediately followed by his debut at Covent Garden in London in Il trovatore and his first concerts in the Netherlands. In August he sang for the first time under Arturo Toscanini, in Verdi’s Requiem at the Lucerne Festival, and in November it was time to return to America for performances at the Metropolitan, appearing there for the first time in Faust and Rigoletto, followed by a series of concerts prior to his return to Sweden in March.
October 1940 marked Jussi Björling’s debut at the San
Francisco Opera, once more in
Bohème. He sang Verdi’s
Un ballo in maschera there a few days later. In December he took up the role, in full costume as King Gustav III of Sweden in the new production which marked the opening of the season at the Metropolitan. He continued to work together with Toscanini, with two concert performances in New York of Verdi’s
Requiem and Beethoven’s
Missa Solemnis, both broadcast on the radio. Having sung opera and concerts in Sweden and Denmark for most of 1941 he was to have returned to America in October, but he cancelled the tour at the last moment. For the remainder of the second world war he chiefly remained in Sweden, with appearances at the Opera in Stockholm and concerts in other parts of the country, some given to soldiers in the field. However, during 1942-43 and in the spring of 1945 he gave one-off concerts in Denmark, Finland, Germany and Hungary, where in Budapest he also sang opera. In April 1943 he made his Italian opera debut with
Il trovatore in Florence, and in June 1944 he was appointed singer to the Swedish Royal Court.
International career resumed (1945-1949)
The autumn of 1945 saw the publication of Jussi Björling’s autobiography Med bagaget i strupen (My luggage is in my throat), and he followed up a guest appearance in Un ballo in maschera in Copenhagen with a return to America as the first major European artist to visit after the war. This American tour was his longest yet, beginning on 7 October with a radio concert in Detroit and finishing in New York in the middle of the following May. The tour also included Canada and Cuba. For the first time his accompanist was Frederick Schauwecker, who was to become his permanent companion during these intensive tours of America. Jussi appeared in Los Angeles with the San Francisco Opera, and both in New York and on tour with the Metropolitan Opera, where his Cavaradossi in Tosca was a new role.
For the remainder of the 1940s and the beginning of the 50s
Jussi Björling repeated the pattern established before the war, spending parts of the summer in Sweden and the remainder of the year for the most part on tour in America. His stays at his summer home on Siarö in the Stockholm archipelago were often punctuated by recitals in Sweden such as those at Gröna Lund and Skansen in Stockholm which had become a regular feature since the 1930s, plus occasional performances in neighbouring Scandinavian countries. During the autumn Jussi would make guest appearances at the Stockholm Opera. In August 1946 he made his debut on the Milan opera stage, singing in
Rigoletto with the La Scala company at the Sports Palace before the opera house was re-opened after the war. In America, in addition to appearances at the Metropolitan Opera where he sang Romeo and Turiddu for the first time in 1947 and Des Grieux in
Manon Lescaut in 1949, he worked chiefly with the Chicago and San Francisco Operas. He was a popular guest on several well-known radio programmes, such as Ford Sunday Evening Hour, Voice of Firestone (including four appearances when this programme transferred to TV), Telephone Hour and Standard Hour.
In November 1950 Jussi took part in the opening performance of the season at the Metropolitan, singing the leading role in Verdi’s Don Carlo. This was the start of the new opera manager Rudolf Bing’s era, and was Jussi’s last new stage role. In 1951 he was back in Italy to sing in
Un ballo in maschera at La Scala. As a song performer, that same summer he was invited to sing at the first Sibelius Week in Helsinki and was able to visit the now ageing composer himself. In July he made his return to London for a recital in the Royal Albert Hall, and in the years that followed he made many such appearances in the UK, including a tour in November 1952 which was preceded by his only concert appearance in Iceland. In 1951, Jussi Björling also received one of his finest accolades when Caruso’s widow Dorothy presented him with one of her husband’s costumes for
Rigoletto, thereby acknowledging the Swedish singer as the successor to Caruso as the king of tenors.
Jussi’s intended debut at the Paris Opera in March 1953 had to be cancelled because of problems with his throat. Having opened the season at the Metropolitan with Faust in November, an extended period of laryngitis was to follow that autumn, and in spring 1954 he had to be replaced in a number of performances there: he was also forced to cancel a radio broadcast of Un ballo in maschera under Toscanini. Following a period of convalescence in the Bahamas and in Sweden he returned to the concert hall in April, remaining largely in Sweden until autumn 1955 with the exception of a major concert tour to South Africa in early autumn 1954, concerts in neighbouring Scandinavian countries and the UK and a few guest opera appearances in Germany, Yugoslavia and Finland.
In July 1954 Jussi Björling went to Italy to record Manon Lescaut, the first of his complete opera recordings there. These recordings were now to become a permanent feature of his summer programmes. Since 1950, he was mostly recording for the American RCA Victor company. Some of his first RCA recordings, with the new tape technique, were the famous opera duets with the baritone Robert Merrill. In 1952, Jussi made his first complete opera recording, Il trovatore, followed in the next year by Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci. These operas were recorded in New York like La Bohème in 1956, but otherwise, his opera recordings would from now on take place in Italy in the summer: the already mentioned Manon Lescaut in 1954, Aida in 1955, Rigoletto in 1956, Tosca and Cavalleria rusticana (now in stereo) in 1957, Turandot and Madama Butterfly in 1959.
The tour of America in autumn 1955 included Jussi Björling’s first appearances at the Lyric Theatre (later the Lyric Opera) of Chicago, where he was to become a regular guest. Among these appearances were his only two performances together with Maria Callas (in Il trovatore). In February 1956, after an absence of two years, he was back at the Metropolitan, returning to the San Francisco Opera in September of the same year. Spring and summer 1957 involved an unusually large amount of opera appearances in Stockholm, but Jussi Björling also managed to sing opera in Zurich (Tosca), and to complete a shorter American tour, following which his contact with the Metropolitan was broken off for two and a half years. Autumn 1957 was, after opera performances in Malmö and Stockholm, mainly spent with the Chicago Opera. Jussi was forced to cut short a new American tour in March 1958 because of a gastric haemorrhage. In autumn 1958 he was back at the San Francisco and Chicago Operas, and at the beginning of 1959 he made his only TV broadcast in the UK, prior to the start of a concert tour of America.
During the autumn of 1959 a series of minor heart attacks were reminders of the growing illness which was shortly to prove fatal. In November and December of 1959 Jussi Björling was back at the Metropolitan Opera for the last time, in Faust, Tosca and Cavalleria rusticana. March 1960 saw a guest appearance in Stockholm as Manrico in IlTrovatore which was to be his last on the stage where his opera career had begun almost thirty years earlier. This was immediately followed by a return to Covent Garden in London for the first time since 1939, with four Bohème appearances, one of which was performed in spite of acute heart problems. Jussi Björling’s final opera performances were a Trovatore and a Faust in March/April at the Cosmopolitan Opera in San Francisco. These were followed by some concerts in America and one in Amsterdam in May.
During the summer of 1960, Jussi Björling gave his usual open air concerts at Gröna Lund and Skansen in Stockholm, recorded Verdi’s Requiem in Vienna and began to record Un ballo in maschera in Rome - a recording which was regrettably not finished due to a conflict between Björling and the conductor Georg Solti. The recital on 20 August at Skansen was to be Jussi Björling’s last ever appearance in public. During the night of 9 September, whilst asleep at his summer house on Siarö, he suffered a fatal heart attack which cut short his life at 49 years of age.
Jussi Björling died at the height of his career. For a long time, he had been acknowledged as one of the outstanding singers of the century, and one of the greatest lyric-dramatical tenors of all time - a judgement which posterity has confirmed. He was a singer who, unspoiled by the public’s adulation and the social and economic position he had attained, was characterized by humility toward his art and his fellow men.
This is an enlarged version of a chapter which was first published (also in Swedish, German and French) in the textbook of ”Jussi Björling Edition” (EMI 5663062). The textbook also contains special chapters about Björling’s recordings and his cooperation with Nils Grevillius.