Igor Gorin

Igor Gorin (October 26, 1904 – March 24, 1982) was a Ukrainian Jewish baritone, Broadway performer, and music teacher. Born Ignatz Greenberg in the village of Grodek, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire — present-day Horodok in Lviv Oblast, Ukraine — Gorin was the son of Sholom Greenberg, a rabbi and Talmudist who taught religion in Grodek and surrounding provinces. His mother, Yente Moritz Greenberg, instilled in him a love of music. Enrolled by his father in a Talmudist school, Gorin demonstrated a strong aptitude for orthodox Jewish liturgy, committed much of it to memory, mastered Hebrew, and eventually became fluent in eight languages. He also sang in the local synagogue choir during his early years.

In 1919, when Gorin was fifteen, the family relocated to Vienna, Austria. To support himself, he worked in an iron factory, a tailor shop, and as a milk deliverer, with shifts running from six in the morning until eight at night, six days a week. In his limited free time he visited the public library and attended lectures at the Urania, a tuition-free night school. His singing eventually came to the attention of Viktor Fuchs, one of Vienna's most distinguished voice teachers, either through a synagogue choir audition or after a neighbor overheard him and arranged an audition. In 1925, Fuchs arranged for Gorin to receive free lessons from his assistant Robert Traniewsky. Following a bout with tuberculosis, Gorin studied piano, music theory, and formal voice training at the Vienna Music Academy from 1926 to 1929. His artistic model during this period was Italian baritone Mattia Battistini, and Gorin made a deliberate effort to master the bel canto style.

Gorin became head cantor at the Leopoldstadt Synagogue in Vienna, and his reputation in that role led to his operatic debut as Ping in a Swiss production of Turandot. He subsequently performed with a Czech opera touring company and joined the Vienna Volksoper in 1930, where his roles included Tonio, Germont, Figaro, Rigoletto, Renato, Wolfram, Escamillo, and Valentin. His first visit to the United States came not as an opera singer but as a cantor, in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1930 and 1931. Returning to Austria, he grew increasingly alarmed by the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi persecution of German Jews, and in 1933 he emigrated permanently to the United States.

Gorin launched his American career at Radio City Music Hall in New York City, where he was billed as a "Viennese baritone," and followed that engagement with a ten-week run on NBC's The Standard Hour. During those broadcasts he met composer Albert Hay Malotte and became the first performer to sing Malotte's setting of "The Lord's Prayer," which became Gorin's most frequently performed number on radio, television, and in concert. His 1940 recording of the piece became his most popular recorded selection. He went on to appear on Hollywood Hotel, the Kraft Music Hall, Great Moments in Music, The Ford Sunday Evening Hour, International Harvester, and The RCA Victor Hour. In 1936 he signed a recording contract with RCA Victor and made his first recordings in 1937. That same period also saw him appear in a secondary role in Broadway Melody of 1938, in which he sang "The Toreador Song" from Carmen and portions of "Largo al factotum" from The Barber of Seville. In May 1939 he married Mary Smith, and in July of that year he became a naturalized U.S. citizen.

In 1942, Gorin appeared on Broadway in the musical Once Over Lightly. Though he auditioned for the Metropolitan Opera, the company did not engage him, and his career developed primarily along concert and regional opera lines. He appeared regularly on The Voice of Firestone and The Bell Telephone Hour, and performed with opera companies across the country, from Pasadena, California, to Baltimore, Maryland. He also participated annually as Brigham Young in the Mormon historical pageant All Faces West. His television credits included the role of Rigoletto on NBC Opera Theatre in 1958 and Giorgio Germont in an NBC production in 1960. In 1962 he appeared alongside Boris Christoff at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in Alexander Borodin's Prince Igor, directed by Vladimir Rosing, who also directed Gorin in The Student Prince at the Hollywood Bowl that same year. In 1963 Gorin sang with the New York City Opera as Rigoletto and as Giorgio Germont in La traviata, opposite Beverly Sills. He made a single guest appearance at the Metropolitan Opera in La traviata in 1964.

Declining health prompted Gorin to retire from the concert stage, and in 1966 he joined the faculty of the University of Arizona in Tucson as a professor of music. He died of cancer on March 24, 1982, in Tucson, at the age of seventy-seven.