John Macurdy was an American operatic bass, who sang at the Metropolitan Opera 1,001 times from 1962–2000. Among his teachers was the contralto Elisabeth Wood of New Orleans, who was also the pedagogue of Norman Treigle.
Macurdy made his formal debut with the New Orleans Opera Association on the opening night of the 1952–53 season, as the Old Hebrew in Samson et Dalila, with Ramón Vinay and Blanche Thebom in the cast, which was conducted by Walter Herbert and staged by Wilhelm von Wymetal. He went on to appear with that company until 1959, in Thaïs, Die Entführung aus dem Serail, The Consul and Norma. He was to return to New Orleans for Sarastro in Die Zauberflöte, in 1979. During those years, he also occasionally performed with other companies, notably portraying Mr Earnshaw in the world premiere of Carlisle Floyd's Wuthering Heights, at the Santa Fe Opera in 1958.
In 1959, Macurdy made his New York City Opera debut, as Dr Wilson in Street Scene . Among his other roles there, until 1962, were Jabez Stone in The Devil and Daniel Webster, the Basso Cantante in Six Characters in Search of an Author, William Jennings Bryan in The Ballad of Baby Doe, Mr Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights, Créon in Œdipus rex, Colline in La bohème, Timur in Turandot, President Prexy in The Cradle Will Rock, a Priest in Il prigioniero, Sparafucile in Rigoletto, Don Alfonso in Così fan tutte, the King of Egypt in Aïda, Reb Bashevi in Abraham Ellstein's The Golem, and the Reverend John Hale in The Crucible . He made a return to that ensemble in 1979, for a single performance of Raimondo Bidebent in Lucia di Lammermoor.
Metropolitan Opera
It was the Metropolitan Opera that would become Macurdy's artistic home. Debuting as Tom in Un ballo in maschera in 1962, from there, Macurdy would sing more than 1,000 performances, in a great variety of roles, including the King in Aïda, Alessio in La sonnambula, Don Basilio in Il barbiere di Siviglia, the Commendatore in Don Giovanni, Ferrando in Il trovatore, Prince Gremin in Eugene Onegin, Colline, Count des Grieux in Manon, Daland in Der fliegende Holländer, Sparafucile, Agrippa in Antony and Cleopatra , King Heinrich in Lohengrin, Sarastro, Ezra Mannon in Mourning Becomes Electra, Alvise Badoero in La Gioconda, Hunding in Die Walküre, Count Walter in Luisa Miller, Timur, Raimondo, the Grand Inquisitor in Don Carlos, Titurel in Parsifal, King Marke in Tristan und Isolde, Rocco in Fidelio, Méphistophélès in Faust, Pimenn in Boris Godunov, Oroveso in Norma, and Tirésias in Œdipus rex. In the year 2000, he returned to the Met, for Hagen in Götterdämmerung, under James Levine.
Macurdy's father worked for a tool and die company. He died while on a business trip to New Orleans when Macurdy was 19. His mother, Dorothea, was a secretary at Wayne State University for many years. He had two sisters. Macurdy married Justine Votipka, also from Detroit. She studied piano at the University of Michigan, and was working as an accompianist-coach for a Goldovsky opera workshop in 1955 when they met. They married in 1958. The couple eventually settled in the woods near Stamford, Connecticut, in a house Macurdy largely built himself. Justine was active with the League of Women Voters and the Schubert Club in Stamford, at one point serving as its president. They had two children – Allison, born in, and John, born in. Allison graduated from the University of Boston. In 1985, she married Australian Nicholas Blaxland Hays.
Death
Macurdy died of natural causes on May 7, 2020, in Stamford.
