Early Career
Peter Dawson was born in 1882 to immigrant Scottish parents, Thomas Dawson, an ironworker and plumber, and Alison, née Miller, in Adelaide, South Australia. The youngest of nine children he attended East Adelaide Primary School then Pulteney Street Grammar School. At the age of 17 he joined a church choir and received singing lessons from C.J. Stevens. Then, aged 19, he won a prize for the best bass solo in a competition at Ballarat, Victoria, and began taking up concert engagements.
He was sent to London to be taught by Sir Charles Santley, who first sent him to F.L. Bamford of Glasgow for six months’ basic training and coaching in vocal exercises, arias, oratorio pieces 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 the soprano Emma Albani.
He attended a large number of performances at Covent Garden during the first decade of the 20th century, and heard many of the leading lower-voiced male singers of the age, including the baritones Titta Ruffo, Pasquale Amato, Mattia Battistini, Mario Sammarco and the basses Marcel Journet, Édouard de Reszke and Pol Plançon. Throughout his life he acknowledged the "bel canto" example of Battistini. In addition to Italian and French opera, he grew to admire the German music dramas of Richard Wagner.
On 20 May 1905, he married Annie Mortimer "Nan" Noble, daughter of the box-office manager of the Alhambra Theatre, who sang professionally in the soprano range under the name Annette George. Around this time, a Russian medical 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 the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, as the Night Watchman in The Mastersingers of Nuremberg (opposite tenor Walter Hyde as David), with Hans Richter conducting. During one of these performances, after winning a large kitty playing poker in the wings, 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 at recounting such anecdotes, usually about other performers.) However, he did not find the pressures of the opera stage to be a congenial fit with his easygoing personality, and he elected instead to forge an alternative career as a concert and oratorio singer.
Read more about this topic: Peter Dawson (bass-baritone)
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