Music: Worth Waiting For

When Robert Field Rounseville first decided to give up the study of medicine for the study of music, the small breaks broke his way.

He had no trouble getting singing jobs in Broadway shows, at the New York World’s Fair, in Radio City Music Hall (billing himself as Robert Field). For a while he was master of ceremonies in Manhattan’s big, lowbrow nightclub, Leon & Eddie’s. But for a man who wanted to get into opera, he seemed to be making no progress at all. By 1947, Tenor Rounseville, aged 30, found himself in vaudeville.

After four days and 16 shows of it, he collapsed with a stomach hemorrhage. One doctor said he would never get over his ulcers as long as he stayed in show business. Another gave him the advice he took: “All you need is a little success.”

Last week, Tenor Rounseville finally got success, of the kind he wanted. With financial help from his home town of Attleboro, Mass., he had worked hard with a teacher, spent the summer of 1948 at Boris Goldovsky’s opera school at Tanglewood. After a student production of the Fountain Scene from Pelléas and Mélisande there, he landed a chance to sing Pélleas in the New York City Opera’s closing performance last year. Ace French Repertory Conductor Jean Morel liked Rounseville’s big, wide-ranging tenor voice, taught him to sing Hoffmann this season in the City Opera’s first production of Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann.

After the performance last week, Tenor Rounseville and wife Ann sat up till 3 a.m. for the reviews. They were worth waiting for. Wrote the New York Times’s Olin

Downes: “… a first-class Hoffmann . . .” Said the Herald Tribune’s Virgil Thomson: “. . . stage sense . . . musical intelligence and (of all things!) an instinct for expressive coloration . . . maybe we have a real artist around . . .”