Stuart Burrows

Though his voice sometimes lacked individuality, Stuart Burrows was in many ways an ideal Mozart and French lyric tenor, flexible and with a seemingly seamless technique. He was also scrupulous musician, known for saying that a role can be memorized but never fully learned, that there is always more to add and rethink. While he occasionally and carefully sang some heavier roles, such as Lensky in Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, Alfredo in Verdi's La traviata, Gounod's Faust, and even the title role in Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffmann, he never, as many of his predecessors and successors did, forced and harmed his voice by choosing the wrong repertoire. His only formal music schooling ended when he was 12, and though he continued to sing informally he began his career as a schoolteacher. However, in 1959, he entered for and won the tenor ...
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