Donald Johnston, 89, Impresario Led WWII Chorus
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Donald Johnston, who died September 17 at 89, was a singing teacher and opera impresario who founded the New York Lyric Opera, a small but ambitious company that graced Manhattan stages for more than a decade, until the early 1980s.
In a dashing prelude to a career in the wings of grand opera’s spotlight, Johnston, in the aftermath of World War II, founded a servicemen’s choir that became a rare breath of high culture in regions of Germany and France shattered by years of combat. He fashioned his choir out of front-line combat soldiers, who only weeks before had been trading artillery shells and bullets with the Germans.
Johnston was a decorated American artillery captain with the 102nd Infantry Division – nicknamed “Ozark” – commanded by Major General Frank Keating. As the war ended, the 102nd met Russian troops at the Elbe River, and the two sides met for victory celebrations. After a chorus from the First White Russian army entertained his men one night, Keating decided to start his own chorus. Johnston, then serving as temporary mayor of the German town of Oebisfelde but who had taught voice at Ashland College for two years prior to the war, was recruited as chorus master.
From about 500 men who auditioned for what later became known as the Ozarkmen, Johnston selected 60. One had been a soloist in the Vienna Boys Choir, another had sung with a Russian opera company, and the majority of the rest had experience with church choirs, college glee clubs, and “over numerous radio stations,” according to a news account of the day. Johnston installed his men on a luxurious steam-powered houseboat docked on the Danube near Passau, Germany. He rehearsed them for four weeks, then presented them to Keating, who responded, “They’re terrific. The Russians are louder but not better. Keep practicing.”
At first, the chorus performed at hospitals and troop emplacements along the Danube, but thanks to newspaper and newsreel accounts, its reputation grew. In the late spring of 1945, the chorus embarked on a seven-month tour of Germany. Johnston, a baritone, soloed with the Bayreuth Symphony Orchestra. At one point, the troupe made a broadcast from the Munich beer hall where Hitler initiated the 1923 Putsch.
At Nuremburg one morning in November, prosecutors and accused war criminals alike were surprised to find the chorus in the courtroom, making a recording on the special sound equipment that had been installed for trials. William Shirer, broadcasting live to America from a room next door, noted the incongruity.
For Johnston, the high point of the tour came in late August, when the chorus visited the composer Richard Strauss at his home in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Bavaria. Strauss, aged 80, had weathered the war well; some accused him of being a collaborator. But for Johnston, it was the once-in-a-lifetime chance to meet the greatest living classical composer. Strauss didn’t disappoint, complimenting the chorus on its performance of Schubert’s “Evening Song” and the Lutheran chorale “Ein’ feste Burgist unser Gott.” “It is a pleasure to hear such fine voices singing together,” Strauss said, according to a 1945 account of the meeting in the magazine Musical America. Later that day, Johnston sang Strauss’s “Allerseelen,” accompanied by the composer. Strauss complained bitterly about his treatment by the Nazis, who tried to change the name of his composition “Austria” to “Ostmark,” forced him to stop collaborating with a half-Jewish librettist, and billeted a bombed out family at his home.
The Ozarkmen next toured France. In Paris, they sang a special concert for General DeGaulle. At the Nice Opera House, a program of Condams, Greig, and Sibelius deeply impressed “Frenchmen who came expecting to hear jive and jazz.” The chorus got major play in local American papers, which included the names of local servicemen choristers in their accounts of the concerts. A tour of the States was contemplated, starting with multiple dates at Radio City Music Hall. Alas, redeployment orders came through; the Ozarkmen were scattered to the wind. Johnston returned home, determined to resume his career in song.
Johnston grew up in Kansas and attended the University of Oklahoma. In 1938, still a dramatic tenor at age 22, he won a scholarship at the Oscar Seagle Colony at Schroon Lake in the Adirondacks. Seagle was a noted voice teacher, and the model of a mountain school was one Johnston would emulate in later years. Johnston later taught voice at Ashland College.
After the war, Johnston seemed poised for a major performing career. In 1948, he won the American Theater Wing’s first concert award. With it came a well-received recital at Town Hall. Apparently, at the insistence of his wife, with whom he had two children he had barely seen for several years, Johnston limited his public performances and took up teaching, according to Richard Hughes, a former student of Johnston who helped care for him in recent years. Nevertheless, Johnston managed to perform with Sigmund Romberg and his orchestra at the Hollywood Bowl and, in New York, performed solo at Radio City and toured in “The Mikado.”
In 1952,Johnston opened the Adirondack Studio of Song on the banks of Lake George, where for a decade he ran a summer program much like Seagle’s Colony. His home there is now a bedand-breakfast, the Lake George Inn. Next door, Johnston built a primitive theater where his students performed. In 1962, it became the first home of the Lake George Opera Festival, illuminated by car headlights in the early years.
Johnston taught for several years at New York University and, in the mid-1960s, founded the New York Lyric Opera. The company produced more than 40 operas under his leadership, all fully realized productions with costumes and orchestras. Productions were put on wherever he could find space – at NYU, at a Unitarian church, and once at the Beacon Theater in 1980, with Lalo’s rarely seen “Le Roi d’Ys.”
The company has been portrayed as a sort of intermediate-level institution that nurtured singers who went on to careers at other opera companies, and not infrequently to Broadway.
The New York Lyric Opera, held together mainly by the force of Johnston’s will, folded in 1982, and Johnston concentrated thereafter on teaching. He specialized in restoring damaged voices and believed that the American obsession with separating the vocal scale into “head” and “chest” voices was responsible for great harm. Among his more recent pupils was the singer and actress Patti Lupone.
Johnston’s son, also named Donald Johnston, became a well-known Broadway composer and conductor. He died in 2002.
Donald W. Johnston
Born in Topeka, Kan.; died September 17 at the Actors’ Fund Home in Englewood, N.J., of pneumonia; survived by two grandsons.