Jerry Hadley, who died yesterday at age 55 of the effects of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, was among the outstanding tenors of his era.

Limiting himself in opera to Mozart, bel canto, and other “lighter” material, Hadley appeared in leading roles at City Opera, the Metropolitan Opera, and other major opera houses across the country and abroad.

Sometimes billed as the “Crossover King,” Hadley occasionally appeared and often recorded American musicals, including works by Rogers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe, and Stephen Sondheim. After hearing Hadley sing in Jerome Kern’s “Show Boat,” the critic Terry Teachout declared that if the tenor ever decided “to move over to Broadway, he would doubtless be welcomed with open arms.”

American sounds came naturally to Hadley, who was raised on an Illinois farm and learned to project his voice by “sitting on the tractor, helping my dad, trying to sing above that incredibly loud noise and coming in from the field hoarse every day,” he told Opera News in 1986.

After studying choral music in college, he continued his voice training at the University of Illinois, where as an operatic naïf he took his first role, as Tamino in Mozart’s “The Magic Flute.” Years later, he said, “To show you how stupid I was about things operatic, I didn’t even know Tamino was the leading tenor role.” He starred in a score of student productions and in 1977 took a position teaching vocal literature at the University of Connecticut at Storrs.

While driving to his new job, “I crossed the Ohio-Pennsylvania border on Route 80 and they announced the king had died,” Hadley, at one time a guitarist in a high school country band, said. “I pulled off the side of the road … and wept like a baby ’cause Elvis was dead.”

A year later, after hearing Hadley sing at the National Opera Institute auditions in Chicago, Beverly Sills offered him his first contract to sing in New York, at City Opera. In his debut, as Lord Arturo Bucklaw in Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor,” a plume on his hat caught fire. He described the experience as “harrowing,” but persevered in smaller roles. In 1980, his emergency substitution in “The Barber of Seville” with the Washington D.C. Opera led to an invitation to sing at President Reagan’s 1981 inaugural gala, where director Lorin Maazel heard Hadley sing and was impressed enough to invite him to appear in a series of guest appearances at the Vienna Staatsoper.

While taking on increasingly challenging roles at the City Opera, Hadley began appearing as a guest in companies around the country, but his career was temporarily sidetracked in the mid-1980s by a painful bout of temporomandibular syndrome, which made singing excruciatingly painful for his jaw. He recovered after withdrawing from the stage for six months, but on his return began limiting his roles to the bel canto and Mozart that became the bedrock of his fame.

“It’s impossible for a tenor here — with great role models like Pavarotti, Domingo, Corelli, Del Monaco, and Caruso — not to grow up believing that if we don’t sing ‘Il trovatore’ we’re not real men,” Hadley told Opera News. “It occurred to me that recognizing what my strengths and weaknesses are was not an admission of failure but rather ‘Let’s deal with what’s real here. Let’s capitalize on the strengths.'”

Among those strengths was acting, and he became a great favorite in romantic leading roles, including Romeo in “Romeo and Juliet,” Steva in “Jenufa,” and Pinkerton in “Madame Butterfly,” although he gave this up after recovering from TMJ syndrome.

Hadley’s Metropolitan Opera debut came in 1987. He sang regularly at the Met through 2002, when he last sang Jay Gatsby, a role he had created at the world premiere of “The Great Gatsby” at the Met in 1999.

Hadley recorded widely, starting with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. He was also the lead tenor in Paul McCartney’s 1991 “Liverpool Oratorio.” He won three Grammy awards, including one in 1992 for his title role in “Candide,” for which he was handpicked by its composer, Leonard Bernstein, who conducted.

In recent years, his career had stalled somewhat, and in the spring he was charged with drunk driving, although the charge was eventually dropped. News reports said he was despondent and was preparing to declare bankruptcy before shooting himself in the head on July 10 with an air rifle at his home in Clinton Corners, N.Y., in the Hudson Valley. On Tuesday, he was taken off life support.

Jerry Hadley
Born June 12, 1952, in Princeton, Ill.; died July 18 at St. Francis Hospital in Poughkeepsie; survived by two sons, Nathan and Ryan.