Ramón Vinay

Ramón Vinay was born in Chillán, Chile, in August 1911, the son of a Frenchman and a Chilean mother, and grew up in Mexico City. He made his début at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City in 1938 as a baritone — singing Alphonse in *La favorite* — and through the early 1940s sang the standard baritone repertoire across the Mexican and Latin American houses.

He retrained as a tenor in 1943 and made his tenor début that year at Mexico City as Don José in *Carmen*. The vocal transition led directly to one of the most concentrated dramatic tenor careers of the post-war era. He made his Metropolitan Opera début in 1946 as Don José, and within two years was singing Otello — the role with which he was internationally identified. His Otello with Toscanini and the NBC Symphony in 1947 (broadcast and recorded) became one of the central documents of post-war operatic performance. He sang at the Metropolitan Opera until 1962, at Bayreuth from 1952 to 1957 (including Tristan and Siegmund under Wieland Wagner’s productions), at La Scala, Covent Garden and the Salzburg Festival. His central tenor repertoire was the heavier dramatic and Wagner parts: Otello, Tristan, Siegmund, Canio in *Pagliacci*, Don José, Don Alvaro in *La forza del destino*, the title roles in *Samson et Dalila* and *Boris Godunov*. In 1962 he returned to baritone roles for his final operatic years.

Vinay died in Puebla, Mexico, in January 1996.