Baritone Bruce Yarnell would today be regarded as the ultimate crossover artist. During his brief, versatile career, Yarnell performed in Broadway musicals, acted for film and TV, and sang principal roles with the American National Opera Company, Portland Opera, Houston Grand Opera, and San Francisco Opera—with debuts scheduled at the Met and Covent Garden. Alas, his career ended 40 years ago this November when the small plane he was piloting crashed in the Tehachapi Mountains near Los Angeles. He was 37.
“I am sure that had [Bruce] not departed from us so soon, his operatic career would have been immense and worldwide,” tenor Stuart Burrows, who sang Lieutenant Pinkerton to Yarnell’s Sharpless in San Francisco Opera’s 1971 Madama Butterfly, confides in an e-mail from Wales. “Sadly, this was not to be, but I have one consolation and this is that he was my friend whom I admired greatly.”
Yarnell was handsome, exceptionally tall (6’ 5”), and charismatic on stage, but his singular voice trumped his other fine attributes. He possessed a rich, flexible tone with a plush bloom on top, and an espresso-hued timbre that could reach your bones as well as your ears. I was privileged to hear Yarnell in Annie Get Your Gun at Detroit’s Fisher Theatre in July 1966, and though Ethel Merman had top billing as Annie Oakley, it was Yarnell’s portrayal of Frank Butler that brought vocal luster to this revival, which ran on Broadway for 13 weeks in 1966 and was televised on NBC in 1967. “Of all the leading men I’ve had, Bruce was the most talented,” Ethel Merman later remarked.
“Bruce was a natural American baritone,” says bass Spiro Malas on the phone from Manhattan. Malas sang Jud to Yarnell’s Curly in a 1969 Oklahoma! at the New York State Theater and later played Frank—Yarnell was Falke—in San Francisco Opera’s 1973 Die Fledermaus. “Bruce never really vocalized. He could just go out there and sing, which amazed me . . . I think he would’ve gone on to a great career, possibly in the movies like Howard Keel and Harve Presnell. As [our Fledermaus colleague] Joan Sutherland used to say, ‘He had “the lot.”’”
Leigh Beery (Tunick), who sang Laurey in that same Oklahoma, agrees. “I think Bruce would’ve been the next Alfred Drake,” she tells me on the phone, referring to the legendary stage baritone. “I admired Bruce greatly.” Beery first met Yarnell in 1968 when they did a Jimmy Van Heusen-Sammy Cahn TV musical, The Legend of Robin Hood—she played Maid Marian and Yarnell was Little John.
In a chat with the baritone’s widow, Joan Patenaude-Yarnell, an acclaimed international soprano who is on the voice faculties at the Manhattan School of Music and the Curtis Institute of Music, I learned that her husband’s earliest ambition was to sing opera. She mentions he was born in Los Angeles in 1935 and studied voice with one teacher, Mebanie Beasley.
Yarnell’s first professional job was singing with the Roger Wagner Chorale, where he met Marilyn Horne, who became a close friend. By age 20, Yarnell had begun a theater career, aided by Edwin Lester, founder and director of the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera, who hired him for chorus work. A few years later, in 1960, he won his first Broadway role as Sir Lionel in Broadway’s Camelot, and he also understudied Robert Goulet as Sir Lancelot.
In a humorous anecdote from this period, Bruce Yarnell’s Camelot colleague, Jack Dabdoub, reports that the show’s King Arthur, Richard Burton, who was 5’ 10”, refused to stand on stage near Yarnell (a situation repeated years later when the baritone sang Escamillo opposite the 5’ 7” Richard Tucker in a Florida Carmen). Yarnell impressed New York producers and was quickly offered his first leading role, General Kinesias, in The Happiest Girl in the World starring Cyril Ritchard. “His baritone is the best voice in the company,” raved Howard Taubman in the New York Times (April 4, 1961), and Yarnell won a Theatre World Award for one of the best debuts that season, which was presented, ironically, by Richard Burton.
When NBC offered him a three-year contract, Yarnell returned to California where he played Chalk Breeson on The Outlaws (1961-62), Tom Kidwell on Wide Country (1963), and the Cartwrights’ crooning cousin, Muley Jones, on Bonanza (1964-65), a hilarious performance captured on YouTube. He also portrayed the pugnacious Hippolyte in Billy Wilder’s Irma la Douce, in which Yarnell holds his own with costars Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine. (You can watch this 1963 comedy at Amazon Instant Video or Netflix.)
Yet a voice as distinctive as Yarnell’s couldn’t remain silent, so the baritone returned to Broadway in Annie Get Your Gun. Writing about the RCA cast album for the New York Times (July 17, 1966), John S. Wilson said, “Bruce Yarnell’s virile baritone has the vigor and warmth to maintain a proper balance with Miss Merman.” In the fall of 1966, Yarnell also nabbed the role of Billy Bigelow in the City Center Light Opera revival of Carousel, and then reprised Billy for the St. Louis Municipal Opera, a company where he also played Sir Lancelot.
“There’s no question that Annie Get Your Gun was the turning point in his career,” says his wife. “People in the business were now aware that this was an operatic voice, and he received his first opera contract with Sarah Caldwell’s American National Opera Company, touring the U.S. in Berg’s Lulu as well as Carmen.” The latter made a key stop in Yarnell’s native L.A. where he sang Escamillo to Marilyn Horne’s sultry gypsy. Reviewing this production on April 1, 1968, Martin Bernheimer wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “Bruce Yarnell’s bullfighter looked marvelous, acted with the nonchalant swagger of [a] cowboy, and sang suavely. . . . ”
It was in the opera realm where the beautiful young soprano from Ottawa, Joan Patenaude, met the baritone when they were cast as Nedda and Silvio in Ramon Vinay’s 1970 production of Pagliacci at Portland Opera. “There was a picture of us both on the front page of the Portland newspaper with the headline ‘X-rated Opera—Do Not Bring Your Children,’” says Patenaude-Yarnell. “It was that kind of publicity that sold out every performance.”
Yarnell presently auditioned for San Francisco Opera where the general director, Kurt Adler, hired him for two productions. His 1971 debut in Butterfly was another career milestone. In the LA Times (September 27, 1971), Martin Bernheimer wrote, “Bruce Yarnell, undaunted in his transition from show-biz to opera, offered an uncommonly sympathetic Sharpless. He played the consul like a superannuated All-American quarterback (somehow it worked), modulated his booming baritone sensitively, and towered imposingly over everyone else in the cast.”
Burrows echoes the critic’s opinion. “One couldn’t have asked for a better starting platform than the Broadway theatre to enhance one’s ability for the operatic stage. Bruce’s natural talent made it look so easy. He was admired by everyone at the San Francisco Opera, and I considered it a great privilege to work with him. He was superb as Sharpless, and his physical stature enhanced every performance.”
“By then we were both professionally very active,” Patenaude-Yarnell remarks. “I’d go to San Francisco for a weekend, and he’d fly to Kansas City where I was doing The Saint of Bleecker Street, and he finally said, ‘Please sing for Adler so we can be together.’ I’d already sung Juliette [at SFO Spring Opera] the year before I met Bruce. So I now auditioned for the main company and was cast as Violetta in La traviata, understudying Beverly Sills and doing two performances. San Francisco became our home.”
Peggy Houdek was a fundraiser for San Francisco Opera in the 1970s. She has fond memories of Yarnell that she reports in an e-mail. “I remember an Aida [1972] in which he sang Amonasro. It’s difficult to get enough supers for lots of performances of Aida. . . . [Ours] was a motley crew! At that time there was some proposition having to do with the war, I think, and one night after the ‘Triumphal March,’ some supers spread out a banner that said something [very controversial]. Of course, there was a gasp from the chorus and the audience, and Bruce reached out, grabbed the banner, and ripped it apart—to cheers, as I recall.”
For San Francisco Opera, Yarnell also sang the Priest in The Visit of the Old Lady (1972), Scarpia in Tosca (1972, student performances), Rangoni in Boris Godunov (1973), and Dr. Falke in Die Fledermaus (1973) with Joan Sutherland—who remarked about his height, “Bruce Yarnell was the only baritone I ever looked up to.” Yarnell also enjoyed a big success as General Boum in La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein (SFO Spring Opera, 1973), and when he sang Scarpia, he was so evil the student audience booed him at the curtain call. Patenaude-Yarnell attended this performance, watching from the wings with Plácido Domingo. “I was upset,” she admits, “but Domingo said, ‘Joan, you should be happy, since young audiences must boo the bad guy.’”
Mezzo soprano, Ariel Bybee, who teaches voice at the University of Utah, sang Musetta to Yarnell’s Marcello in his final SFO opera, La bohème, which also starred Teresa Stratas and José Carreras and closed six days before Yarnell’s death. “He was so fun to be around,” Bybee says by phone, “and he was huggable—a huge teddy bear of a guy—and so easy to play against! I’m sure this came from his experience on Broadway and in television. He was a wonderful actor. He also had a great sense of humor and had everyone in stitches all the time.”
Patenaude-Yarnell feels her late husband exemplified a unique breed: the American classically trained baritone who brought a special style to Broadway musicals. “Unhappily, this style seems to be dying away even though there are wonderful young singers today who are able to carry it on. He used to tell young singers: ‘Go to Broadway and join the chorus. You will learn how to dance; you’ll learn how to move. When you’re in an opera, your body will know what to do.’ Broadway was a fantastic training ground for him—his diction, his delivery. He always told me, ‘I don’t go out to sing, I go out to tell a story.’”
When I inquire how the baritone might want to be remembered, Patenaude-Yarnell says, “He was a free spirit and a Renaissance man. He was brilliant at chess. He was good at so many things beyond acting and singing.” She pauses. “We were both avid believers in the importance of both voice and performance style in both the classical and Broadway venues.”
One of her fondest memories in the early 70s was when she was the Affiliate Artist at the United States Military Academy at West Point. “Bruce and I gave a joint concert of duets from Broadway musicals, accompanied by the USMA band. I have the recording, and it is one of my dearest treasures.” During this period, her husband also toured the country with pianist Mikael Eliasen performing a concert called “The Art of the Singing Actor.”
Intimates of Yarnell often expressed concern about his love for flying his small plane, “Songbird.” “I’d say to him, ‘Why do you fly, Bruce? Isn’t singing exciting enough?’” explains Patenaude-Yarnell. “And he’d say, ‘When I get in that plane and put on my headphones and listen to Mahler while flying through the sky, believe me, Joan, it’s so overwhelming there’s nothing that compares to it.’”
In her memoir, The Song Continues, Marilyn Horne writes, “Bruce was a happy-go-lucky guy and flying was his obsession. The last time I saw him, we got together for dinner. . . . ‘For heaven’s sake, Bruce,’ I told him over dessert, ‘why don’t you stop flying that plane of yours around? The next thing you know I’ll read that you slammed into the side of a mountain.’ Tragically, not long after, that’s exactly what happened.”
As Patenaude-Yarnell regretfully recalls, her husband was flying home to San Francisco on November 30, 1973, after a business meeting in L.A. The skies were clear, and his cousin and her husband decided to join him. While they were traveling near Gorman, Calif., ice suddenly covered the plane’s wings and the electrical systems failed. There were no survivors.
“I remember his death very well,” says Bybee. “The rest of the Bohème cast had left San Francisco but I was still there, and I was devastated. I felt I’d made a new friend—he’d lived in Los Angeles where I was from—and I remember bursting into tears when I heard the news.”
To honor her late husband, Patenaude-Yarnell founded the Bruce Yarnell Scholarship for baritones. For many years it was offered through San Francisco Opera, Philadelphia Opera, the George London Foundation, and the Voice Foundation. Several winners and competitors have gone on to successful performing careers, and it was the only major competition that was dedicated solely to the low male voice. This past summer, Patenaude-Yarnell began working with Manhattan School of Music’s President James Gandre to establish a new scholarship. It is her plan to award it to a deserving student in the baritone/bass-baritone/bass category who is enrolled at MSM. Specific details will presently be announced.
It is certainly tragic when the world loses any artist in his prime, but thankfully Yarnell’s brilliance lives on in three Broadway cast albums and five opera recordings (see opposite page). From all accounts—critical and anecdotal—it’s obvious that Bruce Yarnell is a baritone for the ages, and I’m proud to introduce him to CS readers as a role model for contemporary singers who long to perform musical theatre as well as opera.
