Anton Dermota

Kammersänger Anton Dermota (June 4, 1910 – June 22, 1989) was a Slovene tenor.

He was born in a poor family in the Upper Carniolan village of Kropa in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire (and is now in Slovenia). He went to the Ljubljana Conservatory with the intention of studying composition and organ, but in 1934 he received a scholarship which sent him to Vienna. There, he devoted himself exclusively to vocal study with Marie Radó.

Dermota made his debut at the opera in Cluj in 1934, and was promptly invited by Bruno Walter to perform at the Vienna State Opera. Here he made his début as "First Man in Armor" in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's The Magic Flute in 1936 and got a contract immediately. His first leading role was Alfredo in Giuseppe Verdi's La traviata, which he sang in 1937. In the same year Dermota made his début at the Salzburg Festival in a production of Richard Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, conducted by Arturo Toscanini.

Dermota quickly became a favorite of the Viennese audience and remained with the State Opera's company for more than forty years. He was a witness (and helped to save parts of the furniture) when the opera house burned down after an Allied air raid on March 13, 1945. After the war he stayed with the company in its provisional lodgings at Theater an der Wien, and was one of the stars of the reopening of the original house in 1955 (as Florestan in Ludwig van Beethoven's Fidelio). As early as 1946 Dermota was honoured for his loyalty with the title of Kammersänger.

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