Seattle Opera Icon Archie Drake Dies

If you attended a Seattle Opera performance anytime between now and 1968, there's a good chance you saw beloved English bass Archie Drake. In his 39 seasons at Seattle Opera, he played 109 roles, in over 1,000 performances. In fact, Drake sang in last Saturday's Macbeth. Sunday morning he sustained a massive coronary. He died Wednesday, at age 81. [Opera News, Seattle Times, Seattle P-I] Seattle Opera's Jon Dean, in Denmark for a Ring, has a touching post about Drake, too.

Born into a seafaring family, Drake became a merchant marine. After joining a choir during some onshore duty, he took voice lessons, and eventually made San Francisco and then Seattle Opera debuts in 1968. Seattle Opera's (pdf) press release recaps the career that followed:

...mainstage roles at Seattle Opera included Candy in the 1970 world premiere of Carlisle Floyd’s Of Mice and Men, Wotan in Wagner’s Walküre in 1973, Gunther in Wagner’s Götterdämmerung from 1975 to 1983 (nine productions), and three roles in Prokofiev’s War and Peace in 1990. In the 21st century, he sang for Seattle Opera: Mitiukha in Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, Ambrogio in Rossini’s Barbiere di Siviglia, the Sacristan and Jailer in Verdi’s Tosca, the Imperial Commissioner in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, A Cappadocian in Richard Strauss’s Salome, the Notary in Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, the Second Prisoner in Beethoven’s Fidelio, Jed in Marvin David Levy’s Mourning Becomes Electra, Luther in Offenbach’s Contes d’Hoffmann, and the Doctor in Verdi’s Macbeth.

Opera was in Drake's blood just as much as the sea: in a 2001 interview he said of the art form he loved, “For me, opera is basically an exploration of the human spirit, and it can take you further into emotions and feelings and concepts and understandings and divining than any other way.”