His real name, which he used until 1935, was Arnold-Peeter Vismann. After school, he studied economy in Tartu, and
as a student job, he sang at the Vanemuine Theater as a chorister. Soon, he got a soloist contract as an
actor and operetta singer. While he tried to pursue his economic studies, he simply had not enough time for them, and quit them
after seven years in 1924. Now, he finally decided to study voice, which he did in Tartu, Tallinn, Germany, Austria and Hungary,
while continuing to work at the Vanemuine as a singer and stage director.
From 1927 to 1944, he was a soloist – now almost exclusively in opera – in Tallinn, where he sang Manrico, Wilhelm
Meister, Almaviva, Faust, Tamino, Alfredo, Duca, Roméo, Lenskij, Prince, Shujskij, Vašek, Jontek or Ernesto. He
also continued to work as a stage director. If you read on the internet that he was director of the Tallinn opera theater,
that's bullshit (a mistake resulting from machine translation of Estonian websites – he was a stage director, but never a
theater director).
He fled to Finland from the Soviets in 1944, then went to Sweden a year later, where he still gave concerts, but otherwise worked
as an office clerk, and studied theology.
Reference and picture source
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