Michael Theodore

Michael Theodore was born Michail Theodorou. Not very much is known about him. He enjoyed considerable popularity as a TV, radio and record singer in Germany in the 1970s. He doesn't seem to have had much of an opera career, though he was a member of the Stuttgart opera, where he made his debut in 1967. According to the cover text of one of his LPs, he had worked as an usher at a Thessaloniki cinema, and since he loved singing (and sang in a church choir), he loudly sang the songs from the Mario Lanza film they were currently showing; the Greek tenor Konstantinos Liontas happened to come by and discovered his voice. Anyway, he studied voice first with Liontas in Thessaloniki (whereupon he gave his first concerts in Greece), then in Vienna, then with Alfred Knopf in Munich. Apparently, Theodore sang more in concert than on the opera stage, and his concert tours led him as far as North America. A factor in this may have been that he was petite, hardly taller than Joseph Schmidt.

As early as 1980, Theodore ended his career in a quite abrupt way, returned to Thessaloniki and totally disappeared from public view in Germany, albeit he had been very popular there. In an interview on a local radio station in Thessaloniki, one year after his withdrawal, he said he had stopped singing because he had been "struck by a double-blow of fate", without specifying which double-blow. And not even his friends and family, who still live in Thessaloniki, seem to know what he was referring to.

I wish to thank David Cade for the information about the end of Theodore's career.