Background

Milton John Cross was born on April 16, 1897 on the West Side of New York City, New York, United States. He was the son of Robert Cross, an employee of the American Bible Society, and Margaret Lockhard.

Education

He graduated from the De Witt Clinton High School in 1915 and was enrolled from 1921 to 1923 in a certificate program at the Damrosch Institute of Music (later incorporated into the Juilliard School of Music) with the object of becoming an educational supervisor. The school sought to produce teachers who would instruct the general public in how to play music for their own enjoyment; at the same time, it fostered competent musicians.

Career

Cross became a tenor and sang in local churches and temples. He also performed in minor nonsinging roles with the Metropolitan Opera Company in New York. In 1921 a friend who was an early radio enthusiast interested Cross with his duties at WJZ in Newark, New Jersey, the second commercial radio station in the country.

Cross soon found himself as the station's full-time announcer, but he also sang songs, read stock-market reports, played the piano, and read the comics. He concentrated on classical music; a rival station that stressed popular music was driven off the air for want of suitable material. Although Cross had announced opera intermittently since 1923, his serious entrance into opera broadcasting was as the voice of the Chicago Civic Opera for the NBC Network (WJZ was then on that company's Blue Network). Cross received a baptism by fire one day when the network was ready to air Il Trovatore. Suddenly local utility magnate Samuel Insull decided to read the opera company's financial report to the live audience in Chicago, an event that was not to go over the air. Insull droned on for thirty-five minutes to the live audience, while radio listeners heard Cross describe the opera, the cast, Verdi's life, the hall, and even the Pullman cars carrying the cast. Cross was soon thereafter chosen to narrate the first live broadcast of Metropolitan Opera in New York City; thus on Christmas Day 1933, Cross described Hansel and Gretel to the radio audience. He would continue opera broadcasts for more than thirty years; in fact, the next day he returned with a broadcast of Norma, featuring Metropolitan standouts Rosa Ponselle and Giacomo Lauri-Volpi. By 1933 the performances were always aired complete, but Cross would handle the entire broadcast himself, including lengthy intermissions.

Meanwhile, Cross's career as a studio announcer blossomed. In the late 1930's he became connected with a quiz-style program entitled Information, Please, which had a long radio and short television run. On December 7, 1940, the Texaco gasoline company took on its long-standing sponsorship of the Metropolitan broadcasts. The first broadcast under Texaco sponsorship starred Ezio Pinza as Mozart's Figaro. The music was no longer interrupted by commentary, and musicologist Olin Downes gave Cross a chance to rest during intermission breaks. The popularity of the broadcasts was enormous. Current Biography featured Cross in its very second issue in 1940--the article termed Cross the man with the most famous voice in the United States, excepting only Franklin Roosevelt and Charlie McCarthy.

When World War II began, Cross stayed at the studio microphones while Edward R. Murrow and others made their reputations as war correspondents. Cross remained a calm voice for the arts during this period, arguing against a ban on performances of Richard Wagner, the putative cultural icon of the Third Reich. V-E Day found Cross at the studio talking to a delirious Parisian reporter. In the meantime Cross continued to bring opera broadcasts to the public, eventually describing every opera the Metropolitan performed during the years 1931-1974. To present the names of the performers on those broadcasts is to repeat the recent history of opera--Melchior, Peerce, Hines, Nilsson, Uppman, Stevens, Siepi, Reiner, Bernstein, Boehm, and von Karajan would certainly head the list. Cross would describe artistic performances in diplomatic language, but he was known to give more direct advice at rehearsals, which he attended to prepare for the broadcasts. In later years, he worked from a script provided by a broadcast producer. The broadcasts were described in Cross's time as the foremost regularly scheduled cultural event in the United States. Certainly they brought not only the music but also the visual artistry (through Cross's voice) and the ideas of opera to the hinterlands. Opera became well known across the nation and many of America's future best voices would come from small towns that knew opera only through the broadcasts and local college productions.

Cross also served from time to time as voice of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. In November 1963 it fell on Cross to describe the concert given in memory of the just-assassinated John Kennedy; Cross quoted movingly from Lincoln's second inaugural address. But the Philharmonic always saw Cross as a Met personality.

In the last few years, his studio announcing decreased, although audiences could still hear his distinctive voice from time to time between ABC shows. One Christmas, Cross told audiences it would be "shingles all the way, " because he was suffering from the ailment.

Cross died in his home in Manhattan on the night before the January 4, 1975, broadcast of The Italian Girl in Algiers. Peter Allen immediately took over as host.

Achievements

• He was best known as the voice of the Metropolitan Opera, hosting its Saturday afternoon radio broadcasts for 43 years, from the time of their inception on December 25, 1931 until his death in 1975.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Milton Cross New Encyclopedia of the Great Composers and Their Music

    (Reference book provides information on the lives and musi...)

  • Complete stories of the great operas

    (Milton Cross - Complete Stories of the Great Operas HC, 1...)

Connections

Cross married Lillian Ellegood in 1925. They had one daughter who died at a young age. His wife was an accomplished church organist; when she died in February 1973 he missed two Saturday afternoon broadcasts for the first time in his career.

Father:

Robert Cross

Mother:

Margaret Lockhard

Spouse:

Lillian Ellegood