Lance Ingram/Albert Lance becomes world opera tenor star after orphan start in rural South Australia
Lance Ingram as French/international opera tenor Albert Lance with Maria Callas in Paris in 1959.
Lance Albert Ingram, born and raised in extraordinary circumstances in South Australia, became one of the world’s top opera tenors, singing, as Albert Lance, opposite greats such as Joan Sutherland and Maria Callas.
Ingram was born the McBride Salvation Army Hospital in Adelaide in 1925 and, because his father soon deserted his mother, was fostered into the care of widow Maria Latz, in the strictly Lutheran German-speaking farm community at Cambrai on the Murray flats.
Later brought to Adelaide by his father, Ingram went into his 1940s teen years with no special ambition. He’d sung in school and church choir but, in a reunion after nearly dying with meningitis, his mother encouraged him to study voice at Adelaide College of Music.
After a move to Melbourne, he sang in cafés and night clubs, then toured on the Tivoli vaudeville circuit. He was offered an opera contract and made his 1950 debut in a role he made famous: Cavaradossi in Tosca. He was in the lead in The Tales of Hoffman before Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. Ingram was noticed by soprano Norma Gadsden, wife of the famed voice teacher Dominique Modesti, who invited him to France, for further study.
As Albert Lance*, he made his Paris debut at the Opéra-Comique in 1955, as Cavaradossi. Next year, he made his successful debut at the Palais Garnier, in the title role in Faust. His French citizenship arranged by President Charles de Gaulle, Ingram quickly became a leading French tenor at the Opéra-Comique and the Opéra until 1972, singing the great French roles such as Roméo in Roméo et Juliette.
He also performed in London, Vienna, Moscow, Leningrad and Buenos Aires, with the lead roles in Rigoletto, La Traviata, Cavalleria Rusticana, Pagliacci and others. His American debut was in San Francisco in 1961 in Norman Dello Joio’s Blood Moon.
After retiring in 1977, Ingram became a teacher in Nice and later Antibes. In 2011, the French opera community made him president of the Paris Opera Jubilee.