Neil Shicoff

Written by Neil Kurtzman | 12th October 2025

Neil Shicoff (b 1949) is an American tenor who has attained great success both in America and Europe. A native of Brooklyn, he is the son of the cantor Sidney Shicoff. The younger Shicoff trained as a cantor as well as studying singing at Juilliard. He made his operatic debut in the title role in Verdi’s Ernani conducted by James Levine in Cincinnati in 1975.

He made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera as Rinuccio in Gianni Schicchi also conducted by Levine. He went on to give 208 performances at the Met. He also regularly appeared at the Vienna State Opera. His Met career was interrupted for seven years (1990-1997) due to personal issues combined with severe stage fright, which led to numerous cancellations at other companies. He is now retired and devotes much of his time to teaching.

Shicoff’s voice at his peak was a beautiful lirico-spinto that was best employed in the standard Italian and French repertoire. His vocal mechanics were excellent and he was able to convey the full emotional content of the music he sang. He had a major career and was clearly one of the best tenors of the last quarter of the previous century. Were it not for the personal problems, which need no further discussion here, he might have ranked as high as Richard Tucker among American tenors.

I only heard him in performance one time – as Eleazar in La Juive. He was outstanding as he is on the excerpts below. First, three arias from Massenet’s Werther. The role was especially suited to Shichoff’s voice; he sang it often.

‘O Nature, pleine de grâce’ is in Act 1. Werther expresses his feelings of love and wonder by addressing nature in a moment of deep, romantic contemplation.

‘Oui! Ce qu’elle m’ordonne’ is in Act 2. It is part of a passionate monologue where the poet Werther declares his love for Charlotte and his willingness to do anything for her, despite her being married.

‘Pourquoi me réveiller?’ is the opera’s most famous number. Every tenor sings it in recital or recording, even if the opera is not part of the repertoire. The aria addresses unrequited love, despair, and death. It expresses Werther’s intense emotion and his feeling of being broken by love.

Another Massenet aria – ‘Ah! Fuyez, douce image’. The Chevalier Des Grieux has taken religious vows in despair over losing Manon to a richer and older man. He relives memories of her.

Gounod’s Faust was the first opera ever performed at the Metropolitan Opera. It was done there so often that the house acquired the nickname the Faustspielhaus. It’s not done as frequently by the New York company as it was in the past and has dropped to eighth place on the list of most frequently performed operas. ‘Salut! demeure chaste et pure’ occurs in Act 3. Faust idealizes Marguerite as a pure child of nature.

The last French selection is from La Juive. It was recorded in performance in Vienna. It was this production that the Met borrowed for its revival of the opera with Shicoff in the leading role. The great aria ‘Rachel, quand du seigneur’ is the main reason to attend a performance of Halevy’s five act French grand opera. In the aria the Jewish goldsmith Eleazar does not want to sacrifice his adopted daughter Rachel to his hatred of Christians, and renounces his revenge. She’s really the long-lost daughter of the Cardinal Brogni. However, when he hears the cries from a pogrom in the streets, he decides that God wants him to bear witness in death with his daughter to the God of Israel. Shicoff’s singing gets everything there is from the aria.

The only reason a production can cast a star tenor as Macduff in Macbeth is the Act 4 aria ‘Ah, la paterna mano’. It’s one of Verdi’s finest. Apart from this number the tenor doesn’t have a whole lot more to do.

‘Fontainebleau forêt immense’ is the tenor aria in Act 1 of the original French production of Verdi’s Don Carlos. In versions in which Act 1 is omitted, the tenor aria is moved to the new first act.