Jerry Hadley

Hadley was born and raised in Manlius, Illinois, of Italian and English parents. He attended Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, where he was a member of the Delta Nu chapter of Phi Mu Alpha, a men's music fraternity. Hadley first studied to become a conductor, but after four years turned to singing. He studied voice under Dr. John Davis while at Bradley, ultimately earning his master's degree in voice at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. At Illinois he studied voice with Grace Wilson and James Bailey, and coached with pianists John Wustman and Eric Dalheim. He starred in many School of Music opera productions, including Tamino in Mozart's The Magic Flute, Nemorino in Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore, Alfred in Johann Strauss II's Die Fledermaus, and Tom Rakewell in The Rake's Progress by Stravinsky.

On July 10, 2007, Hadley sustained a catastrophic brain injury after apparently shooting himself in the head with an air rifle at his home in Clinton Corners, New York. Hearing the shot, his fiancée called 911. Hadley was taken to St. Francis Hospital in Poughkeepsie, New York where CAT scans and X-rays showed severe brain injury; he was put on life support. On July 16, he was taken off life support. Hadley died two days later.

Following his divorce from pianist Cheryll Drake Hadley in 2002, Hadley in large part abandoned singing and the stage for five years. A few months before his death, he had begun a major comeback, with the public and critics noting a renewed freshness, control and vibrancy to his voice. His last operatic performances were in May 2007 in Brisbane, Australia, as Pinkerton in Madama Butterfly with Opera Queensland.

At the 1998 Salzburg Festival, Hadley sang the lead tenor role in Weill's Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, a staging that was filmed and commercially released. But Hadley made many recordings. He recorded under Richard Bonynge's baton in the bel canto genre, and Leonard Bernstein selected him to sing the title role in a complete 1989 recording of his operetta Candide, led by the composer a year before he died; London concerts of the operetta given that year with the same principal singers, including Hadley, were separately televised and commercially released.

Hadley created the role of Don Luis de Carvajal y de la Cueva, in Myron Fink's 1997 opera, The Conquistador, and the title role in John Harbison's 1999 The Great Gatsby, based on the novel of the same name. Outside opera, he created in 1991 the tenor part in Paul McCartney's Liverpool Oratorio.

In 1996, Hadley commissioned the composer Daniel Steven Crafts to create music for selected poems by Carl Sandburg. The work, The Song and The Slogan, premiered in 2000 at the University of Illinois, and was made into a PBS video, which won an Emmy Award for Best Musical Performance by the Mid-America Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Among the performers in the premiere were university professors and musicians with whom he had worked while a student, including pianist Eric Dalheim, conductor Paul Vermel, and cellist Barbara Hedlund.

In the early 1990s, Hadley appeared on The Long Goodbye, an album of reinterpretations of the music of Procol Harum featuring past and present members of the band, augmented by orchestra and guest vocalists; Hadley's contribution was a stirring vocal interpretation of the classic, "Grand Hotel".

In 1982 he made his first appearance at the Vienna State Opera as Nemorino in Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore. He frequently performed at the Metropolitan Opera, La Scala, the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden, the Deutsche Oper Berlin, the Hamburg State Opera, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the San Francisco Opera, the San Diego Opera and the Glyndebourne, Aix-en-Provence and Salzburg festivals.

Hadley's early years as a professional singer were spent in regional opera houses in the U.S. He was then snapped up by Beverly Sills, who had heard him in the National Opera Institute auditions in 1978 and offered him a New York City Opera contract on the spot. Hadley became a regular member of the roster of the New York City Opera after his debut there as Arturo in Lucia di Lammermoor in 1979.

Jerry Hadley (June 16, 1952 – July 18, 2007) was an American operatic tenor. He received three Grammy awards for his vocal performances in the recordings of Jenůfa (2004 Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording), Susannah (1995 Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording), and Candide (1992 Grammy Award for Best Classical Album). Hadley was a leading American tenor for nearly two decades. He was mentored by soprano Joan Sutherland and her husband, conductor Richard Bonynge. Leonard Bernstein chose Hadley for his 1989 recording of Candide on Deutsche Grammophon. A versatile singer, Hadley was equally at home in opera and operetta and on Broadway.