Francesco Tamagno
Encyclopedia
Opera
Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...
tic tenor
Tenor
The tenor is a type of male singing voice and is the highest male voice within the modal register. The typical tenor voice lies between C3, the C one octave below middle C, to the A above middle C in choral music, and up to high C in solo work. The low extreme for tenors is roughly B2...
from Italy who sang with enormous success throughout Europe and America. On 5 February 1887, he cemented his place in musical history by creating the role of Otello
Otello
Otello is an opera in four acts by Giuseppe Verdi to an Italian libretto by Arrigo Boito, based on Shakespeare's play Othello. It was Verdi's penultimate opera, and was first performed at the Teatro alla Scala, Milan, on February 5, 1887....
in Giuseppe Verdi
Giuseppe Verdi
Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi was an Italian Romantic composer, mainly of opera. He was one of the most influential composers of the 19th century...
's masterpiece of the same name. He is also the earliest Italian tenor to have left a sizeable body of recordings of his voice.
Musical significance
The most famous heroic tenor of his age, Tamagno performed in a total of 26 countries, garnering renown for the extreme power of his singing, especially in the upper register. Indeed, music critics often likened the sound of his voice to that of a trumpet or even a cannon. (Italians call this rare type of singer a "tenore robusto" or "tenore di forza".) Tamagno's vocal range extended effortlessly up to a resounding high C-sharp during his prime, but he was no mere 'belter' of high notes; for his recordings provide evidence of his ability, even at career's end, to sing softly when required, modulating the dynamic levels of his clarion instrument with remarkable skill and unexpected sensitivity.Best known as the creator of the protagonist's part in Verdi's Otello
Otello
Otello is an opera in four acts by Giuseppe Verdi to an Italian libretto by Arrigo Boito, based on Shakespeare's play Othello. It was Verdi's penultimate opera, and was first performed at the Teatro alla Scala, Milan, on February 5, 1887....
at La Scala
La Scala
La Scala , is a world renowned opera house in Milan, Italy. The theatre was inaugurated on 3 August 1778 and was originally known as the New Royal-Ducal Theatre at La Scala...
, Milan
Milan
Milan is the second-largest city in Italy and the capital city of the region of Lombardy and of the province of Milan. The city proper has a population of about 1.3 million, while its urban area, roughly coinciding with its administrative province and the bordering Province of Monza and Brianza ,...
in 1887, he also was the first Gabriele Adorno
Gabriele Adorno
Gabriele Adorno was the fifth Doge of Genoa. A member of the noble Adorno family, he was elected on March 14, 1363 to succeed Simone Boccanegra, who had died in office; he remained in the position until August 13, 1370, and was succeeded by Domenico di Campofregoso.Adorno is a character in...
in Verdi's 1881 revision of Simon Boccanegra
Simon Boccanegra
Simon Boccanegra is an opera with a prologue and three acts by Giuseppe Verdi to an Italian libretto by Francesco Maria Piave, based on the play Simón Bocanegra by Antonio García Gutiérrez....
, a far more lyrical assignment than the "Moor of Venice". He participated, too, in the premiere of Verdi's Italian-language version of Don Carlos
Don Carlos
Don Carlos is a five-act grand opera composed by Giuseppe Verdi to a French language libretto by Camille du Locle and Joseph Méry, based on the dramatic play Don Carlos, Infant von Spanien by Friedrich Schiller...
when it was staged at La Scala in 1884, singing the eponymous role of the Infante of Spain. Five other operas in which Tamagno created leading roles were Carlos Gomes' Maria Tudor (in 1879), Amilcare Ponchielli
Amilcare Ponchielli
Amilcare Ponchielli was an Italian composer, largely of operas.-Biography:Born in Paderno Fasolaro, now Paderno Ponchielli, near Cremona, Ponchielli won a scholarship at the age of nine to study music at the Milan Conservatory, writing his first symphony by the time he was ten years old.Two years...
's Il figliuol prodigo (1880) and Marion Delorme (1885), Ruggero Leoncavallo
Ruggero Leoncavallo
Ruggero Leoncavallo was an Italian opera composer. His two-act work Pagliacci remains one of the most popular works in the repertory, appearing as number 20 on the Operabase list of the most-performed operas worldwide.-Biography:...
's I Medici (1893) and Isidore de Lara
Isidore de Lara
Isidore de Lara, born Isidore Cohen , was an English composer and singer. After studying in Italy and France, he returned to England where he taught for several years at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and became a well known singer and composer of art songs...
's Messaline
Messaline
Messaline is an operatic tragédie lyrique in four acts by Isidore de Lara. The librettists were Paul Armand Silvestre and Eugène Morand.The opera premiered at the Opéra de Monte-Carlo on 21 March 1899 where it was received enthusiastically...
(1899).
He was lauded, too, for his potent performances of such established parts as Manrico in Il trovatore
Il trovatore
Il trovatore is an opera in four acts by Giuseppe Verdi to an Italian libretto by Salvadore Cammarano, based on the play El Trovador by Antonio García Gutiérrez. Cammarano died in mid-1852 before completing the libretto...
, Don Alvaro in La forza del destino
La forza del destino
La forza del destino is an Italian opera by Giuseppe Verdi. The libretto was written by Francesco Maria Piave based on a Spanish drama, Don Álvaro o la fuerza del sino , by Ángel de Saavedra, Duke of Rivas, with a scene adapted from Friedrich Schiller's Wallensteins Lager. It was first performed...
, the title role in Ernani
Ernani
Ernani is an operatic dramma lirico in four acts by Giuseppe Verdi to an Italian libretto by Francesco Maria Piave, based on the play Hernani by Victor Hugo. The first production took place at La Fenice Theatre, Venice on 9 March 1844...
, the title role in Poliuto
Poliuto
Poliuto is a tragedia lirica, or tragic opera, by Gaetano Donizetti. Salvadore Cammarano wrote the Italian libretto after Pierre Corneille's play Polyeucte . It was composed in 1838 and first performed on 30 November 1848 at the Teatro San Carlo, Naples...
, Arnold in Guillaume Tell, John of Leyden in Le prophète
Le prophète
Le prophète is an opera in five acts by Giacomo Meyerbeer. The French-language libretto was by Eugène Scribe.-Performance history:...
, Raoul in Les Huguenots
Les Huguenots
Les Huguenots is a French opera by Giacomo Meyerbeer, one of the most popular and spectacular examples of the style of grand opera. The opera is in five acts and premiered in Paris in 1836. The libretto was written by Eugène Scribe and Émile Deschamps....
, Vasco in L'Africaine
L'Africaine
L'africaine is a grand opera, the last work of the composer Giacomo Meyerbeer. The French libretto was written by Eugène Scribe. The opera is about fictitious events in the life of the real historical person Vasco da Gama...
, Robert in Robert le diable
Robert le diable
Robert le diable may refer to:* Robert le diable by Giacomo Meyerbeer* Robert the Devil, a medieval legend...
and Eleazar in La Juive
La Juive
La Juive is a grand opera in five acts by Fromental Halévy to an original French libretto by Eugène Scribe; it was first performed at the Opéra, Paris, on February 23, 1835.-Composition history:...
. He excelled equally well in the newer dramatic parts of Radames in Aida
Aida
Aida sometimes spelled Aïda, is an opera in four acts by Giuseppe Verdi to an Italian libretto by Antonio Ghislanzoni, based on a scenario written by French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette...
, Samson in Samson et Dalila, Alim in Le roi de Lahore
Le roi de Lahore
Le roi de Lahore is an opera in five acts by Jules Massenet to a French libretto by Louis Gallet. It was first performed at the Palais Garnier in Paris on 27 April 1877....
and John the Baptist in Hérodiade
Hérodiade
Hérodiade is an opera in four acts by Jules Massenet to a French libretto by Paul Milliet and Henri Grémont, based on the novella Hérodias by Gustave Flaubert...
. Yet, in his younger days, before his voice grew too robust, he was able to negotiate a role as light and graceful as that of Edgardo in Lucia di Lammermoor
Lucia di Lammermoor
Lucia di Lammermoor is a dramma tragico in three acts by Gaetano Donizetti. Salvadore Cammarano wrote the Italian language libretto loosely based upon Sir Walter Scott's historical novel The Bride of Lammermoor....
due to his accomplished mezza-voce singing.
All up, Tamagno sang in approximately 55 different operas and sacred works (including Verdi's Requiem
Requiem (Verdi)
The Messa da Requiem by Giuseppe Verdi is a musical setting of the Roman Catholic funeral mass for four soloists, double choir and orchestra. It was composed in memory of Alessandro Manzoni, an Italian poet and novelist much admired by Verdi. The first performance in San Marco in Milan on 22 May...
and Gioachino Rossini's Stabat Mater) during the course of his career as a soloist, which began in Turin
Turin
Turin is a city and major business and cultural centre in northern Italy, capital of the Piedmont region, located mainly on the left bank of the Po River and surrounded by the Alpine arch. The population of the city proper is 909,193 while the population of the urban area is estimated by Eurostat...
in 1873 and continued for another 32 years, only to be curtailed by the onset of a cardiovascular affliction that would kill him in middle age. Interestingly enough, with one notable exception, Tamagno largely eschewed verismo opera, considering it to be an uncomfortable fit with his stylistic training in the bel canto
Bel canto
Bel canto , along with a number of similar constructions , is an Italian opera term...
tradition. That notable exception was Umberto Giordano
Umberto Giordano
Umberto Menotti Maria Giordano was an Italian composer, mainly of operas.He was born in Foggia in Puglia, southern Italy, and studied under Paolo Serrao at the Conservatoire of Naples...
's Andrea Chénier
Andrea Chénier
Andrea Chénier is a verismo opera in four acts by the composer Umberto Giordano, set to an Italian libretto by Luigi Illica. It is based loosely on the life of the French poet, André Chénier , who was executed during the French Revolution....
. He studied the score of Chénier with Giordano in 1898 and earned accolades for his magisterial delivery of the tenor lead's four showpiece solos at ensuing productions of the work. He was on friendly terms, too, with Giordano's rival Giacomo Puccini
Giacomo Puccini
Giacomo Antonio Domenico Michele Secondo Maria Puccini was an Italian composer whose operas, including La bohème, Tosca, Madama Butterfly, and Turandot, are among the most frequently performed in the standard repertoire...
. In 1892, he took part in a revival of Puccini's flawed early opera Edgar
Edgar (opera)
Edgar is an operatic dramma lirico in three acts by Giacomo Puccini to an Italian libretto by Ferdinando Fontana, freely based on the play in verse La Coupe et les lèvres by Alfred de Musset...
that was staged in Madrid
Madrid
Madrid is the capital and largest city of Spain. The population of the city is roughly 3.3 million and the entire population of the Madrid metropolitan area is calculated to be 6.271 million. It is the third largest city in the European Union, after London and Berlin, and its metropolitan...
under the supervision of the composer; but even Tamagno's involvement in the enterprise was not enough to reinvigorate Edgar and it remains rarely heard. (Tamagno also ventured a few performances of Pietro Mascagni
Pietro Mascagni
Pietro Antonio Stefano Mascagni was an Italian composer most noted for his operas. His 1890 masterpiece Cavalleria rusticana caused one of the greatest sensations in opera history and single-handedly ushered in the Verismo movement in Italian dramatic music...
's archetypal verismo piece, Cavalleria rusticana
Cavalleria rusticana
Cavalleria rusticana is an opera in one act by Pietro Mascagni to an Italian libretto by Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti and Guido Menasci, adapted from a play written by Giovanni Verga based on his short story. Considered one of the classic verismo operas, it premiered on May 17, 1890 at the Teatro...
, in New York City in 1894.)
To paraphrase Tamagno's New York Times obituary of 1 September 1905, such was the extraordinary facility of the tenor's upper register, he made the hurling forth of his high A, B and C sound as easy as everyday speech. Like all singers, however, he had his vocal shortcomings and bad habits. The vibrant, power-packed tone of his voice, while exceedingly thrilling, could never be described as "honeyed" or "seductive" and this reduced the effectiveness of his contribution to the more intimate passages of love duets, such as the one for the protagonist and Desdemona that crowns Act One of Otello. He was not an adroit sight-reader of an operatic score either, justifying this limitation by insisting that he was an emotional person who preferred to deliver his music from the "heart" rather than from the "head". Critics occasionally reprimanded him, too, for striving to maximise the excitement factor of his performances by holding on to top notes longer than necessary and by sometimes pushing them sharp. He was also chided intermittently for getting behind or ahead of the conductor's beat.
In summary: Tamagno pursued a busy and highly acclaimed career as a classical singer that lasted for more than three decades. During that time, he appeared in more than 50 different operas and sang at almost every important theatre in Europe, South America and the United States. He also had the distinction of participating in eight premiere performances of new or substantially refashioned operatic works by significant composers such as Verdi, Ponchielli and Leoncavallo. While not a sophisticated actor or a flawless musician, his huge voice and volcanic renditions of the most forceful tenor roles in the Italian and French repertoires had a tremendous impact on audiences, enabling him to build a worldwide reputation as an elite performer and charge promoters on both sides of the Atlantic top-tier fees for his services.
Life and singing career
Born into a large family in the northern Italian city of TurinTurin
Turin is a city and major business and cultural centre in northern Italy, capital of the Piedmont region, located mainly on the left bank of the Po River and surrounded by the Alpine arch. The population of the city proper is 909,193 while the population of the urban area is estimated by Eurostat...
(Torino) in 1850, Tamagno was the son of a wine-seller who ran a modest trattoria. His vocal promise manifested itself early, and although encouraged by his parents to learn a trade, he was still able to take singing lessons with the conductor/composer Carlo Pedrotti
Carlo Pedrotti
Carlo Pedrotti was an Italian conductor, administrator and composer, principally of opera. An associate of Giuseppe Verdi's, he also taught two internationally renowned Italian operatic tenors, Francesco Tamagno and Alessandro Bonci.-Early life:Pedrotti was born in Verona, where he studied music...
at Turin's Liceo Musicale (music school) and gain experience as a chorister.
In 1873, Tamagno completed his musical studies, and having got a stint of compulsory military service out of the way, he essayed a few small parts at Turin's Teatro Regio (Royal Theatre), of which institution Pedrotti was the director. He then made the most of an opportunity to execute a major operatic role, bursting into prominence on 20 January 1874 with a sensational performance as Riccardo in Giuseppe Verdi's Un ballo in maschera
Un ballo in maschera
Un ballo in maschera , is an opera in three acts by Giuseppe Verdi with text by Antonio Somma. The libretto is loosely based on an 1833 play, Gustave III, by French playwright Eugène Scribe who wrote about the historical assassination of King Gustav III of Sweden...
at the Teatro Bellini, Palermo
Palermo
Palermo is a city in Southern Italy, the capital of both the autonomous region of Sicily and the Province of Palermo. The city is noted for its history, culture, architecture and gastronomy, playing an important role throughout much of its existence; it is over 2,700 years old...
. Tamagno embarked on a series of follow-up singing engagements in Ferrara
Ferrara
Ferrara is a city and comune in Emilia-Romagna, northern Italy, capital city of the Province of Ferrara. It is situated 50 km north-northeast of Bologna, on the Po di Volano, a branch channel of the main stream of the Po River, located 5 km north...
, Rovigo
Rovigo
Rovigo is a town and comune in the Veneto region of North-Eastern Italy, the capital of the eponymous province. -Geography:...
, Venice
Venice
Venice is a city in northern Italy which is renowned for the beauty of its setting, its architecture and its artworks. It is the capital of the Veneto region...
and Barcelona
Barcelona
Barcelona is the second largest city in Spain after Madrid, and the capital of Catalonia, with a population of 1,621,537 within its administrative limits on a land area of...
which raised his profile further and enabled him to make his debut at Milan
Milan
Milan is the second-largest city in Italy and the capital city of the region of Lombardy and of the province of Milan. The city proper has a population of about 1.3 million, while its urban area, roughly coinciding with its administrative province and the bordering Province of Monza and Brianza ,...
's La Scala in 1877.
La Scala was Italy's principal opera theatre, and Tamagno became a core member of its company of singers. His voice continued to mature at La Scala, reaching its full potential after a few years of spirited use in a variety of operas. He enjoyed the added advantage of working closely with Verdi, and his vocalism acquired a discipline and polish that hitherto it had lacked. According to The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Opera, he would eventually take part in every La Scala season until the end of 1887 and appear there again in 1901 as a guest artist. He did not completely turn his back on Turin, however, and he found time to sing periodically in his home town. (Indeed, his last known public engagement occurred in Turin in 1905.)
Argentina was an overseas bastion of Italian opera throughout this period, and Tamagno undertook the first of several well-remunerated visits to the South American nation's capital city of Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires is the capital and largest city of Argentina, and the second-largest metropolitan area in South America, after São Paulo. It is located on the western shore of the estuary of the Río de la Plata, on the southeastern coast of the South American continent...
in 1879. Earlier, in 1875-1876, he had sung in Spain. But his international career did not take off explosively until 1888, with the role of Otello—which Verdi had penned with Tamagno's voice in mind—serving as his global calling card. Music-performance historian John Potter has this to say about Otello in his 2009 book, Tenor: History of a Voice (Yale University Press, p. 61): "The title role was one of the most taxing tenor parts ever written and was created specifically for the unique talents and vocal persona of Tamagno. The requirements of the role, an imposing physical presence capable of combining lyrical sweetness with stentorian declamation that ranges from a rich baritonal middle to a ringing upper register, have made it problematic to cast ever since."
Tamagno toured sedulously during the final dozen years of the 19th century, accepting lucrative invitations to perform Otello and other strenuous operatic roles in countries as diverse as England, France, Portugal, Spain (again), Germany, Austria, Russia, Uruguay, Brazil, Mexico and, as we have noted, Argentina. He performed often, too, at the fashionable Monte Carlo Opera and appeared at key musical venues in the North American cities of New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
, Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
, Boston
Boston
Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...
, Baltimore
Baltimore
Baltimore is the largest independent city in the United States and the largest city and cultural center of the US state of Maryland. The city is located in central Maryland along the tidal portion of the Patapsco River, an arm of the Chesapeake Bay. Baltimore is sometimes referred to as Baltimore...
, Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
, Philadelphia and San Francisco. Tamagno's obituary in the New York Times says that he sang in the United States for the first time in 1890. The prominent American impresario Henry Eugene Abbey
Henry Eugene Abbey
Henry Eugene Abbey was an American theatre manager and producer. During the 1870s - 1890s, he managed such prominent Broadway theatres as Booth's, Wallack's, and the Park Theatre, promoting the talents of some of the foremost American actors of his day, as well as European stars...
managed him during this particular trans-Atlantic visit.
To give just five specific examples of Tamagno's foreign engagements in the wake of the 1887 premiere of Otello, he performed at the New York Metropolitan Opera
Metropolitan Opera
The Metropolitan Opera is an opera company, located in New York City. Originally founded in 1880, the company gave its first performance on October 22, 1883. The company is operated by the non-profit Metropolitan Opera Association, with Peter Gelb as general manager...
in 1894–1895, at London's Lyceum Theatre in 1889, at the Mariinsky Theatre
Mariinsky Theatre
The Mariinsky Theatre is a historic theatre of opera and ballet in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Opened in 1860, it became the preeminent music theatre of late 19th century Russia, where many of the stage masterpieces of Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov received their premieres. The...
in St Petersburg in 1896-97, at the Paris Opera
Paris Opera
The Paris Opera is the primary opera company of Paris, France. It was founded in 1669 by Louis XIV as the Académie d'Opéra and shortly thereafter was placed under the leadership of Jean-Baptiste Lully and renamed the Académie Royale de Musique...
in 1897, and at the Royal Opera House
Royal Opera House
The Royal Opera House is an opera house and major performing arts venue in Covent Garden, central London. The large building is often referred to as simply "Covent Garden", after a previous use of the site of the opera house's original construction in 1732. It is the home of The Royal Opera, The...
, Covent Garden
Covent Garden
Covent Garden is a district in London on the eastern fringes of the West End, between St. Martin's Lane and Drury Lane. It is associated with the former fruit and vegetable market in the central square, now a popular shopping and tourist site, and the Royal Opera House, which is also known as...
, in 1895 and 1901. (During his London seasons, he also sang privately for Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle
Windsor Castle
Windsor Castle is a medieval castle and royal residence in Windsor in the English county of Berkshire, notable for its long association with the British royal family and its architecture. The original castle was built after the Norman invasion by William the Conqueror. Since the time of Henry I it...
.)
Orchestral conductors of the calibre of Franco Faccio
Franco Faccio
Franco Faccio was an Italian composer and conductor.-Biography:Born in Verona, Faccio became known as a conductor of Verdi's music. He studied music at the Milan Conservatory where he was a pupil of Stefano Ronchetti-Monteviti...
, Luigi Mancinelli
Luigi Mancinelli
Luigi Mancinelli was a leading Italian orchestral conductor. He also composed music for the stage and concert hall and played the cello....
and Arturo Toscanini
Arturo Toscanini
Arturo Toscanini was an Italian conductor. One of the most acclaimed musicians of the late 19th and 20th century, he was renowned for his intensity, his perfectionism, his ear for orchestral detail and sonority, and his photographic memory...
partnered Tamagno during his heyday, and he appeared opposite some of the most illustrious soprano
Soprano
A soprano is a voice type with a vocal range from approximately middle C to "high A" in choral music, or to "soprano C" or higher in operatic music. In four-part chorale style harmony, the soprano takes the highest part, which usually encompasses the melody...
s, baritone
Baritone
Baritone is a type of male singing voice that lies between the bass and tenor voices. It is the most common male voice. Originally from the Greek , meaning deep sounding, music for this voice is typically written in the range from the second F below middle C to the F above middle C Baritone (or...
s and basses
Bass (voice type)
A bass is a type of male singing voice and possesses the lowest vocal range of all voice types. According to The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, a bass is typically classified as having a range extending from around the second E below middle C to the E above middle C...
in operatic history. Veteran opera-goers regarded Tamagno as being the legitimate successor to Enrico Tamberlik
Enrico Tamberlik
Enrico Tamberlik was an Italian tenor who sang to great acclaim at Europe and America's leading opera venues. He excelled in the heroic roles of the Italian and French repertories and was renowned for his powerful declamation and clarion high notes.-Career:Born in Rome, some sources claim that...
(1820–1889), the dominant Italian heroic tenor of the mid-19th century, while Jean de Reszke
Jean de Reszke
Jean de Reszke, born Jan Mieczyslaw, , was a Polish tenor. Renowned internationally for the high quality of his singing and the elegance of his bearing, he became the biggest male opera star of the late 19th century....
(1850–1925) was widely considered to be the finest of his tenorial coevals. An elegant lyric-dramatic tenor of the French school, de Reszke's repertoire overlapped Tamagno's to some extent, and although he could never out sing his Italian rival, he had a rounder voice and a suaver stage presence. He was also the foremost male exponent of Richard Wagner
Richard Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, conductor, theatre director, philosopher, music theorist, poet, essayist and writer primarily known for his operas...
's operas to be heard on the stages of London and New York during the late-Victorian Era
Victorian era
The Victorian era of British history was the period of Queen Victoria's reign from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined sensibilities and national self-confidence...
. Tamagno, however, refused to perform Wagnerian works, even in Italian translation; he believed that the tessitura
Tessitura
In music, the term tessitura generally describes the most musically acceptable and comfortable range for a given singer or, less frequently, musical instrument; the range in which a given type of voice presents its best-sounding texture or timbre...
of the music written for Wagner's tenor heroes lay too low to suit his vocal range.
Tamagno lived long enough to witness the rise to fame of the young Enrico Caruso (1873–1921). He admired Caruso's ability, predicting as far back as 1898 that Caruso would go on to become the number-one Italian tenor of the 20th century. As M. J. Phillips-Matz observes in her 2002 Puccini biography, Tamagno and Caruso actually appeared on the same stage in February 1901, during a concert at La Scala. The concert had been organised by Toscanini as a commemorative tribute to the recently deceased Verdi. (In it, Tamagno sang an extract from La forza del destino and Caruso led the quartet from Rigoletto
Rigoletto
Rigoletto is an opera in three acts by Giuseppe Verdi. The Italian libretto was written by Francesco Maria Piave based on the play Le roi s'amuse by Victor Hugo. It was first performed at La Fenice in Venice on March 11, 1851...
.) Opera commentator Michael Scott
Michael Scott (artistic director)
Michael Scott is the founder of the London Opera Society. In his role as the society's sole artistic director, he brought to London Marilyn Horne, Joan Sutherland, and Boris Christoff. He was also responsible for introducing Sherrill Milnes, Ruggero Raimondi, and Montserrat Caballe...
states that Tamagno gave his last performance as Otello in Rome in 1903, when he starred in a gala production mounted for Kaiser Wilhelm II.
A single father who never married, Tamagno possessed an affable personality in addition to a shrewd business brain and a careful attitude to money. Soprano Nellie Melba
Nellie Melba
Dame Nellie Melba GBE , born Helen "Nellie" Porter Mitchell, was an Australian operatic soprano. She became one of the most famous singers of the late Victorian Era and the early 20th century...
's most recent biographer, Ann Blainey, recounts how Melba reacted to Tamagno's penny-pinching when she twice encountered demonstrations of it during the 1894-1895 New York Met season:
"His astounding voice was said to have 'the metallic penetration of an eight-inch [artillery] shell', but at heart he remained a simple peasant, and his peasant-like parsimony was a source of amusement. One night Melba and Jean de Reszke watched open-mouthed as he pocketed the after-dinner candies and souvenired a bunch of orchids from the table. Soon after, at a lunch, Melba saw him gather up his neighbour's uneaten cutlets and wrap them in a newspaper. He said they were for his dog, but Melba guessed they were for his own dinner." (See I Am Melba, Black Inc. Books, Melbourne, Australia, 2008, p. 149.)
Tamagno was blessed with a bullish physique but a chronic cardiac ailment caused his health to deteriorate during the early 1900s. Although this ailment forced him to quit the operatic stage, he continued to give recitals and appear in concerts, the final one of which was held in Ostend
Ostend
Ostend is a Belgian city and municipality located in the Flemish province of West Flanders. It comprises the boroughs of Mariakerke , Stene and Zandvoorde, and the city of Ostend proper – the largest on the Belgian coast....
, Belgium, in 1904. He sang briefly in public for the last time in March the following year and withdrew to the tranquility of a villa in Varese
Varese
Varese is a town and comune in north-western Lombardy, northern Italy, 55 km north of Milan.It is the capital of the Province of Varese. The hinterland or urban part of the city is called Varesotto.- Geography :...
, Lombardy
Lombardy
Lombardy is one of the 20 regions of Italy. The capital is Milan. One-sixth of Italy's population lives in Lombardy and about one fifth of Italy's GDP is produced in this region, making it the most populous and richest region in the country and one of the richest in the whole of Europe...
, that he had owned since 1885 and had remodelled extensively. Tamagno's medical condition failed to improve, however, and he suffered a heart attack while at the villa. He was confined to his bed, experienced a relapse and died on 31 August 1905, aged 54. His body lies interred in an elaborate stone mausoleum at Turin's General Cemetery.
Tamagno's beloved daughter Margherita, who had been born out of wedlock, inherited his considerable estate, according to biographer Ugo Piavano. Piavano's definitive biography, Otello Fu: La Vera Vita di Francesco Tamagno, il "tenore-cannone", was published in Milan in 2005 by Rugginenti Editore to mark the 100th anniversary of the singer's death. Both Volume One of Michael Scott's The Record of Singing
The Record of Singing
The Record of Singing is a compilation of classical-music singing from the first half of the 20th century, the era of the 78-rpm record.It was issued on LP by EMI, successor to the British company His Master's Voice — perhaps the leading organization in the early history of audio recording.The...
(published by Duckworth, London, 1977) and J. B. Steane's The Grand Tradition: 70 Years of Singing on Record (Duckworth, London, 1974) contain evaluations of Tamagno's voice and artistry. Furthermore, the Teatro Regio di Torino has acquired many of Tamagno's costumes and other items relating to his operatic career, while his butterfly collection can be viewed in Varese at the Villa Mirabello.
Recordings
Tamagno's intensely bright, steel-tipped voice with its stentorian timbre, open production, vigorous (but never disruptive) vibrato and incisive declamation is preserved on two batches of technologically primitive recordings of operatic items. They were made during February 1903 at Tamagno's holiday retreat in OspedalettiOspedaletti
Ospedaletti is a comune in the Province of Imperia in the Italian region of Liguria, located about 120 km southwest of Genoa and about 25 km southwest of Imperia...
and during April 1904 at a 'studio' in Rome.
The British Gramophone & Typewriter Company, HMV
HMV
His Master's Voice is a trademark in the music business, and for many years was the name of a large record label. The name was coined in 1899 as the title of a painting of the dog Nipper listening to a wind-up gramophone...
/EMI
EMI
The EMI Group, also known as EMI Music or simply EMI, is a multinational music company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It is the fourth-largest business group and family of record labels in the recording industry and one of the "big four" record companies. EMI Group also has a major...
's predecessor, produced all of Tamagno's shellac
Shellac
Shellac is a resin secreted by the female lac bug, on trees in the forests of India and Thailand. It is processed and sold as dry flakes , which are dissolved in ethyl alcohol to make liquid shellac, which is used as a brush-on colorant, food glaze and wood finish...
discs, which were 10 or 12 inches in size and played at a nominal 78 revolutions per minute. It dispatched one of its best engineers, Will Gaisberg, to Italy to handle the recording sessions. (Such sessions could be a daunting experience for singers of Tamagno's generation, who were accustomed to performing before an audience in an opera house environment.) The company paid Tamagno a cash advance of 2000 pounds sterling to make his first lot of "78s". He also received royalties from the company for every individually numbered, custom-labelled pressing that sold. Roland Gelatt's revised edition of The Fabulous Phonograph (Collier Books, New York, 1977, p. 119) asserts that Tamagno's recording contract, signed in December 1902, was the first to embody "the royalty principle".
Gelatt states that Tamagno approved 19 recordings from his Ospedaletti session for release to the public. They went on sale in April 1903 and were heavily advertised in the press, with Tamagno billed as the world's greatest tenor. Buyers were charged one pound sterling, or its equivalent in other currencies, per disc; in comparison, Caruso's early 10-inch discs (cut in Italy the previous year) sold for just 10 shillings or an equivalent amount of money. The amount charged for each of Tamagno's discs represented at least a week's wages for the common man and for that outlay he would receive a single-sided product, sometimes containing less than two minutes of music. Clearly, Tamagno's recordings were aimed at upper-crust customers, as were those made by such eminent contemporaries of his as Nellie Melba, Adelina Patti
Adelina Patti
Adelina Patti was a highly acclaimed 19th-century opera singer, earning huge fees at the height of her career in the music capitals of Europe and America. She first sang in public as a child in 1851 and gave her last performance before an audience in 1914...
, Pol Plançon
Pol Plançon
Pol-Henri Plançon was a distinguished French operatic bass . He was one of the most acclaimed singers active during the 1880s, 1890s and early 20th century—a period often referred to as the "Golden Age of Opera".In addition to being among the earliest international opera stars to have made...
and Mattia Battistini
Mattia Battistini
Mattia Battistini was an Italian operatic baritone. He became internationally famous due to the beauty of his voice and the virtuosity of his singing technique, and he earned the sobriquet "King of Baritones".-Early life:...
.
The small group of composers featured on Tamagno's combined recorded output of 1903 and 1904 comprises Giacomo Meyerbeer
Giacomo Meyerbeer
Giacomo Meyerbeer was a noted German opera composer, and the first great exponent of "grand opera." At his peak in the 1830s and 1840s, he was the most famous and successful composer of opera in Europe, yet he is rarely performed today.-Early years:He was born to a Jewish family in Tasdorf , near...
, Camille Saint-Saëns
Camille Saint-Saëns
Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns was a French Late-Romantic composer, organist, conductor, and pianist. He is known especially for The Carnival of the Animals, Danse macabre, Samson and Delilah, Piano Concerto No. 2, Cello Concerto No. 1, Havanaise, Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, and his Symphony...
, Jules Massenet
Jules Massenet
Jules Émile Frédéric Massenet was a French composer best known for his operas. His compositions were very popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and he ranks as one of the greatest melodists of his era. Soon after his death, Massenet's style went out of fashion, and many of his operas...
, de Lara, Giordano, Rossini and, naturally enough, Verdi. Apart from Otello, the operas from which he elected to record arias, in multiple takes, were Il trovatore, Guillaume Tell (Guglielmo Tell), Le prophète (Il profeta), Samson et Dalila (Sansone e Dalila), Hérodiade, Messaline and Andrea Chénier.
When he stepped before the recording horn, Tamagno was in poor health and semi-retirement after a long and demanding career. Consequently his voice, although still astonishingly powerful and kept under firm technical control, was no longer at its peak (his phrasing had lost some of its former expansiveness and he had developed a preference for stately tempi). It should be borne in mind, too, that the low-fidelity acoustic recording process, in use prior to the introduction of electrical recording technology in 1925, was unable to capture the full array of overtones present in Tamagno's voice or place a resonant, concert hall-type atmosphere around it in the manner of a modern digital recording. Moreover, Tamagno is accompanied on his recordings by a pianist (and a particularly pedestrian one at that) and not by an orchestra as would be the norm nowadays. Despite these handicaps, his singing remains deeply impressive and the various extracts from Otello and other 19th-century compositions which he committed to disc are treated by scholars as audio documents of precious historical and musical importance.
Potter pays tribute to Tamagno's vocal attributes in his book about the history of tenor singing, averring that his "recorded legacy" is "a priceless connection with Verdi" while Steane, writing in The Grand Tradition (pp. 19–23), praises Tamagno's discs as "artistic and devoted performances by a singer of exceptional gifts" with a "great voice". Scott declares in The Record of Singing (pp. 131–133) that Tamagno's Otello recordings are "invaluable historically" with the Esultate in particular displaying "amazing force" and all of them exhibiting an "intensity of utterance" that is "unique". Indeed, Henry Pleasants, author of The Great Singers, goes so far as to say that the "searing despair" of Tamagno's version of Otello's death aria, Niun mi tema, "is possibly unmatched by anything else on wax" (Macmillan Publishing, revised edition, London, 1983, pp. 252–254).
Symposium Records has released a two-CD anthology of Tamagno's published and unpublished recordings (catalogue number 1186/87), while an extensive selection of them was issued on the Pearl/Opal label (CD 9846) in 1990. Those wanting to hear Tamagno in a broader context may wish to consult EMI's three-CD La Scala Edition, Volume One, 1878-1914 (CHS 7 64860 2). This edition contains four Tamagno tracks in expertly re-mastered transfers plus recordings made by a number of his colleagues, including baritone Victor Maurel
Victor Maurel
Victor Maurel was a French operatic baritone who enjoyed an international reputation as a great singing-actor.-Biography:...
, the creator of the role of Iago in Otello, and bass Francesco Navarini, the creator of the role of Lodovico in the same opera.
Of more specialist interest is a 2007 release of all of Tamagno's extant 12-inch records on high quality vinyl
Gramophone record
A gramophone record, commonly known as a phonograph record , vinyl record , or colloquially, a record, is an analog sound storage medium consisting of a flat disc with an inscribed, modulated spiral groove...
discs by the United Kingdom firm Historic Masters
Historic Masters
Historic Masters is a historical reissue record label, based in Takeley, Hertfordshire, England, dedicated to making available quality pressings on vinyl of rare 78 rpm recordings of opera singers...
. The Historic Masters boxed set is accompanied by a biographical essay written by Michael Aspinall, who also discusses Tamagno's discography and appraises his vocal technique. The set contains, among other things, a recently discovered recording of the Oath Duet from Otello ('Si pel ciel') and an aria from Messaline that was previously known only from a private test pressing once belonging to Tamagno. The baritone on the Otello duet is anonymous but Aspinall believes it might be Tamagno's younger brother, Giovanni, who had a minor singing career. Aspinall concludes his essay thus: "Tamagno is one of the most charismatic and communicative singers ever to record his voice for the wonderment of future generations ... The privilege of listening to the complete recordings of Tamagno helps us to realise his immense stature among the great names of music drama."
External links
- International Jose Guillermo Carrillo Foundation, accessed 20 May 2010
- Biography from Stanford UniversityStanford UniversityThe Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
, accessed 20 May 2010 - Francesco Tamagno includes his 1903 recording of the death of Otello, accessed 20 May 2010
- Historic Masters, Notes to Issue 32- Tamagno 10″ Records, accessed 20 May 2010
- Historic Masters Tamagno discography, accessed 20 May 2010
- The Career of Francesco Tamagno, article by Michael Aspinall, 2007, accessed 20 May 2010
- History of the Tenor - Sound Clips and Narration, accessed 20 May 2010