Since my early teenage years I have always loved opera. I have no great love for opera houses and their often uninterested, self-indulgent audiences who uncritically applaud famous names and often seem to be there only because they believe it to be the thing to do. But I listened to opera for the most part on gramophone records and CDs. My oldest memory is of playing old 78 rpm records on a small record player and then a radiogram. My teenage years coincided with the introduction of the vinyl LP and then the stereophonic vinyl LP. I recollect that I received a 45 rpm EP record that had excerpts for Puccini's La Boheme as a present on my 15th birthday. I still have that disc, nearly sixty years later and still I enjoy the singing of Guiseppe di Stefano in Che gelida manina and in the duet at the start of Act 4 which he sings with Robert Merrill. I got to know many operas at a time when we were blessed with some wonderful operatic performers — but especially, tenors.
Today there are few great tenors. Pavarotti is dead and Placido Domingo — at the end of his career — although a great singer is a baritone/tenor, who cannot reach the highest notes. But between 1950 and 1970 we had many great tenors and with the benefit of high quality recordings, we can still hear them today.
The 1950s saw the end of the career of Benjamino Gigli — the finest Italian tenor of the 1930s — but his place was taken by a clutch of great singers. The picture above shows five of them. From the left : Richard Tucker, Jussi Bjoerling, Franco Corelli, Guiseppe di Stefano, and Mario del Monaco. Jussi Bjoerling died in 1960, still not 50 years old and what a voice we lost then. The aria Nessun Dorma has become a tenor test piece now but Jussi Bjoerling set the standard with his recording in 1944. His finest performance on record is probably his La Boheme with Victoria de Los Angeles in the performance made in New York off the cuff with Sir Thomas Beecham conducting. As a recording of this opera, it has never been bettered.
Mario del Monaco was one of the great voices of the 20th century. An immense voice that could fill any concert venue; a huge voice that was never soft — the instruction pp had no place in his arsenal — but he had a vast range from the lowest of low notes to top "C" s that sounded as no more than the middle of his range. No tenor had a voice that sounded so secure. Guiseppe di Stefano, however, had a voce that ultimately proved fragile and only allowed him a short career, But compare his Che gelida manina with that of Mario del Monaco. Guiseppe di Stefano sings a love duet while the vast sound of del Monaco — every note audible in the back row of the gods — sounds as if it will blast Mimi off the stage — it is almost as though he were about to invade some neighbouring country or something equally dramatic. But del Monaco as Othello is unequaled.
Franco Corelli at his best was incomparable but on occasions he could go so OTT that the song or aria was ruined. But in Verdi and Puccini he was superb. Richard Tucker, the American tenor at the Metropolitan Opera for many years was a very Italian tenor capable of some splendid singing and a joy to listen to.
I have not mentioned others like Carlo Bergonzi, Nicolai Gedda, Fritz Wunderlich and a number of others.
One tenor of whom I have particular recollections is Luigi Infantino. Like Guiseppe di Stefano, he was born in Sicily and exactly contemporaneously. I had bought a ticket for a recital by Di Stefano in the Free Trade Hall in Manchester in 1957 or 1958 but the great tenor was indisposed and his place was taken by Luigi Infantino. At the time, I had never heard of him. But he was beautiful tenor with a voice like Gigli who gave a memorable concert with 8 or 10 encores. He died in 1991 and has now been almost forgotten. Few of his recordings are still available — perhaps because he was a good tenor that sang during a period when the world had many great tenors. I have just been listening to Luigi Infantino again on You Tube as I type this — and still with great pleasure.
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