Niun mi tema mario del monaco biography
Mario Del Monaco – Operatic Tenor
The History of Mario Del Monaco
Born: July 27, 1915
Died: October 16, 1982
Italian tenor.
First class dramatic tenors have been very scarce, since the Second World War.
Windgassen was almost totally Wagnerian, the true heldentenor in fact.
Tucker developed from the Spinto into the dramatic parts rather as Caruso had done.
The only Italian to emerge since the war has been Mario Del Monaco, born in Florence on the 27th of July 1915.
He studied at the Pizzaro Conservatory. At 13, he sang Masani’s Cantata, Narcissus. In 1935, he won first prize in a competition for a place in the Rome Opera School.
He made his debut at Pizzaro in 1939, but regards his official debut, a performance as Pinkerton in Madam Butterfly at Theatre Puccini, Milan, in January 1941.
The foundations of Del Monaco’s international career, were laid during the 1945/46 season, when he sang Radames at the Verona arena and Cavaradossi Canao, and Pinkerton at Covent Garden, with Asan Carlo company from Naples.
I wasn’t into the Pagliacci performance and didn’t enjoy it much.
It would be interesting I think, to compare him immediately with his American rival Richard Tucker.
So, here he is in the O Tu Che In Seno from Verde’s La Forza del Crostino.
O Tu Che In Seno / Forza / 1958 – Mario Del Monaco
Del Monaco established himself during the 50s, at La Scala, Milan. Singing in the heavier operas such as, Norma, La Giaconda, Andrea Chinai, Lohengrin and Samson.
In 1950, he had made his North American debut in Aida at San Francisco. Rudolf Bing heard him and engaged him for the Metropolitan Opera, where he made his debut, the following year.
He was to remain a regular visitor to the Metropolitan, until 1959. He was also heard at the Cologne in Buenos Aires and in the leading opera houses of France, Yugoslavia, and Germany. Another highlight was his tour of the Soviet Union in 1959, and his appearance at the Bolshoi in Carmen with the em
Niun Mi Tema
Derek McGovern
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Many of us here regard Lanza's recording of the Otello Monologue as Reply to author Sign in to reply to author Forward Sign in to forward Delete You do not have permission to delete messages in this group Copy link Report message Show original message Either email addresses are anonymous for this group or you need the view member email addresses permission to view the original message to mario...@googlegroups.com For one thing, his acting was atrocious - even the hammiest of Well, all I can say to that is if sheer volume is all that one Three Titanic Tenors: Del Monaco, Corelli, & Tucker We are all familiar with the universally hailed trio of the Three Tenors, comprised of Plácido Domingo, José Carreras, and the late Luciano Pavarotti. But does anyone remember, with any degree of affection, the Three Titanic Tenors who came before them — namely, the great Mario Del Monaco, Franco Corelli, and Richard Tucker? Is there anybody around today who recalls how their voluminous, dramatic, larger-than-life voices seemed to fill every inch of the theaters they sang in, with such ease and facility and without apparent effort? Why, I’m sure there is! They were all more or less contemporaries of each other, and epitomized to a postwar, opera-starved generation the “Golden Age of Tenor Singing” at the Metropolitan Opera, and abroad, for the better part of three decades. The first of these truly magnificent and unforgettable vocal phenomena — for these are the only words that come to mind in describing what their voices meant to me personally — was Del Monaco. Mario del Monaco as Don Jose ‘ Carmen’ (Drawing by Josmar F. Lopes) Mario Del Monaco was born on July 27, 1915, in Florence, Italy, in the same region that would later produce Franco Corelli. He made his initial appearance, in 1939, in Pesaro as Turiddu in Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana. Officially, however, he debuted in the 1940-41 season at the Teatro Puccini in Milan, as Pinkerton in Madama Butterfly. It was only after World War II that the full, dramatic singing voice we came to know and adore was developed, as Del Monaco inevitably moved on to bigger and heavier parts, particularly that of Andrea Chénier, which he sang for the first time at La Scala, Milan, in 1949. It was a role he had carefully prepared with the work’s composer, Umberto Giordano, and became for him, along with Otello, his two most frequently performed parts. His debut at the Metropolitan Opera was in 1951, as Radames in Verdi&#
one of his greatest achievements -- and rightly so! -- but I would
also rate his Niun Mi Tema from the same opera as another of his
finest operatic accomplishments.
In fact, this rendition is the perfect antidote for countering the oft-
heard nonsense that Lanza always overdid the histrionics on his
operatic recordings. (David Denton, for example, writing in Records &
Recordings in 1973, claimed that the "affectations" on Lanza's 1958
version of Vesti la Giubba "result in almost making a caricature of
this famous aria".) By any standards, Mario is quite restrained here
-- perhaps *too* restrained for some tastes -- but, as Armando points
out in his book, by avoiding the usual scenery-chewing antics of, say,
a Del Monaco, Lanza's sombre, controlled rendition is all the more
moving. I especially love the sensitivity of his "E tu. . .come sei
pallida! e stanca, e muta, e bella" and from "Pria
d'ucciderti. . .sposa. . .ti baciai" (after he stabs himself) to the
end. Not to mention his sighs, on which he skillfully resists any
temptation to ham things up. That final, incomplete "bacio" ("kiss")
is devastating -- and a masterstroke to boot, since completing the
word (as some tenors do) is much less effective -- as is the poignant
quality in his voice on the difficult "morendo".
It helps, of course, that Lanza is in very fine vocal fettle indeed
here. His voice Derek McGovern
unread,
only have to read some of the adoring threads on the grandi-tenori
site for proof of that - but the man's enormous popularity has always
puzzled me. I became even more puzzled recently when I watched a DVD
of his Canio from a televised production of Pagliacci in Tokyo in the
early 1960s - a period when he was supposedly still at his peak. (He
was then in his mid-40s.)
thespians would have been embarrassed by it. Someone once observed
that Del Monaco seems to have acquired his hilariously exaggerated
theatrics from watching silent movies. If that's true, they must have
been very *bad* silent films. But, you might say, many opera singers
from Del Monaco's era were hopeless actors: the key thing was his
voice. That glorious trumpeting sound!
requires from an opera singer, then Del Monaco is the man for the job.
Here, as always, he belts out those notes with terrific force at every
opportunity. But that's *all* he does - and, here, not all of the
notes are as well placed as they ought to be, given the man's
reputation. The voice is not even remotely beautiful to my ears, the
diction is muddy, and he only seems to know one emotion: anger.
Admittedly, Canio is not the most subtle of characters, but, even so,
there are moments when he isn't supposed to be raging. There was no
poignancy in De