Fernando De Lucia
Fernando De Lucia (11 October 1860[1] or 1 September 1861 – 21 February 1925) was an Italian operatic tenor and singing teacher who enjoyed an internationally successful career.
De Lucia was admired in his lifetime as a striking exponent of verismo parts — particularly Canio in Leoncavallo's Pagliacci — and of certain roles written by Verdi and Puccini.
They hail him as the exemplar of a type of graceful, ornamental tenor singing which originated prior to verismo and that went out of fashion for a long time, only to reemerge in recent years.
Especially valued are the recordings that De Lucia made of Almaviva's arias and duets from Rossini's bel canto comic opera Il barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville).
[3] Over the next two or three years he sang in Spain, South America and in the smaller Italian opera houses, in Linda di Chamounix, Dinorah, L'elisir d'amore, Fra Diavolo and La sonnambula.
De Lucia's verismo-opera career continued apace with the first English performance (on 19 May 1893, with Enrico Bevignani conducting), of Leoncavallo's Pagliacci, opposite Nellie Melba and Mario Ancona.
[9] Mascagni made his own London debut at Covent Garden, conducting L'amico Fritz on 19 June 1893 with Calvé and, of course, De Lucia in the cast.
[10] Soon afterwards, again with Calvé, and accompanied by the song composer Paolo Tosti, De Lucia sang excerpts from Cavalleria rusticana for Queen Victoria at Windsor.
On 7 July of that year, appearing in a cast which included soprano Nellie Melba and the baritones Mario Ancona and David Bispham, he gave the first British performance of I Rantzau at Covent Garden.
[2] At Covent Garden in that same year, he shared the principal tenor work with the heavier-voiced Francesco Tamagno and Albert Alvarez in the absence of Jean de Reszke.
The cast of Auber's light-hearted opera featured Bispham and Mme Amadi (as Lord and Lady Allcash) and Marie Engle (as Zerlina), as well as the bass Vittorio Arimondi and the buffo baritone Antonio Pini-Corsi (as brigands).
Although De Lucia's stage career was closely tied to works by his contemporaries Mascagni and Leoncavallo, the vocal method that he exhibited in their operas was not the strenuous, declamatory mode of singing normally associated by modern listeners with the verismo movement.
They include Alessandro Bonci, Giuseppe Anselmi, Fiorello Giraud, Charles Friant, Edmond Clement, and David Devries.
(Unlike the other tenors mentioned above, De Marchi did not make commercial discs; but he can be heard singing part of the role of Cavaradossi on brief cylinder recordings made live at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1903.)
This company began recording celebrity singers in October 1904, having been founded for that purpose by Baron d'Erlanger as the Società Italiana di Fonotipia, Milano.
The 92000 sequence was cut between 1907 and 1914 on the characteristic ten-and three-quarter-inch Fonotipia record format, and De Lucia's were made in 1911 after the cessation of his work for the Gramophone Company.
The repertoire is very wide and includes Tate's song Broken/baby doll (in Italian) and many duets with the "palpably mediocre" (Henstock) soprano De Angelis and the young baritone Benvenuto Franci, then at the start of his long and celebrated career.
De Lucia's ornaments and general interpretations became even more audacious; one notorious example being the change in the melody of Che gelida manina from Puccini's La Bohème.
