Francesco Marconi

His debut was a success, and he was soon appearing regularly at Italy's premier opera house, La Scala, Milan, with lucrative summer seasons spent performing in South America, mainly at Buenos Aires.

He failed, however, to achieve a real success on this particular occasion because his lyric voice was not equal to the heavyweight dramatic demands of Otello's score, which had been written by Verdi to suit the more powerful tones of his stentorian rival Tamagno.

While in Russia, he appeared at the imperial opera houses situated in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, and added Anton Rubinstein's Nero and Peter Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin to his repertoire.

Indeed, near the end of his career, he toured widely in the Requiem, performing as part of a regular quartet of singers which contained one other top-class artist, Francesco Navarini (1855-1923), who was considered to be the best Italian bass of the era.

Some of them, like Marconi's sweet-toned and finely structured version of Cielo e mar from La Gioconda and his stylish delivery of arias from Lucia di Lammermoor, successfully convey the limpidity and grace of his bel canto method of vocalism; but most of them demonstrate that by the age of 50, both his breath control and the sweetly lyrical timbre of his voice had been damaged by the strain of singing such taxing roles[9] as Radames, Otello, Lohengrin and Don Alvaro.