Francesco Tamagno

Five other operas in which Tamagno created leading roles were Carlos Gomes' Maria Tudor (in 1879), Amilcare Ponchielli's Il figliuol prodigo (1880) and Marion Delorme (1885), Ruggero Leoncavallo's I Medici (1893) and Isidore de Lara's Messaline (1899).

Tamagno sang in approximately 55 different operas and sacred works (including Verdi's Requiem and Gioachino Rossini's Stabat Mater) during the course of his career as a soloist, which began in Turin in 1873 and continued for another 32 years, only to be curtailed by the onset of a cardiovascular affliction that killed him in middle age.

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.

The vibrant, power-packed tone of his voice, while 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.

While he was 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, and to charge promoters on both sides of the Atlantic top-tier fees for his services.

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 and composer Carlo Pedrotti at Turin's Liceo Musicale music school and gain experience as a chorister.

[1][3] In 1873, Tamagno completed his musical studies, and having got a stint of compulsory military service out of the way, he undertook 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 at the Teatro Bellini, Palermo.

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 Argentina.

Orchestral conductors of the calibre of Franco Faccio, Luigi Mancinelli and Arturo Toscanini partnered Tamagno during his heyday, and he appeared opposite some of the most illustrious sopranos, baritones and basses in operatic history.

Veteran opera-goers regarded Tamagno as being the legitimate successor to Enrico Tamberlik (1820–1889), the dominant Italian heroic tenor of the mid-19th century, while Jean de Reszke (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 outsing his Italian rival, he had a rounder voice and a suaver stage presence.

Tamagno, however, refused to perform Wagnerian works, even in Italian translation; he believed that the tessitura of the music written for Wagner's tenor heroes lay too low to suit his vocal range.

Opera commentator Michael Scott 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.

Tamagno's beloved daughter Margherita, who had been born out of wedlock, and for whom he cared from her birth, writing to her throughout his career and her childhood incredibly moving letters, 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.

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.

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".

The small group of composers featured on Tamagno's combined recorded output of 1903 and 1904 comprises Giacomo Meyerbeer, Camille Saint-Saëns, Jules Massenet, de Lara, Giordano, Rossini and, naturally enough, Verdi.

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.

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).