Tito Schipa

In 1929, he appeared in two Vitaphone movie shorts, singing "M'appari" from Flotow's opera Martha and "Una furtiva lagrima" from Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore.

Schipa's stage repertoire, which in his early career had encompassed a wide range of Verdi and Puccini roles, eventually contracted to about 20 congenial Italian and French operatic roles, including Massenet's Werther, Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore and Cilea's L'arlesiana.

Although a few contemporary critics considered Schipa's voice to be small in size, restricted in range and slightly husky in timbre, he was still extremely popular with the public.

"Although the quality of one or two of Mr. Schipa's top notes was rather tenuous," New York critic Francis D. Perkins wrote in the Herald Tribune in January 1934, “the style and phrasing of his aria was usually artistic and well schooled.” On July 18, 1919, he was initiated to the Scottish Rite Freemasonry[3][4][5] in the Lodge Espartana of Buenos Aires.

[6] In 1939, Tito Schipa declined an invitation from Italian-American groups to perform 12 concerts in order to raise money for the Anti-Fascist movement in Italy.

Although he was offered $1,000 for each appearance, Schipa refused and is quoted in his letter, dated February 23, 1939,[7] "I am sorry that I cannot sing for Loubet; but you MUST understand my situation; and my relationship with Achille Starace in Italy and all authorities there.

Schipa sang his final performance at the Metropolitan Opera in 1941 before returning to Fascist Italy, "where he was a pet of the Benito Mussolini regime", an association he would never really live down; after returning to the United States, his first post war concert was poorly attended but when he came out of retirement one last time in 1962, Town Hall was jammed.