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Tito Schipa
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| During his heyday there was a unanimity of opinion with regard to the strengths and weaknesses of Tito Schipa's singing, perhaps best summarised in the words of his illustrious colleague, Beniamino Gigli: "Though there were many fine tenors singing in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, who were endowed with greater vocal potential than Schipa, when he sang we all had to bow down to his greatness." It was a true tenor voice, produced with a minimum of effort, which allowed for subtle changes of colour and nuance throughout the range, with particular freedom in the upper register.
It did not contain the constituent elements of weight and drama that characterise a more dramatic tenor, such as Caruso.
The total absence of baritonal resonance in his timbre lends Schipa's top notes a thrill wholly alien to that associated with the sword-wielding, openly heroic tenor.
His was a light-tinted, high-placed instrument, that beguiled the listener with its grace, and gave the impression that the business of singing was no more arduous than spoken word; tuned, sustained speech.
His range was by no means exceptional, either at the top or bottom end of the voice, which perhaps comes as a slight surprise, given the efficiency of the instrument in the higher tessitura. Anything above B flat constituted something of a problem for him, and he was not averse to having arias transposed so that they would lie more comfortably within his reach. As a supreme pragmatist on the one hand, and a musical perfectionist on the other, he was not prepared to risk either his voice or his reputation on repertoire that forced him to the outer limits of his capability. The result of this restraint was his eventual specialisation in a mere handful of operatic roles, about twelve in all, which he would perform over and over again at the three main centres of his professional life: the Chicago Opera, the Metropolitan of New York, and La Scala, Milan. "Singers today," he said in September 1962, "make the mistake of wanting to do everything." Perhaps his greatest gift was one of vocal self-knowledge. And his reward for this was a career which lasted fifty-five years. A natural musician of considerable worth, Schipa adopted a technique that complimented his voice to perfection. He was not capable of enormous levels of volume, and rather than be tempted to force his tone (as is so often the case with smaller voiced tenors) he mastered the art of projection. The baritone Tito Gobbi describes it as "the most subtle tenor singing of my experience... His was not a big 'juicy' tenor, as can be judged from records, but the magic of his vocal projection was something unique... I have known many a big voice which failed to reach the last row. With Schipa distance had no terrors." These were the sorts of vocal qualities that made him such an effective communicator of song - especially in an age when the operatic vogue demanded full-blooded voices (suited to the works of verismo composers such as Mascagni, Leoncavallo, Ciléa and Giordano, not to mention Puccini). Schipa offered an alternative. The range of tonal colour at his command was exemplary; and the delicate pianissimi which never fail to impress, together with the ravishing simplicity of his controlled vocal line (or legato) at times seem to mock the laboured antics of other tenors. It is not without justification that he has been dubbed 'the greatest tenore di grazia of the century,' a tribute to his impeccable elegance and unblemished musicianship. Schipa was born in Lecce, southern Italy, at the very end of 1888. A census which registers his birth as 2 January 1889 was the result of a deliberate ploy on the part of his father to protect the boy from military service for an additional year. He was baptised Raffaele Attilio Amedeo Schipa; the name Tito does not appear until a review of a minor concert at the start of his career, in February 1908. He began to study singing after entering a seminary at the age of 13, but did not consider a career other than priesthood until persuaded by a distinguished singing teacher, Alceste Gerunda, to enrol at music school. He financed his own training, first, by taking part-time jobs as a sculptor's assistant and clerk, and then by raising a travel fund through benefit concerts in Lecce. Armed with this, he moved to Milan, the centre of Italian operatic life, in 1908. A farcical début in La Traviata (during which every conceivable operatic disaster contributed to the total calamity) left Schipa surprisingly unscathed, and he was hired by an impresario to perform four principal roles in his home town of Lecce. This led to a two-year spell with a travelling opera troupe, the highlight of which was his unique interpretation of Massenet's Werther. It was the role in which he was to achieve his highest levels of artistic expression over the years to come. Débuts followed in Milan, Buenos Aires and Naples. He was invited by Puccini to participate in the première of La Rondine (Monte Carlo, 1917), and by the end of the First World War he was established as one of Italy's most celebrated artists. The close of hostilities also gave him the chance, at last, to answer the call from America, where 'tenor fever' had reached boiling point in the wake of Caruso's monumental popularity. He was engaged by the Chicago Opera in 1919, where he would become the regular stage partner of Amelita Galli-Curci, queen of The late 1930s marked the zenith of Schipa's popularity in his native Italy, sublimated, no doubt, by his outspoken support of Mussolini and the fascist regime. He frequently appeared at politically emotive functions, and volunteered his services for purposes of propaganda, along with countless other artists of the era. It was a political miscalculation he was later to regret. In the aftermath of Mussolini's downfall, by which stage vocal strength was on the decline, and certainly not sufficient in itself to evoke prolonged public enthusiasm, his personal prestige within Italy and elsewhere would crumble, to be replaced, in some quarters, by open enmity. He returned to the New York's Carnegie Hall in 1947 but delivered his recital to a half-empty hall - an undisguised protest against his fascist involvement. His final La Scala appearance was in 1949. Nevertheless, he continued to sing superbly. Harold Rosenthal wrote of a performance in Rome, 1950, that "his style... remains an object-lesson to all the younger generation of singers," and in 1951 he issued a recital record, the first in seven years. He toured the Eastern Bloc in 1957 with great success, and two years later founded his own singing academy in Rome (a project which later collapsed). In 1962, a few months short of his seventy-fourth birthday, he astonished the musical world by embarking on a concert tour of America, revisiting some of the scenes of his triumphant 1920s career. He was welcomed back like a hero. As Harold Schonberg wrote of the occasion: "No sooner did Schipa close his mouth after ending a selection, than a roar went up as if he had orbited six times, detoured to the moon, landed and come back to earth." His voice had little now to offer, but his style was still much admired. He died in New York State after a diabetic attack, on 16 December 1965. His recorded legacy is generous, both in the quantity of material available and in the quality of artistry bequeathed. Unlike so many fabulously successful singers, who are prone to distort vocal line in order to give dazzling displays of their own particular strengths, Schipa's records display a respect, perhaps innate, of the composer's score. His intention was not so much to impress with vocal panache, as to allow the genius of composition to find full expression by means of faithful portrayal. Most singers, it must be added, do not do this, because they are simply unable to. As the critic Sydney Winstanley wrote in 1960, "Schipa sang his high notes and his fioritura as integral parts of a whole avoiding the easy pitfall of singing to the gallery. His records are a poor buy for the sensation seeker, but for the lover of good singing there are none better." |
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