Beniamino Gigli
in Song

Note by Nigel Douglas











I have always regarded Beniamino Gigli as a man who was quite simply put into the world to sing. From his early childhood until his retirement at the age of 65 singing was his life, his natural method of expression. He himself used to say 'Apart from my voice I am a very ordinary person', and in one sense this was true. It overlooked the point, however, that wherever a singer goes his voice goes with him; Gigli never was 'apart from his voice', and about his voice there was nothing ordinary whatsoever.

He was born on 20 March 1890 in a small and delightful country town called Recanati in the province of Italy known as Le Marche, an area perhaps best known to the world in general as the home of Verdicchio wine. He was the youngest of six children, his father being a cobbler of humble means, and he received his earliest vocal and musical instruction as a boy soprano in the choir of the local cathedral. Gigli's vocal flair was such that he was admitted to the choir before he had reached his seventh birthday, and so intoxicated was he by the joy of singing that he would sing on his way to school, sing on his way home again, and then climb to the top of the cathedral tower and sing at the top of his lungs to anyone below who might feel inclined to listen. It was as a boy soprano that he took his first steps onstage, playing the role of the heroine in a student production of an operetta in the provincial capital, Macerata, at the age of fifteen, and the audience's response when he sang his principal solo helped to convince him that he would never be happy unless he could make singing his career.

Although his voice retained its beauty once it had broken - not a fact to be taken for granted - Gigli did not make the mistake of rushing into an operatic career, but studied intensively in Rome, just managing to keep body and soul together by working first as an assistant in a chemist's shop, then as a domestic servant. An operatically minded colonel saw to it that his military service was spent as a telephone operator in the capital so that there should be no interruption in his studies, and they culminated in his winning a widely publicised international competition in the city of Parma. There were 105 contestants, and many years later, when a friend of Gigli's presented him with the judges' original report, he found that one of them had written at the bottom in block capitals ABBIAMO FINALMENTE TROVATO IL TENORE! (At last we have found the tenor!)

Gigli made his professional debut on October 15, 1914 as Enzo in 'La Gioconda' in the city of Rovigo, and despite the inevitable disruptions caused by the First World War the sheer quality of his voice and the expertise with which he deployed it could not fail to take him straight to the top of his profession. By 1918 he had reached La Scala, Milan, by 1919 the Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires, and by 1920 the Metropolitan Opera, New York. Unlike Caruso, whose death occurred the following year, he was not without competitors. At the lighter end of his repertoire there was Tito Schipa, at the heavier end Giovanni Martinelli and Aureliano Pertile, and more or less in the same slot as himself there was Giacomo Lauri-Volpi. Gigli, however, had one huge advantage over the others; his voice was by far the most beautiful, and his overwhelming popularity with the public can be gauged by the fact that he was able to charge by far the highest fees.

To me the outstanding characteristic of Gigli's voice was the wonderful roundness of the tone. There was an essential sweetness and softness to it, it was totally without jagged edges, and it glowed with friendliness and warmth. It was basically lyrical in quality, with all the seductiveness that that implies, but thanks to its perfect focus and effortless emission it could be put to grippingly dramatic use without ever sounding forced or harsh - which is, of course, the ultimate tribute to Gigli's mastery as a vocal technician. I remember singing with an accompanist in Rome who had often played for Gigli and who described him as 'furbo', 'crafty' or 'cunning', meaning that he knew everything there was to be known about how to manipulate his voice. The British accompanist Ivor Newton, who played regularly for Gigli on his British tours, describes in his memoirs how Gigli once sang a concert on an evening when he was in the grip of influenza and could hardly speak, yet so total was his technical control that the audience was unaware of the slightest problem. 'Gigli with a temperature of 102', as Newton puts it, 'could sing better than most tenors who were safely fixed at 98.4'.

There was, however, as the recordings on this disc amply demonstrate, a great deal more to Gigli than the mere combination of voice and technique. The first time I heard him in the flesh was at the Albert Hall shortly after the Second World War, and it was an unforgettable experience. The vast auditorium was packed and the sense of expectation as we awaited his appearance was almost tangible. Then onto the stage he came, an utterly undistinguished elderly figure in a baggy tail suit, and for the rest of the evening time stood still. From the opening note of the opening number, 'O paradiso' from 'L'Africana', through an exhausting programme of arias, songs and encores he held the audience enthralled, and anyone writing a review of the occasion could have done no better than to repeat the words which Richard Capell of The Daily Telegraph had written about his very first concert in Great Britain, back in 1933, also in the Albert Hall:

'Gigli is a superb singer. He is a little man, a bantam fighting cock. He sings with the whole force of his body, as naturally as a game cock fights. And there was not an ugly note all evening. He began by singing 'God Save the King' at 8.15, then sang on for two hours with only one break, for which he had to plead. By ten o'clock the audience was making a noise like a football crowd. Those who wanted 'Quest' o quella' were trying to shout down the partisans of 'Celeste Aida' or whatever their fancy was.'

Gigli did not always receive unstinting praise from the critics. Both in London and in New York he was regularly hauled over the coals for his lack of stylistic refinement, most notably for his indulgence in the sob and the interpolated aspirate. Ernest Newman published a celebrated gibe about Gigli 'so-howing his wild notes', and even Richard Capell stated that 'next time Mr Gigli must leave Mr Gihigli in the dressing-room'; but to the countless opera- and concert-goers who were content to lap up the unstinting vocal largesse of Gigli in full flood such niceties were of little significance. It was his habit to sing every note as if his life depended on it, by which I do not mean that he sang consistently flat out - far from it, the way in which those ravishing piano tones could float to the roof of the Albert Hall was one of the most potent secrets of his craft - but that every phrase he sang, even the most musically trivial, was invariably delivered as if it was of gigantic importance to him.

This, to my mind, is one of the main reasons why it is not merely Gigli's voice but also his personality which is still preserved with such immediacy in his recordings. The songs contained in the current selection may not aspire to the same musical stature as the operas of Verdi or Puccini, but they are all classics of the popular genre and Gigli devotes to them just as much passion and intensity as he used to bestow on such celebrated portrayals as his Riccardo in 'Un Ballo in Maschera' or his Cavaradossi in 'Tosca'. Indeed, I often think that it is precisely in such songs as these that we come closest to the essential Gigli; unconstrained by the task of interpreting 'great' music he can bask in the sheer pleasure of pouring forth the sound and the soul of Italy. In several numbers, such as 'Mandulinata a Napule' and 'Santa Lucia luntana', he moves from pure Italian into local dialect as he hymns the haunting appeal of the Neapolitan coastline. In others he is the pleading lover serenading the object of his passion - humorously in 'Maria, Mari', with its suggestion that he will lose a lot less sleep if only she will play the game, (so, too, I suspect, will the neighbours), pathetically in 'Serenata' with its evocations of 'a love which exists no more', persuasively in 'O sole mio', when the young lady is assured that not even the balm of sunshine after a storm can be compared with that of the sunshine in her smiling eyes, and jubilantly in 'Marechiare', an enchanted spot where, when the moon comes up, even the fish apparently 'tremble with love'. With 'Musica proibita' we find the boot, so to speak, on the other foot; it is the lament of a young lady who is serenaded every evening, and who wonders why her mother forbids her to join in with her admirer's song. As the gentleman in question, though, persists in announcing that he is anxious to kiss her hair, her lips and her eyes before they both abandon themselves to 'the intoxication of love' the objections of 'la mamma mia' seem to me to be both prudent and predictable.

Gigli was a master of vocal colouring - though as a stage actor he was virtually a non-starter. One only has to listen to a performance such as his Rodolfo in 'La Boheme' (Nimbus Prima Voce NI 7862/3) to hear that he was a highly imaginative vocal actor - and one mood to which his voice was especially well suited was broken-heartedness. By an odd coincidence two of the composers who introduce us to broken hearts in the current selection, Luigi Denza with 'Se' and Paolo Tosti with 'L'ultima canzone', were both born in the same year (1846), and both elected to spend much of their careers in England, Denza as professor of singing at the Royal Academy of Music and Tosti as singing teacher to the royal family; there is, however, no doubting the authentically Italian nature of their songs, nor of Gigli's response to them.

Though it would perhaps be inappropriate to indulge in too much technical analysis when presented with a feast of emotional outpourings such as the present disc I cannot refrain from drawing attention to such things as the superbly sustained line with which Gigli depicts the desperation of 'Addio bel sogno', the glorious phrase with which he caps the heartbreak of 'Senza nisciuno', high B natural and all, the way he speaks to the listener while telling the tender little story of the love-sick swallow in 'Rondine al nido', or the immaculately posed legato of 'O bei nidi d'amore'; and lest anyone should suppose that Gigli was only happy when wallowing in sentiment there is always that dazzling display of vocal flamboyance, Rossini's 'La Danza', to put them straight, not to mention the infectious high spirits with which the great tenor flings himself into one of his favourite encores, 'Quanno 'a femmena vo'', the story of a young lady who knew exactly how to twist the gentlemen round her little finger. Gigli was a singer who could set an audience laughing as expertly as he could bring the tears to their eyes.

All the recordings in this selection were made during Gigli's remarkably extended artistic prime; the last of them, 'Son poche rose', with its exquisite mezza voce close, was recorded shortly before his fifty-second birthday. For a glimpse of Gigli's status in Italy towards the end of his career one can do no better than dip into the memoirs of Tito Gobbi, who describes an occasion when Gigli came to sing an open-air charity concert in Gobbi's home town. Throughout the afternoon and evening there came winding down from the hills hundreds and then thousands of people from the surrounding countryside, and when Gigli had at last finished singing to them they stood outside his hotel calling for him 'as if he were a king'. He went out onto the balcony, and, as Gobbi puts it, 'It was a sight none of us will ever forget. The people stood so close together that you could only see their raised faces - thousands of them - white in the moonlight. Then he flung out his arms to them and began to sing again, his voice as perfect and seemingly as untired as ever.' It was Gigli's avowed ambition to be regarded as 'the people's singer of Italy'; it was an ambition which he fulfilled.


© 1995 Nigel Douglas

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