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Saturday, July 31, 2010

1896 Un di all'azurro spazio -- Giordano "A. C." role created by Borgatti




Giuseppe Borgatti (born Cento, March 17, 1871—died Reno di Leggiuno, October 18, 1950) was an Italian dramatic tenor with an outstanding voice.

He created the title role in Umberto Giordano's opera Andrea Chénier and became famous for his performances of the music of Richard Wagner.

Borgatti sang leading roles at La Scala, Milan, from 1896 until 1914, but deteriorating eyesight caused by the disease glaucoma put a premature end to his stage career.

Borgatti was born into a poor rural family from the Province of Ferrara in northern Italy and grew up illiterate, according to the music-performance historian John Rosselli.

This handicap did not prevent Borgatti from finding work as a bricklayer/stone-cutter.

He was also called up by the authorities to discharge a compulsory period of military service.

Luckily, a wealthy patron happened to hear him sing.

Struck by the inherent quality of Borgatti's voice, the patron arranged for him to have professional singing lessons and acquire basic educational skills.

His voice teachers included Alessandro Busi in Bologna and, later, Carlo d'Ormeville.

In 1892 (some sources say 1893), Borgatti made his operatic debut at Castelfranco Veneto, singing the role of "Dottore Faust" in the opera of the same name by Charles Gounod. (Cavatina: "Salve, dimora casta e pura").

A string of performances at other Italian opera houses ensued in mainly lyric parts.

Eighteen ninety-four saw Borgatti successfully undertake the role of the Chevalier des Grieux in a notable production in Venice of Giacomo Puccini's Manon Lescaut."

"Donna non vidi mai simile a questa".

Later that same year he appeared at another major venue, the Teatro Dal Verme in Milan, as Lohengrin (his first assumption of a Wagnerian part).

His career was now gaining real momentum but he would not become a major opera star until 1896 when, at Milan's La Scala, he sang in the premiere performance of Andrea Chénier to great acclaim.

"Un di all'azzuro spazio"

Although Borgatti continued to appear in a number of Italian operas after 1896, earning particular renown for his performances in works by Giuseppe Verdi, Puccini and the verismo composers, he fell strongly under the spell of Wagner's music dramas.

He worked closely with La Scala's principal conductor, Arturo Toscanini, from 1898 through into the early 1900s, and proceeded to master all the main tenor parts of the Wagnerian repertoire, namely, Lohengrin, Tannhäuser, Walther, Tristan, Siegmund, Siegfried and, finally, Parsifal.

---------------- IN BUENOS AYRES ----------

In 1898, he toured South America with a first-class troupe of Italian singers which included his fellow tenor Francesco Tamagno (the creator of the role of Otello in Verdi's opera), the soprano Luisa Tetrazzini and the baritones Mario Sammarco and Eugenio Giraldoni.

He also visited Spain and Russia.

Then, in 1901, he took part in a "grand concert" at La Scala that had been organised to mark the recent death of Verdi.

Toscanini conducted the concert and among the array of soloists participating in it with Borgatti were Tamagno and the rising tenor star Enrico Caruso.

Borgatti became the first Italian tenor invited to sing at Germany's Bayreuth Festival in 1904. Both Cosima Wagner (the composer's widow and the festival's director) and the important Wagnerian conductor Hans Richter praised Borgatti's voice and artistry.

In 1906, he made a different venture into the field of German opera when he sang Herod in the La Scala premiere of Salome by Richard Strauss.

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Good looking, intelligent and robustly built, Borgatti is said to have possessed abundant reserves of stamina and strong histrionic ability in addition to a smooth, limpid voice of large size.

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Critics lauded him, too, for the clarity of his diction and the beauty of his phrasing.

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Oddly enough, despite his exceptional attainments as a singer and interpretive artist, he never performed in London or New York City.

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At the height of his career, in 1907, Borgatti began losing his sight due to glaucoma. This affliction grew steadily worse, obliging him to retire from the operatic stage seven years after its onset, even though his voice was still in prime condition. He kept giving concerts, however.

The theatre in his home town of Cento was named in his honour in 1924.

By this juncture, he was blind in both eyes.

His last public performance occurred in Bologna in 1928.

He taught singing in Milan following the curtailment of his opera house career.

His best known pupils were the English lyric tenor Heddle Nash (1894–1961) and the German baritone Willi Domgraf-Fassbaender (1897–1978).

Borgatti married one of his singing teachers, Elena Cuccoli.

They had a daughter, Renata Borgatti (1894–1964), who became a concert pianist.

Borgatti died at a resort town near Italy's Lake Maggiore in 1950, aged 79.

Giuseppe Borgatti's impressive singing is preserved on fewer than 20 acoustic discs that he made in Milan for Fonotipia Records and the Pathé company in 1905 and 1919 respectively.

They include extracts from four different operatic works by Wagner, all sung in Italian, and one aria each by Verdi ("Niun me tema" from Otello) and Puccini ("E lucevan le stelle" from Tosca.

Borgatti had been La Scala's original Cavaradossi in 1900.

For some reason, he recorded nothing from his breakthrough opera, Andrea Chénier, or from some of the other Italian operas with which he had become especially associated, such as Mefistofele, Aida, La traviata, La Gioconda, Pagliacci, Manon Lescaut and Fedora.

He did, however, commit to wax his interpretations of two short examples of lieder by Robert Schumann.

Like the Wagner pieces, they are sung in Italian.

All Borgatti's surviving acoustic recordings are available on CD re-issues.

In 1928, he recorded several rare sides electrically for the Columbia company.

Scott, Michael, The Record of Singing, Volume 1, Duckworth, London, published 1977.
Rosenthal, Harold & Warrack, John, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Opera, second edition, Oxford University Press, London, published 1979.
Steane, John, The Grand Tradition: Seventy Years of Singing on Record, 1900-1970, Duckworth, London, 1974.
Freestone, John, liner notes to Symposium Records, UK, Compact Disc 1199, published 1997.
Rosselli, John, Singers of Italian Opera, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, published 1992 and reprinted 1995.
Phillips-Matz, Mary Jane, Puccini: A Biography, Northeastern University Press, Boston, published 2002.
This article incorporates information from the equivalent article on the Italian Wikipedia.
Biographical sketch

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