Franco Corelli
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Franco Corelli (born Dario Corelli) (8 April 1921 – 29 October 2003) was an Italian tenor active in opera from the 1950s to 1976. He was noted for his charismatic stage presence and physical attractiveness as well as his powerful voice.
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[edit] Biography
He was born Dario Corelli in Ancona, the second son of Remo Corelli, a ship worker. Sources vary as to the date of his birth, but agree that it was on or around April 8, probably in 1921. He originally studied for a degree in marine engineering, but became interested in a career in music after entering a local singing contest as a joke, He studied briefly with Rita Pavoni at the Pesaro Conservatory of Music, but lost the top half of his voice. He briefly thought he might be a baritone, but decided against that, and began listening to the recordings of other tenors, especially Caruso and Beniamino Gigli, beginning his career essentially self-taught.
In 1951, he won the Maggio Musicale in Florence, earning a debut at the Spoleto Music Festival, where he sang Don José in Carmen. He debuted at the Rome Opera in 1953 in Riccardo Zandonai's Giulietta e Romeo, and quickly became a steadfast member of the company, with an active repertory of some thirty roles.
Some critics, especially in English-speaking countries, dismissed him as provincial and self-indulgent, and his technique, which he claimed was based on a lowered larynx, after the style of Arturo Melocchi [1] as unnecessarily athletic[citation needed]. After his 1957 Covent Garden debut, with Zinka Milanov in Tosca, he rarely sang in Britain.
Innately musical, he worked constantly throughout his career to refine his technical prowess. He is believed to have taped virtually every one of his performances [2]. Corelli fans consider this a tantalizing prospect, especially because two of his greatest and most important undertakings are not known to exist in recordings[citation needed]. These are the La Scala performances of Giordano's "Fedora," and Bellini's "Il Pirata," both with Maria Callas. Antonio Ghiringhelli, the head of La Scala, had had serious disagreements with Callas at the time of these performances and would not allow them to be broadcast[citation needed]).
In the United States Corelli was well regarded by some critics, but regarded by others as insufficiently trained and unsubtle [3]
Corelli began his career with a fast vibrato, sometimes called a "caprino," but well before his Met debut he had managed to eliminate this[citation needed]. He became famous for his ability to sing at many dynamic levels, unusual in a so large a voice; for example, he performed the climactic high note that ends "Celeste Aida" with a diminuendo, considered a difficult effect for a tenore robusto. He credited the Italian tenor Giacomo Lauri-Volpi, himself one of the most important tenors of the 20th century, with helping him refine his technique. Without Lauri-Volpi's instruction, Corelli said, "there would just have been one more baritone."[citation needed] Although his French was never idiomatic, he included Gounod's Romeo et Juliette in his active repertoire, recording both it and Faust. One of his greatest triumphs came as Raoul in Meyerbeer's "Les Huguenots," an extremely high-lying part, which he performed in the famous La Scala revival of 1962. Late in his career he undertook the title role in Jules Massenet's Werther, which is also usually sung by tenors with a less weighty vocal quality.
Throughout the 1960s, Corelli's position as one of the greatest Italian tenors in the world was secure[citation needed]. With his unusually dark vocal color and baritonal lower range he infused even the warhorses of Neapolitan songs like 'O Sole Mio' with freshness and authenticity, while his huge and electrifying top notes moved audiences to roaring delirium.[4] By all accounts, he was considered a galvanic stage animal, and a very handsome man. Some newspapers and magazines nicknamed him "Golden Calves". [5]
In 1958 he married Loretta di Lelio, daughter of a well-known Milanese basso and herself a character soprano, who became his public relations agent. After performances, Corelli's wife would be waiting in his dressing room with a list of criticisms -- and ready to back them up with those now-elusive audio tapes. The couple's screaming fights, before, during and after performances, are legendary. [6]
Corelli made his debut at New York's Metropolitan Opera on 27 January 1961 as Manrico in Il Trovatore, in a double debut with Leontyne Price. The combination produced a fiery performance that ended with a 42-minute ovation[citation needed]. His debut, however, was clearly overshadowed by Price's. The next day, New York Times critic Harold Schonberg wrote of Price: "Her voice, warm and luscious, has enough volume to fill the house with ease, and she has a good technique to back up the voice itself. She even took the trills as written, and nothing in the part as Verdi wrote it gave her the least bit of trouble....Voice is what counts, and voice is what Miss Price has." He was somewhat less complimentary about Corelli, noting his "exciting animal drive" and his need for some refining polish. According to Met general manager Rudolf Bing's later memoirs, Corelli was so furious at his reception that he locked himself in his hotel room and the Met's staff had to beg him to come out. What Corelli may not have understood was that Price's Met debut was a political as well as a musical event: the civil rights movement was gathering force, and friends and supporters had traveled to New York to cheer her on.
Later that season Corelli and Birgit Nilsson put Turandot back in the standard repertory at the Met. He eventually sang nineteen roles in fifteen seasons and became a fixture there.
Many of his co-workers stated that Corelli suffered from terrible stage fright. "They had to push him on stage" said soprano Renata Scotto[citation needed]. Nilsson claimed humorously that Corelli once bit her during a performance of Turandot because in a duet she held a high note (the unison high C at the end of In Questa Reggia) longer than he had. Later, Nilsson wired Rudolf Bing, "Cannot sing. Have rabies." [7]. Despite these sparks, Nilsson appeared frequently with Corelli, and recorded "Turandot" as well as "Tosca" with him.
Corelli retired from the stage in 1976 at the young age of 55. At the time, fans expressed much regret that he had never undertaken Giuseppi Verdi's Otello. He had long been rumored to be preparing for it, and many believed it would have been his greatest role. In light of his crippling stage fright, the huge demands of this role may have scared him into retirement a little early, but by the mid-70's the voice was in decline, no longer backed by the sheer animal strength that had, in a sense, created it.[citation needed]
Corelli left many commercial and live recordings. Among the greatest are the title part in Donizetti's "Poliuto," several "Trovatore" performances, and, with Tito Gobbi, a wonderful performance of Puccini's wild-west opera, "La Fanciulla del West." He even left a recording of "Esultate," the opening scene from Verdi's "Otello".
He died in Milan in 2003, having suffered a stroke earlier that year, and was interred there in the Cimitero Monumentale.
[edit] Trivia
His older brother Ubaldo sang as a bass-baritone for many years under the stage name Aldo Relli. It was Aldo who arranged for Franco to be cast as Mario in the 1956 Carmine Gallone film version of Puccini's Tosca [1].
Orlando Cannone, a minor character in Paul Gillette's 1974 roman a clef Carmela, is based on Corelli. Other well-known singers who received this dubious honor were Tito Gobbi (Zobi Galdo), Ezio Pinza (Emilio Mosso) and Renata Tebaldi (Carmela Londra).
[edit] External links
[edit] References
- ^ Zucker, Stefan, "Corelli: Tenore del Mundo", interview with Corelli. Retrieved 2008-06-07.
- ^ Robert Kotlowitz, "The Fragile Ego: A Tenor Named Corelli", in Harper's, June 1968, p. 96.
- ^ Tommasini, Anthony, "Franco Corelli, Italian Tenor of Power and Charisma, and Pillar of the Met, Dies at 82". New York Times, October 30, 2003. Retrieved 2008-06.07.
- ^ Tommasini, Anthony, "Franco Corelli, Italian Tenor of Power and Charisma, and Pillar of the Met, Dies at 82". New York Times, October 30, 2003. Retrieved 2008-06.07.
- ^ For example, "Skylark and Golden Calves", Time, February 3, 1961, covering his Jan. 27, 1961 Metropolitan Opera debut with Leontyne Price.
- ^ Farrell, Eilleen, with Brian Kellow, Can't Help Singing. Limelight, 2002. "At intermission, his wife Loretta would barricade herself in his dressing room and scream at him, telling everything he'd done wrong. She didn't shut up even when we were on stage. It got so that I would try to avoid going to extreme stage left or right, no matter what the blocking called for, because Signora Corelli was always in the wings, yelling at her husband in Italian ..."
- ^ Bing, Rudolf, 5000 Nights at the Opera. Doubleday, 1972. The biting incident seems to be a humorous urban legend conceived by Nilsson and Corelli. Bing provides the real story: "...and he just walked off the stage. I was not in the hall: an emissary came to me in the lobby and said, 'Mr. Bing, we are losing our tenor.' I went backstage, and even before I neared Corelli's door I heard him screaming, his wife screaming, the dog barking. He had slammed his hand on the dressing table, and had picked up a miniscule splinter. There was a drop of blood on the table, and Mrs. was calling for an ambulance. I calmed them down as much as I could, and suggested to Corelli that in the love scene in the next act he could get even with Miss Nilsson by biting her ear. That cheered him a great deal; in fact, he liked the idea so much that he told Miss Nilsson about it, which gave him all the satisfaction of actually biting her without doing it, thank God."
