TINY TITO

After watching a recent Royal Opera House production of Donizetti's L'Elisir d'Amore with an old friend last night on Blu-Ray, I was highly tempted to dive into a rabbit hole of historic recordings of its most famous aria, Una furtiva lagrima, and write about them. In so doing, I found myself reacquainting with one of my favourite tenors of all time, Tito Schipa (1888-1965), who famously sang Nemorino's impassioned lament from L'Elisir d'Amore and delivered one of the greatest renditions of it.

In fact, it was listening to a 1932 recording of Donizetti's Don Pasquale, with Tito Schipa as Ernesto, that first introduced me to the tenor from Lecce, Puglia, and the opera composer from Bergamo. This, in turn, began my lifelong love affair with opera, opera singers, and opera recordings.

There was something about Schipa's warm, golden sound that found its perfect expression in the emotionally transparent music of Donizetti, which struck my heart like a gentle arrow back then.

That Luciano Pavarotti held Schipa in such high admiration, as demonstrated in the video below, speaks volumes about the singer's importance in the grand lineage of Italian tenors, and although Tito was affectionately known as "Titu" due to his small stature, he was, in fact, a giant in terms of his musical legacy.