Francesco Tamagno - Recordings

Recordings

Tamagno's intensely bright, steel-tipped voice with its stentorian timbre, open production, vigorous (but never disruptive) vibrato and incisive declamation is preserved on two batches of technologically primitive recordings of operatic items. They were made during February 1903 at Tamagno's holiday retreat in Ospedaletti and during April 1904 at a 'studio' in Rome.

The British Gramophone & Typewriter Company, HMV/EMI's predecessor, produced all of Tamagno's shellac discs, which were 10 or 12 inches in size and played at a nominal 78 revolutions per minute. It dispatched one of its best engineers, Will Gaisberg, to Italy to handle the recording sessions. (Such sessions could be a daunting experience for singers of Tamagno's generation, who were accustomed to performing before an audience in an opera house environment.) The company paid Tamagno a cash advance of 2000 pounds sterling to make his first lot of "78s". He also received royalties from the company for every individually numbered, custom-labelled pressing that sold. Roland Gelatt's revised edition of The Fabulous Phonograph (Collier Books, New York, 1977, p. 119) asserts that Tamagno's recording contract, signed in December 1902, was the first to embody "the royalty principle".

Gelatt states that Tamagno approved 19 recordings from his Ospedaletti session for release to the public. They went on sale in April 1903 and were heavily advertised in the press, with Tamagno billed as the world's greatest tenor. Buyers were charged one pound sterling, or its equivalent in other currencies, per disc; in comparison, Caruso's early 10-inch discs (made in Italy the previous year) sold for just 10 shillings or an equivalent amount of money. The amount charged for each of Tamagno's discs represented at least a week's wages for the common man and for that outlay he would receive a single-sided product, sometimes containing less than two minutes of music. Clearly, Tamagno's recordings were aimed at upper-crust customers, as were those made by such eminent contemporaries of his as Nellie Melba, Adelina Patti, Pol Plançon and Mattia Battistini.

The small group of composers featured on Tamagno's combined recorded output of 1903 and 1904 comprises Giacomo Meyerbeer, Camille Saint-Saëns, Jules Massenet, de Lara, Giordano, Rossini and, naturally enough, Verdi. Apart from Otello, the operas from which he elected to record arias, in multiple takes, were Il trovatore, Guillaume Tell (Guglielmo Tell), Le prophète (Il profeta), Samson et Dalila (Sansone e Dalila), Hérodiade, Messaline and Andrea Chénier.

When he stepped before the recording horn, Tamagno was in poor health and semi-retirement after a long and demanding career. Consequently his voice, although still astonishingly powerful and kept under firm technical control, was no longer at its peak, though the recording technology of the time was almost certainly not equal to the task of capturing the full breadth of Tamagno's ability at the time.

Potter pays tribute to Tamagno's vocal attributes in his book about the history of tenor singing, averring that his "recorded legacy" is "a priceless connection with Verdi" while Steane, writing in The Grand Tradition (pp. 19–23), praises Tamagno's discs as "artistic and devoted performances by a singer of exceptional gifts" with a "great voice". Scott declares in The Record of Singing (pp. 131–133) that Tamagno's Otello recordings are "invaluable historically" with the Esultate in particular displaying "amazing force" and all of them exhibiting an "intensity of utterance" that is "unique". Indeed, Henry Pleasants, author of The Great Singers, goes so far as to say that the "searing despair" of Tamagno's version of Otello's death aria, Niun mi tema, "is possibly unmatched by anything else on wax" (Macmillan Publishing, revised edition, London, 1983, pp. 252–254).

Symposium Records has released a two-CD anthology of Tamagno's published and unpublished recordings (catalogue number 1186/87), while an extensive selection of them was issued on the Pearl/Opal label (CD 9846) in 1990. Those wanting to hear Tamagno in a broader context may wish to consult EMI's three-CD La Scala Edition, Volume One, 1878-1914 (CHS 7 64860 2). This edition contains four Tamagno tracks in expertly re-mastered transfers plus recordings made by a number of his colleagues, including baritone Victor Maurel, the creator of the role of Iago in Otello, and bass Francesco Navarini, the creator of the role of Lodovico in the same opera.

Of more specialist interest is a 2007 release of all of Tamagno's extant 12-inch records on high quality vinyl discs by the United Kingdom firm Historic Masters. The Historic Masters boxed set is accompanied by a biographical essay written by Michael Aspinall, who also discusses Tamagno's discography and appraises his vocal technique. The set contains, among other things, a recently discovered recording of the Oath Duet from Otello ('Si pel ciel') and an aria from Messaline that was previously known only from a private test pressing once belonging to Tamagno. The baritone on the Otello duet is anonymous but Aspinall believes it might be Tamagno's younger brother, Giovanni, who had a minor singing career. Aspinall concludes his essay thus: "Tamagno is one of the most charismatic and communicative singers ever to record his voice for the wonderment of future generations ... The privilege of listening to the complete recordings of Tamagno helps us to realise his immense stature among the great names of music drama."