Obituary, Carlo Bergonzi (1924-2014)

Having been marvelling anew at the various recordings reissued in the wake of his ninetieth birthday this month, it was with great sadness that I learned of the death of the great Italian tenor Carlo Bergonzi yesterday. Widely regarded as one of the finest Verdi tenors ever to have lived, Bergonzi was loved and admired for his warm, sincere vocal acting and intuitive understanding of Verdian style as much as for his bright and unfailingly beautiful sound. Thanks to his extensive recorded legacy, Bergonzi’s was the very first voice I heard in music that I’ve adored ever since (Madama Butterfly and Aida spring to mind), and I’m sure that he will long remain something of a gold standard for many other lovers of Italian opera.

Like another of his illustrious tenor contemporaries, Plácido Domingo, Bergonzi actually began his career as a baritone: he had sung many of the big dramatic Italian roles for this voice-type (including Germont in La Traviata and the title-role in Rigoletto) on professional stages before he was thirty, a feat made all the more astonishing given that he had spent three years in a German prisoner-of-war camp during World War Two and reportedly emerged weighing less than 7 stones. But it was after retraining as a tenor in 1951 that Bergonzi’s trademark golden, ardent sound really began to emerge: slimmer and more lyrical than that of his peers in Verdi and Puccini, Bergonzi’s voice still had enough blade to make real impact in this music, and the unstudied elegance of his phrasing coupled with unimpeachable technique soon propelled him onto the stages of La Scala, Covent Garden and the Metropolitan Opera.

Throughout the 1960s and 70s, Bergonzi was a firm favourite in some of the best-loved operatic repertoire in all of these houses and more, chalking up over 300 performances at the Met alone and partnering many of the finest sopranos of the mid-twentieth century including Joan Sutherland, Renata Tebaldi and Leontyne Price. Though he had considerable success with Puccini, verismo repertoire and bel canto (I particularly like an early recording of him singing Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore), it was with the great Verdi roles – Radamés (Aida), Alvaro (La forza del destino), the Duke of Mantua (Rigoletto) and Riccardo (Un ballo un maschera) – that he made unique impact.

Thanks to careful repertoire choices and rock-solid technique, Bergonzi continued singing opera well into his sixties and only retired in 1996, with a farewell concert at Carnegie Hall. But there was a bitter-sweet post-script: in 2000 (aged 75) he re-emerged to take on the title-role in a New York concert-performance of Otello, not only the most fearsomely demanding role in Verdi’s output but also one which Bergonzi had never sung on stage. Sadly, he was unable to complete the performance – but inside reports from the previous day’s rehearsal spoke of his near-miraculous vocal freshness and unparalleled dramatic intensity in the role.

Bergonzi spent a happy and productive retirement working with a new generation of singers at his Accademia Verdiana in his native Busseto, where he also owned a hotel-restaurant named after one of the lesser-known Verdi operas which he helped to popularise – I Due Foscari.

Carlo Bergonzi - a selected discography