Antonio Giuglini

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Antonio Giuglini

Born 1827
Fano, Italy
Died 1865
Pesaro
Education in Italy with Cellini
Occupation Opera singer

Antonio Giuglini (1827 – 12 October 1865) was an Italian operatic tenor who during the last eight years of his life was one of the leading stars of the operatic scene in London. He created several major roles for London audiences, including the first London performances of Gounod's Faust and of Riccardo in Verdi's Un ballo in maschera. In London he was the usual stage partner of the soprano Therese Tietjens.

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[edit] Early career in Italy

Guiglini was born in Fano, Italy. He studied in Italy with Cellini, and made his debut at Fermo. His first season at La Scala, Milan, in early 1855, was witnessed by Charles Santley [1] who observed that he created 'a perfect furore' and was the hero of the day.

“ Giuglini was a proof that physical force does not always win: his voice was not powerful, but it was of sympathetic quality, although slightly throaty, and his phrasing was perfect; any ornament he introduced he invariably executed with precision and elegance. He was not a clumsy man, but as an actor he was ungraceful, and lacked intelligence. ”

Santley saw him there as Raoul (Gli Ugonotti), in which he sang charmingly but lacked the fire and manliness for the role, as Arturo in I Puritani, which rivetted the attention completely, and in selection evenings, when he sang the trio 'Pappataci' from L'Italiana in Algeri with Scheggi (buffo) and Ignazio Marini (bass), so popular it had to be repeated throughout the season.

[edit] London 1857

Giuglini was first introduced in London by Benjamin Lumley in 1857, at Her Majesty's Theatre, as Fernando in La favorita. He joined an already celebrated company which included artists such as Marietta Piccolomini, Marietta Alboni and Therese Tietjens. This house was in competition with the newly rebuilt Covent Garden theatre, where Giulia Grisi and Giovanni Mario led the cast and the box-office under Michael Costa for Frederick Gye. In that season Giuglini appeared as Rodolfo at Her Majesty's in the original London production of Verdi's Luisa Miller, opposite Piccolomini.[2]There was also an Italian version of Balfe's The Bohemian Girl for him, with Piccolomini, Vialetti and Belletti.[3]

[edit] With Mapleson and Smith, 1858-1861

However, as Lumley's management soon afterwards collapsed, Colonel J.H. Mapleson, hoping to revive the Her Majesty's company, set up a company at Drury Lane, acquiring some of Lumley's artistes, and in its second season (1858) Giuglini appeared again as Fernando for the debut of Carolina Guarducci, who made a sensational debut despite never having studied the part which she sang (i.e. Leonora), and was afterwards coached by Mme Tietjens.[4] At Drury Lane in July 1859 Giuglini created the role of Arrigo in the first London production of Verdi's Les vêpres siciliennes, opposite Tietjens.[5]

With Edward Tyrrel Smith the Her Majesty's project was resumed, and in 1860 Tietjens and Giuglini were available to Smith and Mapleson as part of a £16,000 deal with Lumley.[6] English and Italian opera companies were run on alternate nights, and Giuglini, Tietjens, Mme Lemaire and Sig. Vialetti in Il trovatore were alternated with G.A. Macfarren's Robin Hood, starring Mme Lemmens-Sherrington (her début), John Sims Reeves and Charles Santley.[7] But the management partnership split, and Mapleson again dealt with Lumley to obtain Giuglini and Tietjens for a new project at the Lyceum Theatre.

[edit] Mapleson's Lyceum season, 1861

Meanwhile Mapleson had also recruited Adelina Patti, but she was immediately poached by Gye for Covent Garden. The Lyceum company opened on 8 June 1861 with Il trovatore with Giuglini and Tietjens, Alboni, Enrico delle Sedie (who had sung with Giuglini in Milan) and Édouard Gassier, under Luigi Arditi. The second night was Lucrezia Borgia, with the same cast, Tietjens' greatest role. Soon afterwards Giuglini led a cast in the very successful first London production of Un ballo in maschera, just beating Covent Garden to it, after all-night rehearsals for weeks through productions of Les Huguenots, Lucrezia Borgia and Norma (Giuglini as Pollio, opposite Tietjens), all with Arditi conducting. The end of the season was crowned with an evening of excerpts, in which Giuglini and Tietjens sang the grand duet from Les Huguenots.[8]

[edit] Her Majesty's, and a Cantata

In 1862 Mapleson finally obtained the lease of Her Majesty's Theatre, with the continued services of Tietjens and Giuglini. Verdi's Cantata, rejected for the opening of the 1862 London Exhibition, was performed, and productions of Semiramide, Oberon, Robert le Diable, Lucrezia Borgia and Il trovatore followed. During this season Giuglini began to be difficult, spending much time in Brighton with a notorious lady, but being brought to heel by the threat of being replaced as Manrico. He however made it a condition of his continued service, that Mapleson should present a new Cantata which he, Giuglini, had written, including a lugubrious role for Tietjens, and a scene in which no fewer than 120 windows should appear in a stage set, from each of which at a given signal (i.e., the Garibaldi hymn) an Italian flag should appear. Mapleson complied: the cantata was performed for one night only.[9] The 1862 season also included Giuglini in the opera Martha.

Following an incident in which Mme Tietjens accidentally struck Giuglini on the nose with a drumstick when sounding a gong during a performance of Norma, causing the tenor's nose to bleed on stage, Giuglini conceived a hatred for that opera and swore a solemn oath never to appear in it again. However, during a breakdown in a series of Il trovatore, owing to the indisposition of the contralto, Mapleson was obliged to stage Norma and engaged another tenor, knowing Giuglini's objection, and that this performance was supernumerary to his contract. Having attempted to extort additional fees, Giuglini at the last minute had the rival forcibly divested of his costume backstage, and sang the role himself, but to little financial advantage, and without the drumstick.[10]

The 1863 season opened with Il trovatore, and in May was the premiere of Schira's opera Niccolo de' Lapi with Giuglini as Lamberto, Tietjens, Zelia Trebelli and Santley.[11] However the highlight of that season was the first London Faust, launched 11 June at Her Majesty's, in which he took the title role: the opera was thereafter produced at Covent Garden in every year until 1911. The premiere was with Tietjens (Margherita), Trebelli (Siebel), Edouard Gassier (Mephistopheles) and Charles Santley (Valentin), Arditi conducting. (On one occasion Giuglini was hissed for a late appearance in the church scene.[12]) It was given for ten nights in succession, after which Gye opened it at Covent Garden on July 2 with Enrico Tamberlik, and with Mario in the following year. In later productions Mapleson replaced Giuglini in the role with the tenor Alessandro Bettini (who married Trebelli), and with Sims Reeves.[13] Giuglini again sang The Bohemian Girl, this time with Santley, Vialetti and Louisa Pyne.[14]

In 1864 Tietjens and Giuglini performed Lucrezia Borgia at Her Majesty's, in the gala performance in the presence of Garibaldi, and surpassed themselves.[15] They led the cast in a new production of The Merry Wives of Windsor of Nicolai (as Mistress Ford and Fenton), with Bettini, Gassier, Santley and Caroline Bettelheim, which ran for many nights. Both appeared in Buckingham Palace concerts in that year. Giuglini was also Vincenzo in Gounod's Mireille, in a fight scene of which, owing to insufficient rehearsal, he received a resounding blow on the head from Santley, playing Ourrias.[16]

[edit] At St Petersburg

Late in 1864 Giuglini accepted an engagement for a season in St Petersburg, but arrived to find that he was not required for Faust as Tamberlik had contrived to take that role. His debut as Faust there was, therefore, delayed, and when he was finally asked, Patti (the Marguerite) was rumoured to be indisposed, to be replaced by a débutante. Giuglini was unnerved, and became indisposed himself. When at the end of his contract a sum was deducted for that evening because he had taken a walk and left his house on that night, he threw his payment into a stove in fury, and thereafter his reason began to desert him. He returned to London in spring 1865, where Mapleson awaited him for a Dublin tour. All his valuable clothes and fur coats had been stolen in the journey back from Russia, and all the precious stones removed from his property and jewellery.[17]

[edit] Illness and death

At home in Welbeck Street, Giuglini sat eating oysters and refused to put on his trousers. Mapleson placed him in the care of a doctor at Chiswick, and in a later visit, with Tietjens, the tenor seemed rational, and sang 'Spirto gentil' and M'appari' for them divinely. His condition deteriorated, and having made a sea voyage to Italy that autumn for his health, he died at Pesaro.[18]

[edit] Character

According to Mapleson, Giuglini had a childlike and sometimes mischievous nature. He was often prey to unscrupulous young women who used their charms to play on his sensitive nature to bring him under their influence. In this he was protected by an adoptive mother-figure named Mme Puzzi, or Mamma Puzzi as he called her, who was frequently summoned by letter or telegraph to rescue him at a moment's notice, and never failed to do so. He was very fond of flying kites, which he often did in the Brompton Road at the risk of being crushed to death by passing omnibuses, and became known to the drivers who indulgently avoided him.[19] He also loved fireworks, and Mme Tietjens told of a hazardous journey with him back from a performance in the theatre at Dublin, in a cab stuffed full of fireworks, with excited but unaware fellow travellers smoking pipes and cigars around them. Giuglini himself was a cigar-smoker, and enjoyed gossip and conspiracy among his companions.[20]

[edit] A critique

Santley, who had admired him in Milan, felt afterwards that he was not so fine a singer as Italo Gardoni, the tenor who succeeded him in London.

“ I never could understand why Gardoni should be comparatively forgotten, and Giuglini quoted as one of the great artists who have lived... Giuglini's voice was throaty... he was an awkward, ungainly man, and no actor at all.. he could not execute a rapid passage of four notes. What I conceive established him as a great favourite was a lackadaisickal sentimentality which the public, especially the British public, accepts for poetic sentiment. Withal, Giuglini was the last of his race; there has been no tenor on the Italian stage since who has been able to fill the place he left vacant.[21] ”

In 1893, George Bernard Shaw could still write of his own time as the 'post-Giuglinian days'; and his name was often coupled with that of the great tenor Mario.[22]

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ C. Santley, Student and Singer (Edward Arnold, London 1892), 69-70.
  2. ^ H. Rosenthal and J. Warrack, Concise Oxford Dictionary of Opera (OUP, London 1974).
  3. ^ C. Santley, Reminiscences of my Life (Isaac Pitman, London 1909), 15-16.
  4. ^ J.H. Mapleson, The Mapleson Memoirs (Belford, Clarke and Co, Chicago 1888),I, 9, 17.
  5. ^ Rosenthal and Warrack 1974.
  6. ^ Mapleson 1888, I, 23-27.
  7. ^ J. Sims Reeves, The Life of Sims Reeves written by himself (Simpkin Marshall, London 1888), 220-221.
  8. ^ Mapleson 1888, I, 29-39.
  9. ^ Mapleson 1888, I, 43-45.
  10. ^ Mapleson 1888, I, 47-57.
  11. ^ Santley 1892, 197-199.
  12. ^ Santley 1892, 199.
  13. ^ Mapleson 1888, I, 66-76.
  14. ^ Santley 1909,15-16.
  15. ^ Mapleson 1888, I, 81.
  16. ^ Santley 1892, 208-209.
  17. ^ Mapleson 1888, I, 82-85.
  18. ^ Mapleson 1888, I, 84-86, 89-90; Rosenthal and Warrack 1974.
  19. ^ Mapleson 1888, I, 51.
  20. ^ Mapleson 1888, I, 49-53.
  21. ^ Santley 1892, 211-212.
  22. ^ G.B. Shaw, Music in London 1890-1894 (Constable, London 1932), III, 41.

[edit] Sources

  • J.H. Mapleson, The Mapleson Memoirs, 2 vols (Belford, Clarke & Co, Chicago 1888).
  • H. Rosenthal and J. Warrack, Concise Oxford Dictionary of Opera (OUP, London 1974 printing).
  • C. Santley, Student and Singer - The Reminiscences of Charles Santley (Edward Arnold, London 1892).
  • C. Santley, Reminiscences of my Life (Isaac Pitman, London 1909).
  • G.B. Shaw, Music in London 1890-1894, 3 vols (Constable, London 1932).
  • J. Sims Reeves, The Life of Sims Reeves written by himself (Simpkin Marshall, London 1888).