After hundreds of years of foreign domination and influence, particularly by France and Austria, the independent and often antagonistic states of Italy were unified in 1861. Decades of social and political struggle and two wars for independence, followed by yet another decade of instability, upheaval, and war through the 1860s coalesced into a kingdom of speakers of dialects of Italian, not always comprehensible to one another, that we recognize as Italy today. As the dust settled from the 1870s into the early 20th century, the terms of unification were predominantly in the interest of the northern Piedmont region. Not coincidentally roughly a third of the massive wave of immigration to the United States during 1880-1920 — the largest per capita in U.S. history — was comprised of southern Italians. By the middle of the 20th century, Italian-Americans were profoundly important to the mainstream of American entertainment and singing in particular. “When the moon hits your eye…”

19th-century Italian struggles and nationalist passions fed directly into and were given a voice in the popular medium of opera. The first successful opera by Giuseppe Verdi (b. Le Roncole in Parma, Oct. 10, 1813; d. Milan Jan. 27, 1901), Nabucco (1841) was, like the work by his immediate predecessors Donizetti and Bellini, in historical setting, but its subject of foreign domination was unmistakable to its contemporary audience as an expression of what everyone was thinking, and its song “Va, pensiero” was a nationalist anthem. Its success was followed by Verdi’s settling in the northern cultural capital Milan. Ten of the twenty-eight operas Verdi created over the next fifty years were premiered at Milan’s La Scala theater. By 1844, Verdi’s work was directly based on romantic writers including Victor Hugo and Lord Byron, and he began to move toward contemporary social realism. His last two operas, Otello (1887) and Falstaff (1893) were both set in history but their libretti were written by Arrigo Boito (b. Padua, Feb. 24, 1842; d. June 10, 1918) who was a figure in the scapigliatura scene of boozy, disheveled, idealistic bohemian Milanese radicals with ties to anarchism and belief in transcendent personal experience. Real "dudes" who were heavily into Baudelaire and Poe. Boito was an atheist who completed only one opera himself, Mefistofele, which premiered at La Scala in 1868. The generation of Italian opera composers that followed Verdi, particularly Giacomo Puccini (b. Lucca, Dec. 22, 1858; d Brussels, Nov. 29, 1924), but also Umberto Giordano (b. Foggia, Aug. 28, 1867; d. Milan, Nov. 12, 1948), and Pietro Mascagni (b. Livorno, Dec. 7, 1863; d. Aug. 2, 1945), and Ruggero Leoncavallo (b. Naples, April 23, 1857; Aug. 9, 1919) were, like the hundreds singers who performed all of that work, indebted to Verdi. (Among his contributions was the founding of a retirement home for opera singers, who, like athletes, made good money in their youth, much less in middle-age, and almost none later.)

While opera thrived in the 19th and early 20th centuries in France and Germany in particular, successful Italian operas could often premier in quick succession in a dozen cities on four continents. There is arguably an approximate equivalence in the global reach and popularity of 20th-century Hollywood directors, and I will only mention in passing the Italian names Scorcese, Coppola, De Palma, Capra, Ferrara, and Tarantino and leave any further correlations to the reader. While a few performers of the era remain recognizable names to musically literate listeners today (who hasn’t heard of Enrico Caruso?), the devolution of operatic singing over the 20th century into a yawning, pitchless warble is a profound turn-off to many, encapsulated perfectly in the 2009 British movie In the Loop: “It’s just VOWELS. Foreign, subsidized vowels.” A dim view of the pomposity, anti-democratic elitism, and tuxedoed joylessness opera had come to embody was summarized by Groucho in A Night at the Opera (1935): “You’re willing to pay him a thousand dollars a night just for singing? You can get a phonograph record of ‘Minnie the Moocher' for 75 cents. For a buck and a quarter, you can get Minnie.” But the innumerable singing stars of the early recording era are a rich seam of some outrageously beautiful music, studied now mostly by an ever-dwindling subculture of obsessives. My people, broadly speaking.

Among 19th-century Italian singers, there were still teachers remaining of the bel canto style that was predominant almost a century earlier, typified by clarity of pitch and line in combination with extremely elevated technique, agility, and florid ornaments of phrasing and timing. It’s wonderful stuff and practically a dead art now. In parallel, the Romantic and Realist trends in opera called for changes in singing style to the verismo school that tended toward vibrato as a signifier of emotionality with a relatively declamatory and less ornamented delivery (which is where the problems we have today began). The introduction of the Gramophone Company’s “portable” sound recording equipment (six crates each weighing over 250 pounds) in the few years surrounding the turn of the century captured spectacular performers in Paris, Madrid, Leipzig, Dublin, St. Petersburg, and, in particular, Milan.

In 1904 the Fonotipia label was founded in Milan for the express purpose of recording and marketing discs of the music that was emanating from La Scala (along with some other arty projects including violin recordings and recitations.) Their productions were of exceptional sound quality for the era. The discs were beautiful objects often given unique serial numbers and inscribed by the artists in the dead wax near the label, and they were double-sided, an innovation that did not become commonplace on other labels for several more years. A March 1907 advertisement in the Parisian Le Matin newspaper already boasted more than 400 artists on their roster. By 1911, Fonotipia's engineers had traveled to London, Paris, and Berlin to gather still more performances. Although their subsequent reputation as covetable collector's items was predicated largely on their pre-WWI output, by the time Fonotipia folded into the label of their German partners Odeon in the '20s, they had released about 100,000 sides.

This particular cross-section of recordings from Fonotipia’s early days are all derived from a small collection owned by a man born in Abruzzo in 1902 and who immigrated through New York in 1920, becoming a tailor outside of Philadelphia — a working man for whom these represented the sound of his childhood and the accomplishments of his national culture, so commonly maligned with epithets in his adopted country. The first half is all accompanied by a piano, performed in some cases by the composer and label's artistic director Umberto Giordano. Then, there are two sides by the orchestra of the Italian Royal Navy performing an arrangement of Franz Liszt’s 1851 Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 featuring some truly outstanding clarinet playing (bringing to mind the instrumental traditions brought to the U.S. by immigrants and synthesized into American popular music) and indicating how much music has always been in the interstices of the formal and the vernacular. The second half of the collection is accompanied by the orchestra of La Scala under the conduction of Edoardo Vitale who had just then replaced Arturo Toscanini (b. Parma, March 25, 1867; d. Bronx, Jan. 16, 1957) when Toscanini joined the Metropolitan Opera in New York along with La Scala’s general manager Giulio Gatti-Casazza (b. Undine, Feb. 3, 1869; d. Ferrara, Sept 2, 1940). The two of them then spent more than a decade helping to build “serious” music in America.

THE SINGERS

Amedeo Bassi (b. Montespertoli, July 29, 1872; d. Florence, Jan. 14, 1949) debuted in Florence in 1897 and performed in a dozen Italian cities to rave reviews for five years. In 1901, he was selected for a role by the composer Pietro Mascagni for the Roman premier of his comic opera La Maschere. In 1902-07 Bassi traveled each year to Buenos Aires. He appeared for a season in 1903 in Santiago, Chile. He recorded a total of 40 sides, the first 16 of them made in Paris for Pathe in 1904, followed by 10 for Fonotipia in Milan in 1906. Notably, the composer Umberto Giordano (b. Foggia, Italy, Aug. 28, 1867; d. Milan, Nov. 12, 1948), who was a partner in Fonotipia starting in 1905 and its artistic director for a period, accompanies Bassi. In 1906-07 Bassi had significant roles at La Scala as well as in Monte Carlo, Naples, and New York City. He sang in Chicago from 1910-13 during which time he substituted at the Met for Caruso when he was ill as well as performances in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Brooklyn, Washington, D.C., Dallas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Denver, St. Louis, and St. Paul. Bassi returned to Europe in 1913 and ’14 and performed prolifically well into the mid-1920s. He stopped performing in 1940 at the age of 66.

Carlo Dani (b. Florence ca. 1872-3; d. Florence 1944) debuted in Firenze in December 1894 after having been a successful professional racing cyclist. He sang in Australia in 1901 and spent four months in 1902-03 in the U.S. His roles at the Metropolitan Opera were taken over by Enrico Caruso when he returned to Italy where he continued to perform through 1913 with appearances in South America in 1906, the U.S. in 1908 (Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and La Crosse, Wisconsin), and an appearance at the Metropolitan in 1922. He cut 28 sides for Fonotipia (not including nine that were left unreleased) and a handful of discs and cylinders for small companies. He retired to Australia where he taught singing.

Regina Pacini (b. Lisbon, Jan. 6, 1871; d. Buenos Aires, Sept. 18, 1965), the daughter of an Italian baritone, studied in Paris with the famous vocal pedagogue Mathilde Marchesi and debuted in 1888 in Lisbon where she was very popular for a decade. In 1889 she sang in Milan, London, and Palermo. From 1890 to 1905 she performed primarily in Madrid with performances in St. Petersburg, Warsaw, Montevideo, Buenos Aires, London (where she was partnered on stage with Caruso), Naples, Florence, Rome, and Milan from 1894-1900. Shortly after recording 27 sides for Fonotipia in 1905-06, she married the Argentinian diplomat Marcelo T. de Alvear who had pursued her since meeting her eight years earlier. He became president of Argentina from 1922-28, making her the First Lady. She retired from performing at the time of her marriage in 1907. They lived in Paris during WWI and again in 1930-31.

Ester Mazzoleni (b. Sebenico, Croatia, March 12, 1883; d. Palermo, May 17, 1982) was born to wealthy Italian parents in Dalmatia. She studied under the soprano Amelia Pinto before debuting in 1906. She joined La Scala from 1908-17. She recorded 47 sides for Fonotipia between 1908 and 1917 and toured South America and Western Europe. She retired from the stage when she was married in 1926 and then taught music in Palermo.

Francesco Viñas (b. Moiá, Spain, March 27, 1863; d. Moiá July 14, 1933) is thought to have studied at the Barcelona Conservatory at the age of 23. He was recruited from there to debut in 1888 in a production of Wagner’s Lohengrin. He performed at La Scala several times between 1891 and 1904 and toured Italy and Spain widely and made significant appearances in London. He performed in the U.S. in the 1880s-90s at the Metropolitan as well as in Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Boston, Chicago, and St. Louis. Kidney disease caused a break in his career but he resumed performing in Europe in 1895 and continued until 1918. He recorded eight sides for the Gramophone & Typewriter Ltd. company in Milan in October 1903 before recording another 60 pieces for Fonotipia between 1905 and 1913.

Pasquale Amato (b. Naples 1878; d Long Island, NY 1942) studied at the Conservatory San Pietro a Majella and debuted in Naples at 21-years-old. He performed in Italy, Germany, Russia, England, and South America before success at La Scala under the direction of Arturo Toscanini in the lead role in the 1907 Italian premiere of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande. The following year, he was signed to the Met in New York where Toscanini had also found a conducting position. Following a slow decline in his voice and bookings through the 1910s, he retired to Italy through the ‘20s before accepting a position as the Head of vocal at Louisiana State University in 1933.

Lina Pasini-Vitale (b. Rome, Nov. 8, 1872; d. Rome Nov. 23, 1959) debuted in Milan in 1892 and performed widely through Italy from 1894-1905 before performing mainly in Spain for several years and then in South America from 1911-14. In 1897, she married the conductor Edoardo Vitale (b. Naples, Nov. 29, 1872; d. Dec. 12, 1937) who was the director of La Scala from 1908-10 and the conductor of the orchestra on tracks 13-21 on this collection. All 24 of her recordings were made for Fonotipia in 1909.

Rinaldo Grassi (b. Milan, Oct. 5, 1885; d. Milan, Oct 14, 1946) studied at the Milan Conservatory and made his debut in 1904. He performed around Italy for a couple of years before giving his first performance at La Scala in 1907 and roles in four operas in the 1908-09 season at the Metropolitan and continued to perform until 1920. He recorded 13 performances between ca. 1906 and 1909, all for Fonotipia.

Giuseppe Krismer (b. Naples, ca. 1873-6; d. Pozzuoli, Jan. 7, 1946) was born into nobility and debuted in 1902 in Venice. By 1904 he had performed in Bologna under the direction of Toscanini and performed the lead in Rigoletto at La Scala. He performed through Italy from 1903-1922 with appearances in Portugal, Egypt, and Brazil, all before the First World War. He recorded 26 issued pieces for Fonotipia in 1909-10 before recording another 81 performances for various labels well into the 1920s. He continued to perform into the early 1930s.