Fernando De Lucia (11 October 1860Arthur Eaglefield Hull (Ed.), A Dictionary of Modern Music and Musicians (Dent, London 1924) or 1 September 1861 – 21 February 1925) was an Italian operatic tenor and singing teacher who enjoyed an internationally successful career.
De Lucia was admired in his lifetime as a striking exponent of verismo parts — particularly Canio in Leoncavallo's Pagliacci — and of certain roles written by Verdi and Puccini. Since then, however, he has acquired a great posthumous reputation among record collectors for something different. They hail him as the exemplar of a type of graceful, ornamental tenor singing which originated prior to verismo and that went out of fashion for a long time, only to reemerge in recent years. Especially valued are the recordings that De Lucia made of Almaviva's arias and duets from Rossini's bel canto comic opera Il barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville).
Early career De Lucia was born in Naples, where he studied at the Naples Music Conservatory with Vincenzo Lombardi and Beniamino Carelli.Scott 1977, 124. He made his debut at the Teatro di San Carlo, Naples, as Gounod's Faust in 1885.M. Scott, The Record of Singing to 1914 (Duckworth, London 1977), 124. Over the next two or three years he sang in Spain, South America and in the smaller Italian opera houses, in Linda di Chamounix, Dinorah, L'elisir d'amore, Fra Diavolo and La sonnambula. While in Madrid he was hired by Augustus Harris and Herman Klein for his first London appearances in the Drury Lane season of 1887; but although Klein liked his Alfredo, he went comparatively unnoticed due to the British debut of the charismatic tenor Jean de Reszke.H. Klein, Thirty Years of Musical Life in London, 1870-1900 (Century, New York 1903), 219, 223. His Almaviva in Il barbiere di Siviglia (a role later closely associated with him) was described as "truly detestable" by The Times newspaper.
Mascagni, Rome and Florence On 31 October 1891, De Lucia took part in the world premiere of L'amico Fritz, singing the role of Fritz Kobus opposite the French diva Emma Calvé. The opera had been composed by the up-and-coming musician Pietro Mascagni and its debut occurred in Rome at the Costanzi Theatre.Rosenthal and Warrack 1974 printing, 10. For a singer later upheld (by some) as the rarified model of bel canto styleB. Semeonoff, Record Collecting (Oakwood Press, Chislehurst 1949), 65: 'Fernando de Lucia, leading exponent of a vanished bel canto tradition'; H. Rosenthal and J. Warrack, Concise Oxford Dictionary of Opera (London, 1974 printing), 'a master of bel canto.' the situation was originally quite otherwise; De Lucia was, in fact, famous during his career not as a bel canto stylist, but as a performer of Mascagni and Ruggero Leoncavallo's earthy, melodramatic verismo characters. De Lucia capitalized on Europe's Mascagni craze of the early 1890s. Accordingly, in November 1892, he was engaged by the Florence opera house to create the tenor lead in Mascagni's third opera, I Rantzau.M. Girardi: Mascagni, Pietro (Grove Music Online). Appearing with him in the work was the virtuoso baritone Mattia Battistini.
Verismo firsts in London, 1893 De Lucia's verismo-opera career continued apace with the first English performance (on 19 May 1893, with Enrico Bevignani conducting), of Leoncavallo's Pagliacci, opposite Nellie Melba and Mario Ancona. De Lucia sang the part of Canio, which had been created a year earlier in Milan by Fiorello Giraud.Rosenthal and Warrack 1974, 297. Klein describes an audience breathless with excitement, and De Lucia's burning intensity in the role as a triumph of realism.Klein 1903, 378. Mascagni made his own London debut at Covent Garden, conducting L'amico Fritz on 19 June 1893 with Calvé and, of course, De Lucia in the cast.Klein 1903, 384. Soon afterwards, again with Calvé, and accompanied by the song composer Paolo Tosti, De Lucia sang excerpts from Cavalleria rusticana for Queen Victoria at Windsor. On 7 July of that year, appearing in a cast which included soprano Nellie Melba and the baritones Mario Ancona and David Bispham, he gave the first British performance of I Rantzau at Covent Garden. (The opera was not a great success.)Klein 1903, 385-386.
London and Milan In 1893-94, De Lucia sang in New York City at the Metropolitan Opera. He repeated his Canio with Melba and Ancona, and this was esteemed, but he was disliked as Don Ottavio in Don Giovanni and as the Duke of Mantua in Rigoletto. He did not repeat the experience. In London in 1894, he performed both Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci (together on one night) at Covent Garden, with Ancona in the lead baritone parts. Shaw admired the "'altogether exceptional dramatic force" which their performances gave to the pair of works.G.B. Shaw, Music in London 1890-1894 (Constable, London 1932), iii, 222. That season he was also in a bilingual (French-Italian) Faust, with Melba, Ancona and Bauermeister. Shaw thought the role of Faust too heavy for De Lucia: his "dramatic instinct helped him well through a part in which he seemed likely to be overweighted. Several times in the garden scene he found the right musical treatment with exceptional success."Shaw 1932, iii, 233. That was also his verdict of his Duke in a Rigoletto with Melba, Ancona and Giulia Ravogli, though he got through the music 'adroitly and pluckily'.Shaw 1932, iii, 245.
De Lucia sang at La Scala in 1895 in the world premiere of Mascagni's Silvano, and also appeared in the first Milan performances of Puccini's La bohème and Massenet's La Navarraise. At Covent Garden in that same year, he shared the principal tenor work with the heavier-voiced Francesco Tamagno and Albert Alvarez in the absence of Jean de Reszke.Klein 1903, 413. The American baritone David Bispham thought De Lucia admirable in Fra Diavolo that year. The cast of Auber's light-hearted opera featured Bispham and Mme Amadi (as Lord and Lady Allcash) and Marie Engle (as Zerlina), as well as the bass Vittorio Arimondi and the buffo baritone Antonio Pini-Corsi (as brigands).D. Bispham, A Quaker Singer's Recollections (New York, 1920), 165-166.
In 1897, he sang in a state concert at London's Buckingham Palace to mark Queen Victoria's Royal Jubilee.Bispham 1920, 265. At the Costanzi Theatre, Rome, on 22 November 1898, he created the role of Osaka in Mascagni's Iris,Scott 1977, 125; Rosenthal and Warrack 1977, 190 for date. and at Covent Garden on 12 July 1900 he played Cavaradossi in the first performance of Tosca in England, supporting the Floria Tosca of Milka Ternina, with Antonio Scotti as Scarpia and Luigi Mancinelli conducting.Rosenthal and Warrack 1974, 404-405. The "Musical Times" found that his performance was highly effective and that his character exactly suited that of Cavaradossi.Musical Times, Aug 1, 1900, p 537
De Lucia was also admired in London as Don Jose in Bizet's Carmen. He appeared, too, in the same composer's I pescatori di perle and in various works by Rossini, Bellini and Verdi.Rosenthal and Warrack 1974, 98. His last London season would be in 1905, in an outstanding operatic company assembled by Henry Russell for the Waldorf Theatre (now the Novello Theatre). De Lucia's colleagues on this occasion were the tenor Alessandro Bonci, Ancona and Pini-Corsi.Scott 1977, 125.
In 1916, De Lucia delivered his farewell performance at La Scala as Rodolfo. He said goodbye to his loyal Neapolitan supporters the following year at the Teatro di San Carlo. De Lucia's final appearance before the public occurred at the funeral of the incomparable Enrico Caruso in Naples in 1921. In his later years, De Lucia dwelt in Naples and taught at the conservatory there, in which he himself had been trained.Eaglefield-Hull 1924, 117. His most famous pupil was the French tenor Georges Thill. He died in his native city of Naples.
His vocal technique Although De Lucia's stage career was closely tied to works by his contemporaries Mascagni and Leoncavallo, the vocal method that he exhibited in their operas was not the strenuous, declamatory mode of singing normally associated by modern listeners with the verismo movement. Because his voice was not overly powerful or extensive in range, he needed to rely on his histrionic skills to project the drama fully. When it came to his actual singing, he delivered the music at hand in a flowery and fluttery way that has no modern equivalent.
De Lucia's recordings of arias and duets from Rossini's Barber of Seville ('Ecco ridente', 'Se il mio nome' and 'Numero quindici', for example) show off his vocal characteristics to an even greater extent than do his records of verismo pieces (or even lyrical Verdian parts, such as Alfredo in La traviata). They contain a studied display of fioritura, rubato, limpid phrasing and portamento which appears to be a deliberate re-statement of the so-called bel canto style practised by previous generations of Italian tenors; or perhaps more accurately, a re-statement of that style's surviving mannerisms. These mannerisms were already dying out in the early 1900s when audiences came to prefer their tenor idols to sing in a more full-blooded, robust and straightforward way.Scott 1977, 125-126.
George Bernard Shaw wrote tellingly of De Lucia in June 1892. Having seen his L'amico Fritz, he stated that: "Signor De Lucia succeeds [Fernando] Valero ... as artificial tenor in ordinary to the establishment. His thin strident forte is in tune and does not tremble beyond endurance; and his mezza voce, though monotonous and inexpressive, is pretty as prettiness goes in the artificial school."Shaw 1932, ii, 104. In 1894 Shaw speaks of De Lucia as a tenor of the Julián Gayarre school, without the "goat-bleat" of its extreme disciples.Shaw 1932, ii, 222. This comment of Shaw's provides a clue.Scott 1977, 123-124. Like Valero, Gayarre was taught by Melchiorre Vidal in Madrid. Another of Vidal's pupils, soprano Rosina Storchio, was closely associated with verismo premieres. De Lucia, who sang in Spain in the 1880s, may have imbibed the example set by those who studied with Vidal.
By referring to De Lucia as an artificial tenor, Shaw is associating him with other tenors who employed a similar vocal technique, and were inclined to colour and phrase in the same sort of way as De Lucia. They include Alessandro Bonci, Giuseppe Anselmi, Fiorello Giraud, Charles Friant, Edmond Clement, and David Devries. The voices of several of these tenors had a fast vibrato which is apparent on their gramophone records. Musicologists debate whether this is a genuine stylistic hand-me-down from the "bel canto" singing tradition founded by the virtuoso tenor Giovanni Rubini (1794–1854) or merely a flaw, attributable to inadequate breath support, in the vocal method adopted subsequent to Rubini by some Mediterranean tenors.
Many other famous Mediterranean tenors active in De Lucia's day, such as Francesco Tamagno, Francesco Marconi, Emilio De Marchi, Francesco Vignas (a Vidal pupil, paradoxically), Giuseppe Borgatti, Giovanni Zenatello and, of course, Enrico Caruso, did not 'tremble' like De Lucia and his ilk when they sang, but their repertoire was often in heavier roles. This fact is borne out by their recordings. (Unlike the other tenors mentioned above, De Marchi did not make commercial discs; but he can be heard singing part of the role of Cavaradossi on brief cylinder recordings made live at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1903.)
Recording career