Antonio "Toto" Cotogni (; 1 August 1831 – 15 October 1918) was an Italian baritone of the first magnitude. Regarded internationally as being one of the greatest male opera singers of the 19th century, he was particularly admired by the composer Giuseppe Verdi. Cotogni forged an important second career as a singing teacher after his retirement from the stage in 1894.

Early years and education

Antonio Cotogni was born in Rome to Agata Fazzini and Raffaele Cotogni, who managed a small majolica plant. He had four siblings: sister Giuditta (who remained unmarried and lived in the family household); brothers Francesco, Andrea (who owned a meat packing business), and Gaspare (later mayor of Melara).

After some initial studies at the Hospice of San Michele, where he was a student of Angelo Scardovelli, Andrea Salesi, and Ludovico Luccesi. He studied music theory at Santa Maria Maggiore under Fontemaggi. Soon after, he began working with Achille Faldi on the study of singing itself. Under his guidance, Cotogni made his first public ventures into solo singing but only in the principal churches of Rome and in small summer music festivals in the small towns of the province, such as Anagni, Valmontone, Subisco, Velletri, and Viterbo.

Early on, Cotogni worked part-time in a majolica plant and did not care much for theater. He had no pretensions for assuming a career there and was content to remain a church singer. He won his first success in 1851 singing Salvatore Capocci's oratorio Il martirio di Sant'Eustachio at the church of Santa Maria in Vallicella.

About his training prior to his Italian stage debut, Cotogni told a former student:

Operatic career

Debut

In 1852, after much insistence from Faldi and castrato Domenico Mustafà, among others, he agreed to sign a contract for his debut at Rome's Teatro Metastasio, as Belcore in L'elisir d'amore. For the next year, he did not sing in public at all but rather studied assiduously with Faldi to build his repertoire. After an initial contract at Spoleto for Il trovatore and Maria di Rohan, he began to pick up consistent work in the Italian regional operatic circuit: Lanciano for Trovatore, Rigoletto, and Maria di Rohan; Orvieto for I masnadieri; Lucrezia Borgia in several cities; I puritani at Perugia.

In the spring of 1857, he was signed by the impresario Jacovacci for Lucia di Lammermoor and Gemma di Vergy at Rome's Teatro Argentina. In September and October of that year, he performed I due Foscari and Luisa Strozzi at Teatro Rossini in Turin. It was then that he met the soprano Maria Ballerini. They married the next year but never had any children together.

Following that, Cotogni was engaged for Foscari and La traviata at Asti and then Cuneo, the Teatro Rossini again, Zara, in Genova, and at Turin for the opening of the new Teatro Alfieri. There he was asked by the impresario Scalaberni to take the place of the famous baritone Felice Varesi in an operatic company being formed for the theater in Nice. During his time in Nice, Cotogni studied the role of Don Giovanni with his predecessor, Italian baritone Antonio Tamburini, who had left the stage in 1855.

Breakthrough

The turning point in Cotogni's career came in late 1858. As soon as he arrived in Nice for rehearsals in October, he began to feel an air of contempt for his presence from everyone from the theater to public restaurants and cafés. Those who knew and loved Varesi felt that Cotogni, an virtually unknown singer, had been hastily and unfairly chosen to replace him. The first role he was engaged to sing was of Antonio in Gaetano Donizetti's Linda di Chamounix in Nice, where the audience greeted him with noises and whistling before he had even opened his mouth. This same audience fell silent during Antonio's opening aria "Ambo nati in queste valle" and gave him a unanimous, colossal applause after the cadenza, demanding a bis. That performance assured his place on the scene and revealed him to be an absolute master of his art—technically, stylistically, and dramatically. Consequently, this became one of Cotogni's signature roles, one by which he made great impressions on all the great theaters of Europe and even the most sullen critics. In Nice, he followed Linda with Gemma di Vergy, Rigoletto, La favorita, Traviata, Trovatore, Don Pasquale, Roberto Devereux, Don Sebastiano, and Il barbiere di Siviglia.

He sang with enormous success over the next year—I lombardi, Rossini's Otello, and Nabucco in Viterbo; again at Nice for Lucia di Lammermoor, Ernani, Trovatore, and Maria di Rohan; and at Barcelona's Teatro Principal for Saffo, Traviata, Attila, Gemma, Barbiere, and Trovatore. By October 1860, Cotogni had sung in 21 theaters, and it was at this point that he reached La Scala, Milan, debuting there in the role of Giovanni Bandino in Bottesini's L'assedio di Firenze. Cotogni had been nervous about this debuting, doubting his ability to do it justice and doubting the power of his voice to be heard in the theater. The reviews of the debut were encouraging, but one or two critics mentioned a certain tremulousness and constriction in his high notes. But Cotogni regained his composure after the premiere, and won over the Milan public with his other roles that season—William Tell, Peri's Vittor Pisani, Rodolfo in La sonnambula, and Ezio in Attila.

During the ensuing decades, he also appeared at the leading opera houses in Madrid, Lisbon, Paris, London, Moscow, and Saint Petersburg. He became enormously popular with London audiences, performing at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, from 1867 to 1889. He sang at Saint Petersburg in 26 successive seasons.Eaglefield-Hull 1924.

It was in 1894 at Saint Petersburg that he gave his last operatic stage performance, in Donizetti's Don Pasquale. While Cotogni had spent his career singing the opera's baritone role of Dr. Malatesta, the younger baritone Mattia Battistini was now taking over many of the Cotogni's old roles. Nevertheless, Battistini requested Cotogni to honor the company by joining them in one final performance, only this time asking that he sing the lead comic bass role of Don Pasquale, which Cotogni obliged.

Voice teacher

In retirement, Cotogni became one of the most celebrated vocal teachers in history. At the invitation of Anton Rubinstein, he taught at Saint Petersburg Conservatory (where incidentally he had Sergei Diaghilev as a student) from 1894 to 1898, but he had to abandon this post in consequence of a serious illness,Eaglefield-Hull 1924. subsequently taking up an appointment in 1899 as a professor at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome, where his assistant was Enrico Rosati, who was later to become teacher to Beniamino Gigli.

The qualities that made Cotogni beloved in his career on the stage, also made him an effective teacher, one who toiled for his students to provide them what they needed musically, artistically, and often even materially.

During this time, twelve-year-old Luigi Ricci (who would later become a vocal coach) began accompanying voice lessons given by Cotogni, who had performed several of Verdi's operas under the composer's supervision. At this early age, Ricci began taking meticulous notes on traditions that Cotogni passed on to him from his own work with Verdi and other 19th century composers and conductors information about elements that had been changed in rehearsal and practice but had never been notated officially, as well as traditions of variations and cadenza begun by various singers from the past century. Ricci continued his copious note taking throughout his life and eventually compiled these into a four-part collection entitled Variazioni-cadenze tradizioni per canto (two volumes and two appendices published by Casa Ricordi, 1963).

Cotogni died of old age in Rome less than a month prior to the 1918 armistice that ended World War I. A group of his friends, colleagues, and former students raised money for his tomb. His burial chapel is located at plot 98 in the Pincetto Nuovo section of the Campo Verano cemetery in Rome.

Students & Protégés Ricci reports that when in 1912 he attended performances at Moscow's Imperial theater and Zimina Opera, as well as at the Imperial Theater in St. Petersburg, half of the artists on stage had been Cotogni's students. For nearly 20 years, Cotogni dedicated himself to teaching singing. Many artists already in the fullness of their careers also came to study with him at the Liceo and/or learn from him privately.

+ Sortable table First Name Last Name Voice Type Adolfo Pacini Baritone Alfredo Costa Baritone Amleto Pollastri Baritone Augusto Beuf Baritone Benvenuto Franci Baritone Carlo Galeffi Baritone Cesare Alessandroni Baritone Cesare Ferretti Baritone Dante Perrone Baritone Dinh Gilly Baritone Domenico Caporello Baritone Enrico Nani Baritone Ettore Bernabei Baritone Giuseppe Bellantoni Baritone Giuseppe De Luca Baritone Guido Caselotti Tenor Jean De Reszke Baritone Leone Paci Baritone Luigi Pasinati Baritone Luigi Rossi-Morelli Baritone Mariano Stabile Baritone Marino Emiliani Baritone Mario Basiola Baritone Mattia Battistini Baritone Millo Picco Baritone Nazzareno Bertinelli Baritone Nikolai Shevelev Baritone Onofrio Pirrone Baritone Riccardo Stracciari Baritone Salvatore Persichetti Baritone Sergei Diaghilev Baritone Titta Ruffo Baritone Evgeny Dolinin Tenor Ugo Donarelli Baritone Valentino Giorda Baritone Zygmunt (Sigismondo) Zaleski Baritone Aristodemo Giorgini Tenor Armando Gualtieri Tenor Beniamino Gigli Tenor Pasquale Funtò Tenor Edgar Herbert-Caesari Tenor Ellison Van Hoose Tenor Enzo Fusco Tenor Franco Tumminello Tenor Giacomo Eliseo Tenor Giacomo Lauri-Volpi Tenor Giuliano Romagnoli Tenor Giuseppe Antonio Paganelli Tenor Guido Ciccolini Tenor Julian Biel Tenor Luigi Ceccarelli Tenor Luigi Lucenti Tenor Luigi Pasinati Tenor Manfredo Miselli Tenor Nicola Bavaro Tenor Rinaldo Grassi Tenor Vincenzo Tanglongo Tenor Berardo Berardi Bass Alfred Blackman Bass Emilio Casolari Bass Filippo Valentine Bass Gennaro Curci Bass Giuseppe Quinzi Tapergi Bass Irnerio Costantini Bass Paolo Argentini Bass Tadeusz Orda Bass Tito Verger Bass Umberto Di Lelio Bass Virgilio Lazzari Bass Vladimir Kastorsky Bass Carmen Melis Soprano Marta Wittkowska Contralto Cecilia Cao Pinna Mezzo-Soprano

Voice

As a child, Cotogni had merely a weak soprano voice, but it did begin to increase in volume and darken, turning later into a contralto voice. As a teenager, his voice finally began to break into that of a young man, and the head music teacher Scardovelli forbade him to sing; Cotogni grudgingly obeyed and was silent for about six months. After this period of rest, he began to find a few notes, then went on to enrich and strengthen his vocal means continuously until the complete development of a baritone voice.

Range

According to his biographer, Cotogni's professional/usable vocal range was from A1 to B4, though a handful of his roles and even his interpolations and cadenzas require a half-step lower—A♭1. According to Ricci, his other noted interpolations include a high G♯ in Posa's romanza "Carlo, ch'è sol il nostro amore" in Don Carlo; high A♭'s in "O de verd'anni miei" and "O sommo Carlo" from Ernani and the end of "Suoni la tromba" in I puritani; and a quick high A♮in a roulade on the word "piacere" in "Largo al factotum" from Il barbiere di Siviglia. He did, however, chide Titta Ruffo for interpolating an unwritten high B♭ in Hamlet. It is therefore unlikely that Cotogni ever sang a note above the high A♮ in public performance. Of physiological interest is the fact that Cotogni suffered from a lateral lisp that affected his speech but that disappeared when he sang.