Lebendige Vergangenheit - Salvatore Baccaloni

Like the great actors of the past, only some of the personalities who commanded the stage of opera history have been preserved in recordings. And just as the solemn, dignified speech of the great actors Alexander Moissi (1880-1935) and Josef Kainz (1858-1910) today seems more exaggerated than convincing, the recordings of the compelling singing actors of yesteryear, restricted as they are to the acoustic element, receive only modest applause from present-day critics, who judge them only on their merits as recorded. This applies particularly to Salvatore Baccaloni, whose feeling for musical drama was entirely concentrated on its effect in the space of theatre and on the stage action of the moment. He cared little for the delicate technology of a microphone. Born on 14 April 1900 in Rome, he received his musical training singing treble in the Sistine Chapel. He first studied architecture, but at the same time took singing instruction from the baritone Giuseppe Kaschmann. He performed in concert and in amateur productions before deciding on an operatic career, which he began in April 1922 as Rossini's Bartolo at the Teatro Adriano in Rome. He spent his early years on minor Italian stages before performing in 1925 at Rorhe's renowned Teatro Costanzi as Angelotti, Sparafucile and Basilio. In 1926 he made guest appearances in Wagnerian roles in Palermo and Ravenna, before being engaged at Milan's Scala, where until 1940 he appeared in an extraordinarily varied repertoire. Under the direction of Arturo Toscanini, he developed his comic acting talent without, however, abandoning serious roles. In 1928 he appeared in Verona's Arena as Timur and Sparafucile. In London in 1929 his interpretation of Warlaam was described by Ernest Newman as "the best vocal performance of the evening" - much to the displeasure of the great Feodor Chaliapin. In a series of performances in Buenos Aires starting in 1930, he was equally successful as Sparafucile, Ivan Khovansky, Raimondo (Lucia di Lammermoor) Dulcamara, Don Pasquale and Bartolo. In 1930 he made his US debut in Chicago as Fra Melitone in Laforza de! destino. He was celebrated for his appear­ ances at the Glyndebourne Festival, where he sang the roles of Leporello and Bartolo every year from 1936 to 1939 as well as Alfonso in 1937 and Don Pasquale in 1938-1939. In 1936, however, he had great difficulties with the spoken language of Osmin, an incident that Rudolf Bing drastically described in his memoirs. Roland Tenschert had a far more elegant description in 1939, calling it the "stylistic boundaries between Mozart's singspiel and the Italian genre of opera". In 1938 Baccaloni was sensationally successful as Falstaff in San Francisco. On 3 December 1940, he sang his New York debut as Bartolo. He now shifted the focus of his career to the USA, where he became known for his amusirig roles as an film actor. He returned to La Scala in Milan for a final time in 1952, singing the role of Osmin in Die Entführung aus dem Serail alongside Maria Callas. The Metropolitan Opera remained his artistic home for a quarter of a century. He ended his singing career on 8 August 1965, in a Met performance at the Long Island Festival. There he sang Bartolo in Il barbiere di Siviglia, the same role with which he bad begun his career 43 years earlier. The year before he had been named general director of the Hudson Valley International Cultural Centre, where he also directed opera and staged Poulenc's Les dialogues · des Carmelites. He died in New York on 31 December 1969. All of his obituaries stressed his peculiarities and the difficulties his exceptional stage presence caused his colleagues. The most touching and affectionate words came from the British bass . David Franklin in the magazine Opera. He praised the singer's vocal ability as well as his artistic conscientiousness and remembered the solicitude with which the mature singer Baccaloni had treated his young and inexperienced colleague in 1936. Franklin was also the only one to mention Baccaloni's ideal partnership with other singing colleagues. In the final words of his obituary, Franklin spoke of this type of singing actor in .the following line: "If you never saw them in the flesh, there's nothing tobe clone but commiserate with you that you have missed a great experience."