Rigoletto: Live Master Classes: Tito Gobbi Opera Workshop (review)

A brittle yellow newspaper clipping in my archives from the Los Angeles Times is dated 10 February 1982. It was written to celebrate the eleventh and last opera workshop of the Rosary College Graduate School of Fine Arts in Florence and its star teacher, baritone Tito Gobbi. In extolling his merits and accomplishments, staff writer Louis B. Fleming quotes Ida Cook's assessment: "I don't know anyone else who has the maestro's genius for passing along the skill of opera singing, for telling how it is done."¹

Cook, a prolific author and avid opera lover since 1924, was Gobbi's ghost-autobiographer. As she and Gobbi describe the birth of the program in Tito Gobbi: My Life, the idea germinated during his Chicago engagement in 1958. He was invited by Sister Maria Michele Armato for a recital, a return engagement at nearby Rosary College in River Forest, Illinois. To vary the program, "In the second half I stripped my jacket and tie and I announced that I was inviting the audience to witness a rehearsal."² Gobbi then gave an improvised opera rehearsal of the first act of Falstaff with the assistance of some obliging Chicago colleagues. Years later, when Sister Maria Michele became dean of the Graduate School of Fine Arts established by Rosary College at the Villa Schifanoia in Florence, she invited the maestro to organize a summer opera workshop at the villa.

Gobbi accepted the offer immediately. A successful and rewarding undertaking for all concerned, it was repeated annually for an international student body. This experiment became the model for a new program that was to start in the summer of 1983 near Venice, with an international competition added to the workshop. Gobbi himself declared, "The results have been very satisfactory. From those attending these workshops, 40 have gone to professional work in opera, including stage directors, critics, coaches, and conductors as well as singers. And, yes, two are in jazz. One has his own group."³

As the descriptive title of the set implies, this multimedia publication contains the instructive conversations and rehearsals with young singers under Gobbi's tutelage. "The aim is improving projection of sound, interpretation and pronunciation," he said in the Los Angeles Times interview.⁴ According to the set's accompanying information, the master classes presented here took place at the Villa Schifanoia between 1973 and 1978. Although the individual sessions clearly did not take place in the same years, they all relate to Rigoletto, and the purposeful editing leads us through the opera from the opening scene to Rigoletto's final anguished cry as the imaginary curtain falls.

The set consists of three compact discs and a seventy-two-page illustrated booklet. No translation of the libretto is provided, nor is it necessary. Anyone who will devote the listening time to these discs will not be trying to learn what the opera is about. Members of the intended audience are likely to know much of Rigoletto by heart, even if not every word of every character.

The transcription of the spoken exchanges and instruction helps the listener understand Gobbi's accented English and his remarks made in Italian (to the accompanist) or French (to soprano Noelle Lenain). The color coding of the English and Italian texts makes it easy to follow the proceedings in the language of choice. Ironically, the Italian version is the translation for Gobbi's instructions. Although at one point he pokes fun at himself in trying to sort out the correct pronunciation between "wowel" and "vowel," his command of English is perfectly satisfactory. Still, one senses he would have even more instructive comments to make if his English vocabulary were as ample as his native Italian. And while on languages: there are obvious differences among the students' command of Italian pronunciation.

The layout and execution of the booklet are excellent. Profuse illustrations show Gobbi as...