Carnegie Hall was in a sweat bath of nostalgia: far-famed Italian Tenor Beniamino Gigli (pronounced jeel-yee), 65, returned for his first U.S. appearances in 16 years, and presumably his last. This week he sang the third of three Manhattan farewell recitals. The instant his heavily paunched figure moved from the wings, the crowd turned on the applause full blast. The tenor bowed, leaned firmly on the piano, spread his feet and bent forward from the waist as if to bounce his voice off the stage.
The programs listed one old reliable after another (Brahms's Lullaby, Una furtiva lagrima from L'Elisir d'Amore, O Paradiso from L'Africana), but the cheering listeners evidently were in the mood for chestnuts. The music was just what Gigli always sang best, and he showed traces of his old vocal glory: a refined moment of color, a liquid pianissimo phrase, a ringing high note. More often, the voice was thin, unsteady, and unmistakably 65 years old.
Ever since Gigli replaced Caruso as the Metropolitan Opera's star tenor in 1920, audiences have applauded him less for artfulness than for artlessness. He sang and acted with his peasant's gusto—"with the whole force of his body," one critic wrote, "as naturally as a gamecock fights." Vocal style usually went out the window when he saw a chance to prolong a honeyed mezza voce, a thundering high B-flat, a sob, a gulp or a tearful portamento.
Despite Gigli's fortissimo reception, New Yorkers still remembered the hullabaloo when he failed to take a salary cut during the Depression as other Met stars did. In 1939, back in Mussolini's Italy, he denounced the Met as decadent, predicted "something like a civil war" in the U.S. (he later denied everything).
Long a wealthy estate owner and patriarch in Recanati, near the Adriatic city of Ancona (he grows grapes, cures hams and plays boccie), Beniamino Gigli had left his home only to bid goodbye to his audiences—particularly, he said, to Americans. "I come not for the money or the artistic success to myself," he said, before taking off on a tour of major eastern cities. "I come for gratitude and for addio."