Titta Ruffo
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Titta Ruffo, Italian opera singer (Pisa, June 9, 1877 - Florence, July 5, 1953), was generally regarded as the greatest baritone of his generation. Known as the "Voce del leone" ("voice of the lion"), he was renowned for his enormous voice, thrilling high notes and dramatic force on stage. Other baritones, even the greatest, were in awe of Ruffo's voice: Giuseppe de Luca, a baritone star in his own right, said of Ruffo, "His was not a voice, it was a miracle;" and Victor Maurel, the creator of Verdi's Iago and Falstaff, said that the notes of Ruffo's upper register were the most glorious baritone sounds he had ever heard.
Born Ruffo Titta in Pisa (he later changed his name for the stage), Ruffo was the son of an engineer. He studied voice with several teachers, but basically his vocal method was self-taught. He made his debut in 1898 at the Teatro Constanzi in Rome as the Herald in Wagner's Lohengrin. After a slow start, his career took off in the early 1900s and he quickly achieved international renown. His major debuts were in London (1903), Milan (1904), Lisbon (1907), Buenos Aires (1908) and the Paris Opéra (1911). Ruffo made his American debut in Philadelphia in 1912 and sang extensively in Chicago. He came to the Met relatively late in his career, in 1922 as Figaro in Rossini's The Barber of Seville. He sang 46 performances at the Met from 1922 through 1929.
Ruffo's repertoire included most of the major baritone roles in French and Italian opera, including Rigoletto, Di Luna, Amonasro, Germont, Tonio, Rossini's Figaro, Hamlet, Iago, Carlo in Ernani, Don Giovanni, Barnaba, and Renato in Un Ballo in Maschera. He was also renowned for several baritone roles in operas largely forgotten today: the title roles in Ambroise Thomas's Hamlet and Franchetti's Cristoforo Colombo, Cascart in Leoncavallo's Zazà and Neri in Wolf-Ferrari's La Cena delle Beffe. Ruffo's signature roles were Rigoletto and Hamlet.
Ruffo's voice was a huge instrument, powerfully resonant and rich with an exceptionally brilliant upper register all the way up to high A. It has been compared to burnished bronze, and indeed there was more than a little metal in his sound. In the middle register the voice was rather dark in color. His lower notes were weak and lacked the resonance of his higher tones. The voice, over all, was colorful and prismatic.
Like his famous tenor compatriot, Enrico Caruso, Ruffo represented a new style of singing in which power and declamatory force eclispsed the previous generation's premium on vocal grace, subtlety and finesse. Notwithstanding his great popularity, Ruffo's vocal approach was not universally admired, and he was compared unfavorably by some critics with the great lyric baritone Mattia Battistini. Ruffo's detractors accused him of bellowing and seeking to overpower audiences with sheer force of sound, however, his records show him to have been capable of great subtlety and nuance.
Ruffo was a prolific recording artist and made over 130 records, acoustic and electric, first for Pathé Frères in Paris in 1904, and then exclusively for Victor (the "Gramophone Company" in England) beginning in 1907. Like Caruso, Ruffo's voice recorded exceptionally well. It was so rich and resonant that even through the primitive acoustic recording process, much glory remains to be heard. He continued recording into the electric recording era after 1925, but most of those later discs caught him past his prime. He made two stunning records of Hamlet's "Brindisi" (1907 and 1911), the cadenza in which demonstrates his astounding breath control. Most amazing of all is the unaccompanied "All'erta, Marinar!" from Meyerbeer's L'Africaine which shows the superhuman resonance and brilliance of Ruffo's upper register.
Ruffo was never a "house baritone" or a resident singer with any opera company; he was a star in his own right and received top billing - and top fees - wherever he sang. Ruffo was the only male opera singer of his time who could compete, in terms of celebrity and fees, with Caruso. Surprisingly, they sang together infrequently. Two explanations have been adduced for this: one, that neither singer liked sharing the glory with another male star; and another (more likely), that no opera house could afford to pay both singers' exhorbitant fees in one performance, especially if there was an expensive soprano singing as well. Caruso and Ruffo did pair up once in the recording studio, in the duet "Si pel ciel" from Otello. It is considered by many vocal connaisseurs to be the greatest single vocal record ever made.
Ruffo's forceful singing style was not conducive to vocal longetivity, and his vocal decline began relatively early. From the late 'teens on, his voice took on an increasingly hollow, metallic sound, still quite powerful but with a sense that the vocal core had been blown out. Volume remained aplenty, but the richness faded, and the resulting sound was impressive but not particularly beautiful. Perhaps the seeds for Ruffo's early decline were sown in the fact that he was largely self-taught. Ruffo himself seemed to recognize this and he refused to teach voice after his retirement, stating; "I never knew how to sing,that is why my voice went by the time I was fifty. I have no right to capitalize on my former name and reputation and try to teach youngsters something I never knew how to do myself."
Ruffo retired in 1931, staying for several years in Switzerland and Paris. He wrote an autobiography, La mia parabola (My Parabola), which shows Ruffo to have been an intelligent, articulate and self-aware man. In 1937 he returned to Italy, where he was later arrested for opposing the Fascist regime.
Titta Ruffo died in Florence from lung cancer in 1953.
Sources
Hamilton, David, ed., The Metropolitan Opera Encyclopedia (Simon & Schuster, New York 1987). Pleasants, Henry, The Great Singers (Simon & Schuster, New York 1966). Seltsam, William H., Metropolitan Opera Annals (H.W. Wilson Co., New York 1947). Steane, J.B., The Grand Tradition (Amadeus Press, Portland 1993).