Music: Tenor

Tip-top Italian-style tenors have always been a scarce commodity, and for the past two decades they have been growing scarcer & scarcer. Opera impresarios count on the fingers of one hand (Gigli, Lauri-Volpi, Borgioli, Schipa . . .) the lusty high-voiced Latins still capable of raising even moderate-sized rafters on either side of the Atlantic. Since the death of Enrico Caruso (1921), tenor departments of U. S. opera-houses have shown a steady decline. Today their audiences count it a privilege to hear their “Ridi Pagliaccios” and “La donna e mobiles” sung by anything bigger than a microphone voice.

Last week, during a performance of Tosca, pandemonium broke loose in Chicago’s Civic Opera House. Excited operagoers pounded the floor, stood on their seats and yelled frantic approval. Conductor Moranzoni tried to get the perform-ance going again, was stopped by a gusty chorus of “boos.” For more than five minutes the demonstration continued. Finally the cause of it, a broad-shouldered, lusty-looking Italian tenor, Galliano Masini, repeated “E lucevan le stelle.” And the opera was allowed to go on.

Son of a Livornese macaroni maker, 34-year-old Masini worked once as a stevedore, then as a mechanic, was sent to Milan by admiring townsmen. He claims that he never took a singing lesson, that the Milanese taught him only repertory. He made a debut in Livorno (Tosca) in 1928 and has sung since at La Scala and other leading European opera-houses.

Chicago critics who had described Masini’s U. S. debut in Lucia di Lammermoor last month, and subsequent appearances in La Gioconda and Tosca as “one long crescendo of excitement,” now spoke of him unhesitatingly as “another Caruso.” While Chicago music-lovers last week were congratulating each other on this sensation of the musical season, Tenor Masini was being watched by hawk-eyed impresarios from coast to coast.