The complete music-actor

Summary

I'd been warned: he would sing the role of Falstaff the same way he always did, and not give a damn about the production. He arrived along with his charming wife Tilda, then spent two uncommunicative days observing suspiciously what we young upstarts were up to. Then Tilda passed judgement: ‘Tito, tutto questo sarà un’ amore. Fai tutto quello che vuole’ (‘Tito, this will be a love affair. Do everything he asks of you’). ‘He’ – that was me, the director. From this moment onwards, Tito Gobbi – the most famous Falstaff of his era – rehearsed the role with us as if he were singing it for the first time. Everyone was deeply impressed by his artistry: he didn't think it beneath himself to engage with ideas from younger people, while at the same time he was teaching them a lot himself. Tilda turned out to be right – this production became his last great triumph.

Tito Gobbi was the complete music-actor. No one was more in control of his craft, and he was able to apply it to tremendous effect. When he sang the role of Scarpia (usually alongside Maria Callas), his opening words ‘Un tal baccano in chiesa!’ (‘What an uproar in church!’) exuded such a glacial iciness that every audience froze to the spot. And when he appeared as Falstaff at Herne's Oak in Windsor Forest, replete with stag's horns in his disguise as the Wild Hunter, everyone in the audience held their breath. The way he sang and acted out Verdi's twelve strokes of midnight with their shifting harmonies was spookily magical.

Gobbi was capable of elementary fits of rage – both in character and in private. One of our performances was taken over by a guest conductor who annoyed Gobbi throughout the evening. In the forest scene, Falstaff holds Alice in his arms underneath Herne's Oak, but she slips out of his grasp and he cries out, exasperated: ‘Il diavolo non vuol, ch'io sia dannato!’ (‘The devil doesn't want me to be damned’), followed by a wild orchestral eruption. But on this occasion, Gobbi turned to the conductor he now so despised, and declared – completely in his role: ‘Il diavolo ben vuol, che tu sii dannato!’ (‘The devil would love you to be damned!’). The poor conductor got such a fright he almost dropped his baton.