Italian baritones

Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 48. Chapters: Mattia Battistini, Ettore Bastianini, Titta Ruffo, Patrizio Buanne, Antonio Scotti, Pasquale Amato, Tito Gobbi, Afro Poli, Giuseppe Taddei, Anselmo Colzani, Renato Bruson, Antonio Pini-Corsi, Mario Ancona, Antonio Magini-Coletti, Giuseppe Campanari, Tiziano Ferro, Giuseppe Valdengo, Giorgio Ronconi, Valerio Scanu, Francesco Maria Bonini, Riccardo Stracciari, Giuseppe De Luca, Antonio Cotogni, Giacomo Rimini, Mario Sereni, Antonio Tamburini, Rolando Panerai, Luigi Bassi, Mario Sammarco, Luca Pisaroni, Carlo Galeffi, Piero Cappuccilli, Renato Capecchi, Enzo Mascherini, Giuliano Bernardi, Mariano Stabile, Felice Varesi, Gustave Garcia, Eugenio Giraldoni, Leone Giraldoni, Ernesto Badini, Gino Bechi, Giangiacomo Guelfi, Apollo Granforte, Leo Nucci, Enrico Delle Sedie, Paolo Silveri, Scipio Colombo, Carlo Tagliabue, Ugo Savarese, Giulio Fioravanti, Cesare Formichi, Achille De Bassini, Luigi Piazza, Aldo Protti, Antonio Galassi, Armando Borgioli. Excerpt: Mattia Battistini (27 February 1856 - 7 November 1928) was an Italian operatic baritone. He became internationally famous due to the beauty of his voice and the virtuosity of his singing technique, and he earned the sobriquet "King of Baritones". Battistini was born in Rome and brought up largely at Collebaccaro di Contigliano, a village near Rieti, where his parents had an estate. The Battistinis were ancestrally from Rieti, the ancient capital of the Sabines, and Mattia Battistini always looked like an ancient Roman, with his imposing physique, high forehead and monumental nose. (See photograph, top right.) They were a well-to-do family, long established in the field of medicine. His grandfather, Giovanni, and uncle, Raffaele, were personal physicians to the Pope and his knighted father, Cavaliere Luigi Battistini, was a professor of anatomy at the University of Rome. They preferred the future baritone to take up a career in medicine or law, and sent him to old and exclusive preparatory schools (the Collegio Bandinelli and later the Istituto dell' Apollinare) where he gained a classical education. From the beginning, Battistini had shown great musical talent, so, to the dismay of his mother, née Elena Tommasi, he dropped out of law school to study singing, first with Emilio Terziani and then with the renowned vocal pedagogue Venceslao Persichini (who also taught Francesco Marconi, Antonio Magini-Coletti, Titta Ruffo and Giuseppe De Luca). Battistini worked, too, with the top-class conductor Luigi Mancinelli and the composer Augusto Rotoli, and he consulted an illustrious baritone of the previous generation, Antonio Cotogni, in an effort to refine his technique. Most of the following information about Mattia Battistini's performance venues, dates and roles is drawn from The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Opera (second edition, 1980), edited by Harold Rosenthal and John Warrack, and The Record of Singing (Volume One, 1977), by Michael Scott. A 22-year-old Battistini m