Memories of the Master
Tis many years since the old Lamperti (called “old” to distinguish him from the son, the “young” Lamperti,” who is often confused with his father) taught some of the greatest singers of his day in a dingy and shabby room in a house equally dingy and on the great Plaza del Duomo in Milan, Italy.
That poor, little room has rung with the magnificent voices of men and women who have thrilled the hearts of thousands and thousands of Europe, the United States and as far away as Montivideo and Rio de Janeiro. To have been a graduated pupil of Lamperti’s at one time was to have held the golden key to almost any opera house in the world. And who was Lamperti that name and his teachings wielded such power? What his method that made voices so wonderful that the music world so eagerly listened to them? Lamperti spent his younger life as the humble accompanist of a famous teacher long since forgotten called Trivulzi, who, when I studied in Milan, had for years been a paralytic confined to his bed, yet whose mind was sufficiently clear to enable him to teach a few pupils who came to him. Still he was completely eclipsed by the great frame and success of his former accompanist.
Upon this subject the old master was dumb and no one had the hardihood to question him. He himself had ceased to create great singers. The tide had turned and rising had overwhelmed him while his former aid stood upon a lofty height, secure from the storms which had swept many a good master under the waves of oblivion.
It was at the very height of Lamperti’s popularity that I was accepted by him as a pupil. I had already sung two seasons in opera, and done church and oratorio work and, despite the gentle and kindly encouragement of my American audiences, deeming my faults far more conspicuous than my merits, I went to Italy, hoping to find in the musical atmosphere and surroundings of that country and the teaching of the great masters of Milan the means of developing my voice, conquering my faults and gaining as full a knowledge of that famous school of singing from out of which arose the wonderful artists which have delighted the world for generations. Singers, whose golden notes have charmed away the melancholy of kings, who have been the joy of princes and nobles and the idols of an adoring public.
I had been directed, on leaving my own country, to Signor Sangiovanni, a tenor who came over to the United States with Jenny Lind on her first concert tour, and who had also been a favorite in Eurpopean cities. Unquestionabley he was an impeccable musician and master, but while yielding him homage and admiration, I yet found him too easily satisfied with my voice and efforts. I knew my faults, he judged them too leniently and we did little but “pass” operas, while he continually urged me to accept engagements when my Italian pronunciation was far from being anything but embryonic and I was well aware that the Italian public demanded purity, clearness and accuracy in that respect. Sangiovanni was a very handsome man, with a fine presence and a large, expansive manner; in fact, so ornamental that when he came to my little room to give me lessons I looked upon him as a quite attractive and picturesque addition to my daily life. He would enter with a “Con permesso, signorina” (“with your premission”), admire his fine figure in my long glass, then seat himself at my piano and play my accompaniments in his masterly manner, cry out a few “Bravi’s,” and after hearing me sing through my part in some opera, reversing the order of his coming, would take himself away pouring out a volley of the conventional Italian compliments.
“Now this,” I said to myself, “Is all very find and delightful, but it isn’t good study. I am learning a number of operas and an enormous amount of new ‘cadence,’ but I must have a master who sees my faults, who is more severe with me. This dead level praise is very benumbing.” So with many expressions of regret I parted with Sangiovanni.
Some one told me of Corsi, another famous singer for whom Verdi wrote the part of Rigoletto in the opera of that name, and who subsequently became the head of the St. Petersburg conservatory. To Signor Corsi I directed my steps. Signor Sangiovanni had spoken English perfectly, but not a word of my mother tongue could Corsi utter or understand, so I took along with me to my lessons a fellow American who could speak Italian, as I had not fully mastered that tongue at the moment.
Corsi was fine, but he had two faults; he, too, was easily satisfied with me, and he could go to sleep at any and every moment. To have your teacher sound asleep when you were pouring out your voice with fervor, while your soul was standing on an pinnacle of musical ecstasy, was not to be though of, not to be endured for one moment, let along for a long hour’s lesson, and so Corsi and I, with compliments, reluctantly parted. My fellow pupil said: “You want some one to criticise you more severely? Well, go to Lamperti, he’ll do it; and he won’t fall asleep.” So, after a few weeks spent in mastering Italian that I might understand him fully, I went to Lamperti—and found he spoke the Milanese dialect. However, I hoped that the universal language of music would aid me.
I went to the shabby studio of the famous man, over a little café or wine shop, which filled the house with fumes of various brands of wine and beer. Added to this was the cigar smoke which came from the room adjoining the studio, used by one of Lamperti’s sons as a musical agency, and which was always crowded with men, every one of them was invariably smoking. You may imagine the atmosphere. The studio itself was astonishingly bare. The least pretentious music teachers in my own country would have scorned it in this day of studios overloaded with bric-a-brac and useless and trivial adornments. This one was furnished with a small grand piano of very poor, thin tone, whose case looked as if it had barely survived a shipwreck. There were moments when Lamperti, failing to make a pupil comprehend time and accent, would beat them out with his baton on the lid. Add to this the fact that nearly every pupil ordered some kind of mild refreshment from the wine shop below, and that all the glasses, in the absence of any table, were put on the piano, and one may easily see that the poor instrument could not keep up much of a pretention to original beauty and polish. On an old sofa sat Lamperti, baton in hand. He was a tall, bent old man, light complexioned, with fading sandy hair and whiskers, and pale blue eyes, and a large mouth with projecting teeth. He had absolutely no pretensions to any appearance of dignity of authority. His speaking voice was indistinct and misty, his singing voice a horror—but he seldom gave an example of it.
All the pupils who could crowd down beside him sat on the old sofa. The rest of us were ranged around the room on little chairs of very humble pattern. The master liked to have those pupils whose day it was to take a lesson spend the morning or afternoon doing so, calling us up in turn to sing about fifteen minutes at a time. This at first was disconcerting, but one quickly got used to it and found that as much was to be learned by hearing the others, if not more, than by having a lesson quite alone with the master. On the whole, I now think that it is the best way to study, although most students would object to it. In this manner I heard the lessons of many who have since became famous. One by one the master called us to him. The accompanist sat at the piano mechanically playing the necessary chords and talking volubly with some pupil beside her, while we stood before the old man, who sat in a huddled heap on the sofa, baton in hand, with which he sawed us up and down on the shoulders. Why he did this I never knew, unless it was to keep in our minds the legato style he so earnestly cultivated in us all. His great cry was “Breathe! always breathe;” and yet one of his greatest pupils at the time, Signora Waldmann, for whom Verdi wrote the part of “The Requiem,” was particularly faulty in this respect, which distressed Lamperti greatly, as he confessed to me. When we sang an aria about which the master was very particular, he himself played for us and then we fairly outdid ourselves. He was very painstaking and exigent. I remember one poor girl who sang nothing but the mad scene from “Lucia” for three eternal months. And to this day I can remember the various “cadenze” in a score of operas which I learned by just hearing pupils sing the same ones week after week until in his judgement they approached what he called “finish.”
All the pupils were making a serious study of music. None came simply to learn drawing room songs. All the work was big. Many were learning new operas between engagements. I remember well Signora Waldmann, of whom I spoke above. When she first appeared with her sister at the studio a poor, plain, awkward, shabbily-dressed girl, who possessed a glorious contralto voice, no one dreamed that within a few months on the stage at La Scala all Milan would shout “bravas” and wildly recall her again and again, or that she would be chosen by the great Verdi to create two of his noblest roles. Still less when she retired from the stage that that unusually disheveled head would wear the coronet of a duchess. That the silver-voiced and gentle Albani would eventually be the friend and favorite of the great Queen Victoria, she who sat with us on those humble and rickety chairs and took her lessons just as we did.
One episode which I will relate has lingered all these years in my memory. It was on a hot summer afternoon, when all the voices sounded unusually dull and uninteresting to me, the chatter of the pupils unbearable, and I was longing to get through my lessons and back to my cool, shady, pretty room. As usual, the piano was covered with an array of glasses, and now and then a man would come in from the agency in the next room, seize a glass, drink the contents and retire, letting in a confusion of voices and much smoke as he came and went. This man who I took to be the waiter from the café below, dressed simply and untidily in a rumpled shirt and trousers, and a yet more rumpled linen coat, “got my my nerves” with his fluttering to and fro, his coat-tails flying in the air, and I wished that he would finally clear the piano of its glasses and betake himself to the shop.
At last, Lamperti called me up to sing, and when I had finished he said: “Would you please put your head into the next room and call Campanini?”
I parted the curtains and shouted the name into the confusion and noise of the agency, and then seated myself to await my turn to conclude my lesson. The waiter entered. “Ah!” I said to myself, “this time he surely will clear off the glasses from the piano and carry them away. I hope he won’t return.” Judge to my surprise when I saw, instead, Lamperti, disentangling himself from his effusive pupils hanging around him, slowly arise and seating himself at the piano, began the prelude to the tenor aria from “Don Sebastian.” The “waiter” went over to the master’s side and sang that song with the divinest tenor voice I had ever head. Stong, brilliant, sympathetic, with that lovely Italian legato which is the distinguishing characteristic of that school.
Campanini was then at the zenith of his brilliant powers. The following season he made the greatest success any tenor had made, many said, since the days of the far-famed Rubini. And he poured out that glorious voice in that mean little room while our hearts shook with the beauty and splendor of it all. That poor, shabby, common-looking little man with the voice of an angel!
When he had finished and gone back to the agency the master called me again, but I could only shake my head, my throat was choked with unshed tears. Lamperti understood and gently dismissed me. I went out into the little street, passing under the shadow of the great cathedral to my quiet room, overwhelmed by what I had heard. Long, long that voice lingered in my memory, and not his least ardent admirer who welcomed him on the night of his first triumph at La Scala was his fellow-student at the great Lamperti’s.
—Edith Abell, “Lamperti,” The Musician, November, 1901, p 353-4; “Lamperti,” The Minneapolis Times, September 1901, p 18.
Addendum 5/6/2022
Since this post was published on May 3, 2022, I found the first published version which adds an additional three beginning paragraphs, this information confirming Lamperti received his vocal pedagogy from Trivulzi.
Who was Edith Abell? A contralto who sang soprano on occasion, wrote reviews for major newspapers, lived in Boston and Philadelphia, taught in Minneapolis for 15 years (where she had family), and returned to Boston where she died in 1926 at the age of 80. She also studied repertoire with Jenny Lind and was closely associated with Arthur Sullivan.
Memories of the Master
Are not easily found; this memory of Lamperti finding me while mining old music journals online. It makes me smile, reminding me of what I encountered as a graduate student while singing in Spoleto, Italy, the summer of 1985: the heat of hot pavement, cool water from an aqueduct, dining with friends, laughter, the sound of Italian being spoken at every turn, and enjoyable hours in rehearsal and performance. That I will be singing in Sicily this summer after a hiatus of three years with Serenades Choral Travel—founded by a friend who sang with me my first summer in Italy—only adds to the nostalgia. I cannot wait to return to the Land of Song.
Photo: Lamperti autograph, Shigo Voice Studio, private collection.
