Biography (read more)
Tito Gobbi was born on 24 October 1913 in Bassano del Grappa in the Veneto and initially studied law in Padua before turning to singing. He trained in Rome with the tenor Giulio Crimi and made his stage debut in the mid-1930s, joining La Scala in Milan during the following decade. From the late 1940s he built an international career at Covent Garden, the Metropolitan Opera, the Lyric Opera of Chicago and San Francisco Opera. He died in Rome on 5 March 1984.
Gobbi sang around a hundred roles and is remembered above all as a singing actor of exceptional dramatic detail rather than as a purely vocal phenomenon. His Scarpia in Tosca, which he performed many hundreds of times, and his Verdi roles including Iago, Rigoletto, Falstaff and Simon Boccanegra are regarded as benchmarks. His partnership with Maria Callas produced the 1953 EMI Tosca under Victor de Sabata and the celebrated Covent Garden staging of 1964, among the most discussed collaborations in opera. He also appeared in some two dozen films and worked as an opera stage director in his later years.
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