Fernando de Lucia - Mattinata (Leoncavallo)

[31operafan]

Cool! :) This wasn't long after Caruso's version. (Ironically, this song was written for Caruso.)

[svjatazarov]

ЯРКО ВЫРАЖЕННАЯ ШКОЛА НА У, ДАЖ СЛЫШНО КАК НЕКОТОРЫЕ ГЛАСНЫЕ УТРИРОВАННО ЗАМЕНЯЕТ НА У......

[abracadabranque]

Un temps où les ténors sonnaient comme nos barytons actuels,la puissance en plus!

[lodiopera]

salve, se non sbaglio il disco e stato suonato a una velocita superiore ,io ho il disco fonotipia e la sua voce e piu cupa , e scura, quindi questo documento e falsato , questa non e la vera voce di de lucia , mi scuso per la precisione

[AulicExclusiva]

It was the legendary tenor Giovanni Battista Rubini (1794-1854) who made the quick tremolo fashionable. It is thus properly called a "Rubini tremolo". There is another devise named after him: the "Rubini sob", a quick aspirate added to the line, usually after a turn (gruppetto).

[meltzerboy]

Yes, which then became the "Caruso sob" followed, in turn, by the "Gigli sob." But it was Rubini who started both traditions, for better or worse.

[AulicExclusiva]

Gigli's sob was a "catch" which helped him find the head register—it is perfectly exemplified in the way he catapults the High C in his Di quella pira record.

The Rubini Sob is an ornament. It is almost invariably used in the final "turn" of the aria Donna non vidi mai, when 'deh non cessar' becomes 'deh no-Hon cessar'. Caruso uses it there and in Parmi veder le lagrime, in the phrase "farti quaggiù beata", where in the high note in giu he breaks the u and sings giu-hu.

[meltzerboy]

Gigli could have transitioned to head register without that "catch," I assume; it just made it easier for him. Would you say that both the Rubini and Caruso ornamental sob (and Gigli's sob) became what one might call a mannerism? It seems to me Caruso uses it more frequently than other tenors of his time, just as Bonci, Anselmi, et al use accacciatura quite freely. Maybe that's what Pons was going for--an array of ornamental aspirates!

[AulicExclusiva]

Gigli uses the catch for drama. Of course he could sing high notes without it. He just liked the impression that the high note was wrung from him by sheer passion.

I like the way Caruso executes the Rubini sob cleanly and elegantly. In later stages tenors would turn it into a loud sigh (Giacomo Lauri Volpi) or a pained shudder (Aureliano Pertile).

[meltzerboy]

There does seem to be a progression in the use--or rather, abuse--of the sob, from Caruso to Lauri-Volpi to Pertile. Still, even Pertile gets away with all the shuddering and quivering, disrupting the legato musical line, and his occasionally unpleasant tone, which speaks to the strength of his singing apart from these aberrations.

[otterhouse]

Very nice how he "colours" his voice.

Thanks again for transferring and uploading this stuff...

By the way, do you know "truesoundtransfers" from christian Zwarg? Of not, google it out...

Greetings,

Rolf, Netherlands,

@otterhouse on Twitter

[goldenageofsong]

Chris has been a friend for more than a decade, and some of the discs he made transfers for his CDs from are actually mine ...

But I, too, would advise anybody interested in early sound recordings to check out his company - he has excellent stuff, including lots and lots of incredibly rare stuff, and his transfers are absolutely first class (which means usually better than mine ...)

[Turee85]

Viva la scuola antica Italiana, Viva il belcanto!

[chastenor]

Interesting: 'almost goat-like'. My understanding of the older bel canto tradition is that a wide vibrato was a deliberate technique. Early reviews of Caruso praise him because he does NOT sing like a goat, suggesting that this was something new. So perhaps the old higher speeds of De Lucia records were correct. After all, they were presumably reproduced by people who had heard him sing. I have done some reading today, there is no suggestion anywhere that De Lucia had a magnificent voice.

[goldenageofsong]

There is a certain style of artificial vibrato of old-style singers; you can hear that in the recordings of many pre-verismo singers - Giuseppe Kaschmann is an extreme example. If you speed such discs up, at a certain point this becomes cartoonish. But, as I think you'll agree, it's not possible to really know what he sounded like, for I don't think a modern transfer of his voice was ever made by an engineer who actually head him - his last performance out of Naples was in 1916, after all.

[goldenageofsong]

"Serious" engineering (by which I mean not just transfering a disc with the standard 78 rpm, but actually looking in the score) was very unusual prior to the late 1970s, so I guess that most, if not all of those engineers weren't even born when de Lucia made his last appearances. The bright side of this is that we can all decide for ourselves how it sounds best and adjust our turntables accordingly ...

[chastenor]

Magnificent singing, wonderful voice, but surely at the wrong speed? Sounds much too slow to me.

[goldenageofsong]

I made the transfer at 79.75 rpm: then the key is E flat, which is a semitone lower than the original key (quite a minor transposition for de Lucia, who sometimes transposed music down by as much as a third!). The original key required playback of the disc at about 84.5 rpm, which is not that common even for early "78s" (and very unlikely for a 1911 Fonotipia). But as noone of us heard him live, we cannot be sure what his voice sounded like, and this is indeed much slower than Caruso, so ... ?

[goldenageofsong]

By the way (off topic): Why isn't it possible to correct a few typos after one posted a reply to a comment? Quite embarassing sometimes!

[chastenor]

Thank you for posting this. I apologise if my comment implied any criticism of you, that certainly wasn't my intention. Have you heard this played at the higher speed? Thank you by the way for giving us access to records like this, I had heard De Lucia before but never as clearly as here, the voice was a total revelation.

[goldenageofsong]

At first I tried it in the original key, but (although of course the voice sounded more brilliant) the vowels sounded unnaturally bright to my ears. The trouble with de Lucia's records is that if you play them in the original keys (the way they were transferred even by the bigger companies for decades) you just sit and wonder how somebody with an almost goat-like voice could ever become so famous. That was one of the reasons I started to collect the original discs.

[meltzerboy]

De Lucia generally has an original perspective on many of these Italian songs, very different from that of Caruso, Gigli, etc. Insofar as his excessive vibrato is concerned, opera goers who heard him in person reported that there was no obtrusive vibrato or "bleat" in his voice. So perhaps the early issues of his recordings at the wrong speed accentuated the vibrato. Be that as it may, my own feeling about De Lucia is that his tone is not as luscious as Caruso's, but his singing is wonderful.

[CurzonRoad]

Many thanks to goldenageofsong, and to meltzerboy for sending my way! Cheers, etc. Doug --

[crimsontoxic]

Accurate description of the "vibrato-problem". It has definitely something to do with the "wrong speed".

[svjatazarov]

ярко выраженная школа на У, так как слышно, что он умышленно некоторые гласные произведения в переходных нотах заменяет на гласную У! шикарный певец!