Giuseppe De Luca

Giuseppe De Luca (Rome, 1876 – New York, 1950) was one of the most distinguished Italian baritones of the first half of the twentieth century. His career, which spanned some fifty years from his operatic debut, unfolded largely in the United States, although his training and his first successes came in Italy.

He studied singing for five years with Venceslao Persichini and made his debut in Piacenza in November 1897, singing Valentin in Faust. In 1902 he took part in the premiere of Cilea's Adriana Lecouvreur at the Teatro Lirico in Milan and, over the following two years, in the premieres of Giordano's Siberia and Puccini's Madama Butterfly at La Scala, the theatre where he remained for eight seasons. He then moved on to the Metropolitan Opera in New York, where he arrived in 1915 with Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia and stayed for twenty consecutive seasons, gradually taking on the leading roles in the Italian repertoire.

His voice did not match the power of close contemporaries such as Pasquale Amato or Titta Ruffo, but his technical mastery allowed him to retain his faculties almost intact into advanced age. He proved this in 1935, when, after twenty-five years' absence, he reappeared at Covent Garden as Figaro without any prior announcement. His farewell to the Metropolitan came in 1940 with Rigoletto, and on 7 November 1947, at the age of seventy and half a century after his debut, he gave his final recital in New York.

His numerous recordings, made over some forty-five years, are highly prized. The earliest, for Fonotipia, reveal the brilliance of his youth and his sense of humour, as in the comic duet from Don Pasquale with Corradetti; those he made for Victor between 1917 and 1930 are models of classical style and of the bel canto tradition. They are now reissued in a complete CD collection, as a memorial to an admired artist.