In this Issue – Forgotten Opera Greats

IN THIS ISSUE
April 2025

When admiring a great voice from the past, you may wonder how this artist could ever have fallen into obscurity. You might just chalk it up to the passage of time. But invisibility hasn’t been the fate of the few singers who are still celebrated. When you look closer, there are other reasons why once-renowned greats have faded from view.

Have You Ever Heard Of …

Relatively few opera singers achieve a level of international fame that renders their names immediately recognizable. The assumption that it must be because their singing was somehow lacking would, in many cases, be mistaken. Political events can isolate promising singers from international stages. The failure to land a major recording contract can drastically limit an artist’s audience. Sometimes a singer just slips into oblivion with the passing of decades. There are various reasons why a singer may be unfamiliar, and possibly completely unknown, to the opera lover of today.

Virginia Zeani

Born 1925, Solovăstru, Romania

Died 2023, West Palm Beach, FL

If you were told that there was a very successful operatic soprano who sang Violetta in Verdi’s La Traviata 648 times in her 34-year career, yet you had never heard of her, would you want to know more? This was the case with Virginia Zeani.

Born in a Transylvanian village in Romania, Zeani studied with the famous Italian tenor Aureliano Pertile and made her debut in 1948 as Violetta at the Teatro Duse in Bologna.

She made her Florence debut in 1952, replacing Maria Callas in Bellini’s I Puritani, and there she met basso Nicola Rossi-Lemeni, who would become her husband and frequent colleague on the operatic stage.

In 1957 Zeani created the role of Blanche in Francis Poulenc’s The Dialogues of the Carmelites in its world première at La Scala. It was performed in an Italian translation from the French, as Poulenc wanted his opera performed in the vernacular of his audiences. From 1970, Zeani sang heavier roles such as Aida, Tosca, Manon Lescaut, Elsa, and Senta.

She retired from the operatic stage in 1980 and taught at Indiana University until 2004, coming out of retirement in 1982 to sing the role of Mother Marie in Poulenc’s opera at the San Francisco Opera. Among her students were Vivica Genaux, Sylvia McNair, Elizabeth Futral, and Ailyn Perez.

Whatever Happened to …

Some singers burst upon the opera scene, amazed audiences, and then suddenly vanished. Whatever happened to them? Singers in this category include soprano Anita Cerquetti, who enjoyed a meteoric rise in the 1950s only to retire at age 30, never to be heard again on the world’s stages. Gino Penno, another gifted singer from the 1950s, quickly achieved fame as a dramatic tenor, portraying Siegfried and Lohengrin as well as partnering with Maria Callas in Norma, Il Trovatore, and Medea. But by the late 1950s, he, too, had vanished.

Gino Penno

Born 1920, Felizzano, Italy

Died 1998, Milan, Italy

Gino Penno sang his first leading operatic role (Floreski in Cherubini’s Lodoiska) in 1950. His first international appearance took place at the Paris Opera in 1951. He sang with all of the operatic stars of the 1950s but vanished from the world’s opera stages before the end of the decade! What happened to him is unknown, although speculations have surfaced: he lost his voice, or encountered health problems, or just chose to change careers and become a lawyer.

Penno’s voice was said to have been the most enormous dramatic tenor on the world’s operatic stages, and that during the prime of Mario Del Monaco and Franco Corelli, and while a legend such as Giacomo Lauri-Volpi was still performing.

Like all very large voices, his did not record particularly well, with his huge, brilliant high notes sometimes overloading the sound equipment of the day. However, what is evident from his few recordings are admirable musicianship, stentorian production, expressive use of piano, and subtle vocal modulation, always in service to the text.

Listen to Penno in one of his few commercial studio recordings (1953), that of Verdi’s “Sento avvampar nell’anima” from Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra.

Penno was featured in a few radio broadcasts from RAI, including an excellent Lohengrin, sung in Italian in 1954 with Tebaldi, which is sometimes available on the Hardy Classic CD label. Other than that, his extant performances are available as pirated recordings, that is, live performances recorded in the house, with variable sound quality.

Here, in good sound quality, he sings “Meco all’altar di Venere” from Bellini’s Norma, in a production at the Metropolitan Opera in 1954. Even the Met’s microphones seemed pushed to their limit by the volumes of sound Penno was producing!

At the Met two years later, he lost his voice during a performance of Verdi’s Il Trovatore. He sang one more performance later that season, and that was the end of Penno’s career at the Met.

Let’s close out this post with Gino Penno singing “Come rugiada al cespite” from Verdi’s Ernani in 1950, when he was at the beginning of his career and his voice was at its freshest.

Dubious Past Connections

Singers associated with abhorrent regimes fall into this category, including a large contingent of Nazi-endorsed artists. A case in point is Germaine Lubin, the first French dramatic soprano to sing Isolde at Bayreuth in 1939. After the French Liberation in 1944, she was arrested and imprisoned as a Nazi collaborator, a development that obscured her considerable operatic achievements. Other such singers include heldentenor Max Lorenz and lyric baritone Heinrich Schlusnus.

Margarete Klose

Born 1902, Berlin, Germany

Died 1968, Berlin, Germany

Some opera lovers will not listen to singers who chose to remain and perform in Germany during the Third Reich and World War II, assuming they were all Nazis, sympathizers, and/or antisemites. This is unfortunate, since that assumption is not true in many cases. In other instances, insufficient or no information is available. Such is the situation with the great dramatic contralto/mezzo-soprano Margarete Klose.

After her debut in a Kálmán operetta in 1926, Klose next sang Azucena in Verdi’s Il Trovatore.

She joined the Mannheim National Theater in 1929 and was associated with the Berlin State Opera from 1932 to 1949, and again from 1955 to 1961.

Klose’s magisterial contralto/mezzo soprano made her an ideal performer in the dramatic works of Wagner and Strauss, and she performed at the Bayreuth Festival every summer from 1936 to 1942. Here she sings Ortrud’s great scene in Wagner’s Lohengrin, “Entweihte Götter,” rising into dramatic soprano territory to high B-flat. Maud Cunitz is her Elsa (1953)

Klose’s voice was large, noble, and opulent with a deep, rich lower register and an upper register of penetrating power. Here is one of the rare performances in which she sings “O don fatale” from Verdi’s Don Carlo in the original Italian, not a German translation.

In 1961, Klose retired from the stage and turned to teaching until her sudden death in 1968 at age 66.

Check out more great singers on our Archives page!