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Beniamino Gigli

Italian postcard. Novo Film.

Beniamino Gigli (1890-1957) was one of the most famous Italian opera singers, internationally respected for the beauty of his voice and his vocal technique. Between 1935 and 1950 he also starred in various Italian fiction films.

Beniamino Gigli was born in 1890 in Recanati, in the province of the Marche (Central Italy), as the son of an opera loving shoemaker. In 1914 he won first prize in an international singing contest in Parma and later that year he debuted at the opera of Rovigo. Soon his star rose, thanks to his part in Mefistofele: Palermo (1915), Naples (1915), Rome (1916), Milan (1918) and finally New York (1920) fell for him. After the death of the famous opera tenor Enrico Caruso in 1921, Gigli became even more famous, often nicknamed Caruso Secondo, even of his voice was much sweeter than the dark, heroic voice of Caruso. At the Met Gigli got competition from Giovanni Martinelli and Giacomo Lauri-Volpi. In 1932 Gigli left the Met when the management dropped him, so he went back to Europe where he started to perform in films from 1935 on, even if he never became a good actor and by then was not in his prime anymore either. Still, his films were cherished by audiences in Europe. Often the storylines doubled the plots of the operas in which Gigli's character sang in real life as well. Alongside Gigli made many records, not only of his opera songs, but also of the same popular songs he sang in his films, thus gaining double. After the war, from 1946 on, Gigli started his opera performances again and even did a big tournee in the early 1950s, but because of his deteriorating health he had to quit first the operas and in the end his solo performances as well.

Gigli's first film was Non ti scordar di me!/Vergiss mein nicht (1935), directed by Augusto Genina in a Berlin studio. In the film the female lead was played by Magda Schneider and the script was done by her husband Ernst Marischka. Because of Gigli's heavy accent, Genina had provided a script about an Italian opera singer (Gigli) who meets a young German teacher (Schneider) who is still troubled over a lost romance and is struck when Gigli starts to sing ''Non ti scordar di me' (written by Ernesto De Curtis for the film). They meet and she learns him German, so he can sing in that language as well. Genina was worried about Gigli's rotund physique as well, regarded unfit to represent a romantic lover, but when the film came out women loved him altogether. So several follow ups to Non ti scordar di me followed. First of all, this was Forget me not (1936), a British version of the same film, in which Schneider's part was played by Joan Gardner and the script was by Hugh Gray and Arthur Wimperis.

In addition, Gigli played and sang in first a series of enteratinment films shot in Germany, directed by former Weimar cinema actor Johannes Riemann and the former theatre innovator Karlheinz Martin: Ave Maria (Riemann 1936) with Käthe von Nägy, who plays a golddigger who falls for the tenor's wealth, but in the end falls for himself; Du bist mein Glück (Martin 1936) with Isa Miranda in a double role and partly shot in Genoa, Liguria; and Die Stimme des Herzens (Martin 1936/1937) with Geraldine Katt and Ferdinan Marian. Gigli then turned to Rome to play in films shot at the Cinecittà studios, first the multilingual Solo per te/Mutter lied, by Carmine Gallone, co-starring Maria Cebotari as the singer's unfaithful wife and Peter Bosse as their son - Bosse had already played the singer's son in Vergiss mein nicht as well. After a small part as a tenor in the historical film Giuseppe Verdi (1938), also directed by Carmine Gallone, Gigli starred again in Gallone's Dir gehört mein Herz (1938), which had an almost exclusively German cast including Carla Rust, Lucie Englisch and Paul Kemp, but was again shot at Cinecittà. After a part in the German short Der Trichter Nr. II (1939), Gigli continued at Cinecittà with leading parts in Marionette (Gallone 1939) with again Rust, Englisch and Kemp; and Der singende Tor (Johannes Meyer 1939) with Kirsten Heiberg; the latter was also released in Italian as Casa lontana.

In 1940 Gigli played in the multilingual Ritorno/Traummusik, both versions by Geza von Bolvary; followed by Mamma (Guido Brignone 1941) in which Gigli sang the song which forever stuck to him: ' Mamma'; and Vertigine/Tragödie einer Liebe (Brignone 1941) with Emma Gramatica and Camilla Horn. In 1943 Gigli's gave his last film performances of the war years. First in the multilingual I Pagliacci/Lache, Bajazzo (1943), with Paul Hörbiger and Dagny Servaes acting in both versions, while the female lead was played by Alida Valli in the Italian version and by Claude Farell in the German version. Director of the Italian version was Giuseppe Fatigati, while Leopold Hainisch did the German version. The second film of 1943 was Silenzio, si gira! (Carlo Campogalliani), which mingled opera and cinema world and in which Gigli had a double role as an opera singer and his stealing stand in. In the postwar era Gigli played in Voglio bene soltanto a te (Giuseppe Fatigati 1946), and Una voce nel tuo cuore/A Voice in Your Heart (Alberto d'Alversa 1949) which starred Vittorio Gassmann. Gigli had his last lead in Taxi di notte (Gallone 1950), a comedy about a singing taxi driver who finds a baby but not its mother. Gigli's last performance was a small part in Puccini (Gallone 1953), a biopic on the famous composer; Gigli played an opera singer, of course.

Beniamino Gigli died in Rome in 1957, because of a heart attack, caused by either pulmonitis (WIkipedia) or diabetes (Steffi Kleine).

Sources: Italian/ English/ German/ Dutch Wikipedia, www.filmportal.de, IMDB, www.steffi-line.de/archiv_text/nost_buehne2/03st_gigli.htm

If you'd like to hear Gigli sing to his 'mamma', here it is: www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHqP5FFoyf0&feature=related and here he sings Vesti la giubba from I pagliacci while Paul Hörbiger is hearthbroken, watching the stage: www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ou-32eeklM

Taken on: January 31, 2011

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Sets appears in: • Italian film stars of the 1930 and 1940s • Opera stars

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