Karajan artists: Tito Gobbi – the incomparable Falstaff

Recalling the great Italian singers Karajan worked with during the 1950s – del Monaco, di Stefano, Taddei, Panerai, Tebaldi, Simionato – there is one name that mustn’t be left out: Tito Gobbi. Although he only made a single complete opera recording with Karajan it was a significant one. The “Falstaff” with Gobbi in the title role has been praised up to today as one of Karajan’s finest recordings of that period with the Philharmonia Orchestra. When they met up in the studio in 1956, they had never collaborated for the stage but the year before, there had been a “warm up” with two excerpts from “Figaro” and “Don Giovanni” (with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf as Zerlina!) in London. Karajan recalled in 1989:

“Gobbi had sung Falstaff on many occasions. I remember him telling me how over the years it was a role which he had been able to approach from many different standpoints.”

In an interview Tito Gobbi said he was studying Elizabethan theatre before singing a single note. Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, who was Alice Ford, told Karajan’s biographer Richard Osborne “how assiduously Karajan and Gobbi worked on the comedy, on the score’s myriad half-lights. […] It was all done through the music.”

In 1957 and 1958, Gobbi performed Falstaff under Karajan’s baton at three different opera houses – the Salzburg Festival, La Scala and the Vienna State Opera – 17 times altogether. During this period, he also appeared at the State Opera in that part he embodied almost a thousand times in his career. Gobbi’s Scarpia in “Tosca” became immortal in combination with Maria Callas in the title role, mainly due to the recording with de Sabata, which Karajan admired a lot. The Vienna premiere on 3 April 1958 featured Callas’ “opponent” Renata Tebaldi and Carlos Guichandut as Cavaradossi (the production staged by Margarethe Wallmann has never been out of the repertoire and was presented for the 652^nd time on 26 April 2024).

Six days later, the three of them performed “Otello” with Karajan and then once again in the following year. Gobbi’s fourth collaboration with Karajan was Amonasro in “Aida”. It was their last joint performance on 10 May 1962.

—  P.R. Jenkins