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Luigi Lablache
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Luigi Lablache (6 December 1794 - 23 January 1858) was an Italian bass singer of French and Irish heritage, born in Naples. He was most noted for his comic performances, with a powerful bass voice, a wide range, and adept acting: Leporello in Don Giovanni was one of his signature roles.
Lablache studied initially at Naples, and had a professional career as a boy alto before he became a bass.
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Encyclopedia
Luigi Lablache (6 December 1794 - 23 January 1858) was an Italian bass singer of French and Irish heritage, born in Naples. He was most noted for his comic performances, with a powerful bass voice, a wide range, and adept acting: Leporello in Don Giovanni was one of his signature roles.
Lablache studied initially at Naples, and had a professional career as a boy alto before he became a bass. He sang in 1809 in a Requiem commemorating Haydn's death.
On 15 August 1821 he made his debut at La Scala as Dandini in La Cenerentola.
He sang Mozart's Requiem at both Beethoven's (1827) and Chopin's (1849) funerals and was the soloist, singing a Lachrymosa, at Bellini's funeral in 1835.
He appeared in the title role of the premiere of Don Pasquale in 1843.
He taught voice to Princess, later Queen, Victoria of the United Kingdom.
The actor Stewart Granger was his great-great-grandson.
Biography
The son of Nicholas Lablache, a merchant from Marseilles, by an Irish lady, he was educated from 1806 at the Conservatorio della Pietà de' Turchini, where Gentili taught him the elements of music, and Valesi instructed him in singing, while at the same time he studied the violin and violoncello. His voice was a beautiful contralto, and just before it broke he sang the solos in the requiem of Mozart on the death of Haydn in 1809.
Before long he became possessed of a magnificent bass, which gradually increased in volume until at the age of twenty it attained a compass of two octaves from E flat below to E flat above the bass stave. In 1812, when only eighteen, he was engaged at the San Carlo Theatre, Naples, and appeared in La Molinara of Valentino Fioravanti. In 1817, at La Scala in Milan, he took the part of Dandini in La Cenerentola. The opera Elisa e Claudio was written for him in 1821 by Saverio Mercadante and his position was assured. His reputation spread throughout Europe.
From Milan he went to Turin, returned to Milan in 1822, then appeared at Venice, and in 1824 at Vienna. Going back to Naples after an absence of twelve years, he created a great sensation as Assur in Rossini's Semiramide. On 30 March 1830, under Ebers's management, he was first heard in London as Geronimo in Il Matrimonio Segreto and thenceforth appeared there annually, also singing in many provincial festivals. His success in England was assured from the first.
His voice was at all times extraordinarily powerful, but he could produce comic, humorous, tender, or sorrowful effects with equal ease and mastery. As an actor he excelled equally in comic and tragic parts. His chief rôles were Leporello (his greatest part), Geronimo the Podestà in La gazza ladra, Dandini in La Prova d' un' Opera Seria Henry VIII in Anna Bolena the Doge in Marino Faliero, and Oroveso in Norma. Towards the close of his career he played two new characters of quite different types with great success, Shakespeare's Caliban and Gritzenko, the Kalmuck, in Scribe's L'Etoile du Nord. At the funeral of Beethoven in 1827 he was one of the thirty-two torchbearers who surrounded the coffin. He taught singing to Queen Victoria. Franz Schubert wrote a cycle of three songs in Italian for Lablache, marvellous exercises in Rossinian pastiche; they are among the last songs he ever wrote.
Having married the singer Teresa Pinotti in 1813, they had thirteen children, several of them, notably Frederick Lablache, likewise were singers. His eldest daughter, Francesca (Cecchina), married the pianist Sigismond Thalberg in 1843, and his younger daughter, Therese, married the opera singer Hans von Rokitansky. He died at Naples on 23 January 1858, and was buried at Maison-Lafitte, Paris.
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