The Bel Canto Violin

The Life and Times of Alfredo Campoli, 1906-1991

David Tunley

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429758799
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

First published in 1999, this biography from David Tunley draws on newly researched documentary evidence to chart Campoli's early success and his later struggle for recognition as a serious artist. Campoli's early success and his later struggle for recognition as a serious artist. Campoli's career emerges as one particularly shaped and directed by the great economic and social forces of the first half of the century, and the story here is as much that of his times, as of his life.

Described by Szigeti as 'one of the last great individualists among violinists', Alfredo Campoli was a household name in the field of British light music prior to the Second World War. Having made his début at the Wigmore Hall in 1923 Campoli toured with Melba and Butt, then turned to light music during the Depression. He became one of Decca's early recording artists and broadcast frequently for the BBC with his light music ensembles and pursued a long, successful career as a distinguished international performer.

Chapter 1
'The Wonderful Boy Violinist'

It was perhaps to be expected that Alfredo Campoli would play the violin as if he were singing, for his mother used to say that he had taken part in several performances of Aida before he was even born. His personal appearance, so to speak, was on 20 October 1906 when Elvira Celi-Campoli, a rising opera-star, gave birth to her only child in Rome where she and her husband Romeo, a professional violinist, were then living at 14 Via Garibaldi. From infancy Alfredo was thus surrounded by music, particularly from opera, the style of which so influenced his playing that in later years he would say that the bow to a violinist was like the breath to a singer. For an example of the latter he had only to listen to his mother.

Elvira Cell's career, though short, was by no means undistinguished, and reviews of her performances suggested that it would be a brilliant one. Born in Rome on 20 July 1877, she had studied singing under the Roman teacher Giuseppe Gianoli, making her début in 1903 in Verdi's Il Trovatore at the Manzoni Opera House there, followed by appearances in the same composer's Emani, Attila and Gomez's Guarany.¹ She was then 26 and already in the ample mould of the classical prima donna in the days when a large body was considered essential for a large voice. That it was powerful, vibrant, incisive and put to fine dramatic account is confirmed by press reviews of her début and all her subsequent appearances. Yet it could also be sweet and clear, with a technique that so scorned (as one reviewer put it) the technical difficulties of the roles she played that the following year she was engaged to sing leading roles in Bellini's Norma, Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana and Donizetti's Poliuto at the Quirino Theatre. She gained glowing reviews for them all, leading to engagements in 1905 at the Adriano Theatre in the same city, singing some of the same operas. From Rome she went to Orvieto and Terni, and by 1908 was working in Milan.² The height of her career was reached at the end of that year with an invitation to join the Lambardi Grand Opera Company for a tour of the United States.

Mario Lambardi, a well-known Italian opera impresario whose company, first called the Milan Touring Opera, was active from the last years of the nineteenth century up to the First World War, mainly touring, the USA and South America. For his 1908/9 tour, which included Buenos Aires, San Francisco, San José, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, St Louis, Seattle, Tacoma, Denver, Memphis and Stockton, Lambardi surpassed all his previous tours in the quality and range of his productions that he had offered to his American audiences. The repertoire consisted of Tosca, Lucia di Lammermoor, Il Trovatore, Cavalleria Rusticana, Pagliacci, Carmen, La Traviata, Rigoletto, Faust, La Bohème, Aida, Il Barbiere di Siviglia and Un Ballo in Maschera. For this immense season Lambardi engaged sixteen leading singers of whom Elvira was prima donna. There were three conductors: Agide Jacchia, Edoardo Lebegott and Giovanni Baravelli. Baravelli, who had at one time been Chorus Master and Assistant Director to Toscanini at La Scala (by now at the Metropolitan in New York) was also in charge of training the chorus, while production was under the direction of Ricardo Petrovich and Lambardi. American audiences had good reason to look forward to what the publicity brochure described as the 'largest and most elaborated arranged [sic] circuit ever undertaken by any Grand Opera Company in America'.

The newly organised Lambardi Grand Opera Company this year is larger, better and stronger in celebrities than ever and the principals of the organisation are among the foremost singers of the present day and all have enviable records of European successes,

Impresario Lambardi has engaged many artists of high reputation especially for the minor roles, which will ensure a perfect cast for all Operas presented during the coming season.

This Magnificent Company of European Celebrities will be supported by a complete and thoroughly disciplined orchestra, and by forty young fresh-voiced Choristers selected from the leading Italian Opera Houses.

Realising the importance of improving the chorus, Impresario Lambardi spent the Summer in thoroughly reconstructing and disciplining his chorus and promises that this year you will see in that body, fine harmonisation and splendid technique and precision.

... In scenery and costumes the production will be new and up to date, as a revision and rebuilding of scenery has been made, with several complete new productions. New costumes have been imported for this tour and the presentations will be complete in every detail.

Despite the publicity, not all cities rose to the occasion and the company was sometimes greeted by small audiences. Yet the reviews were consistently enthusiastic and laudatory, not least about the company's prima donna. As there is no recording of her voice we must depend upon the critics' comments. In Buenos Aires she was extravagantly described as 'the equal of any dramatic soprano in the world'. In more detail one critic described her as having 'a brilliant soprano voice of great volume and flexibility, with admired pianissimo effects and artistic phrasing'. Yet, according to another, her voice also displayed some weaknesses, considering that it to be 'better in its upper and lower registers and in the former is beautifully sweet and clear. In common with a great many singers, she makes too much use of the tremolo for the best effect.' So, too, was there guarded comment on her physical appearance, as when she sang the role of Leonora in II Trovatore to which she was not suited because of what one critic tactfully described as her 'physical over-development'. Nevertheless, the overall impression from the reviews is that Elvira Campoli was an exceptionally fine singer, and that her career seemed assured.

During her absence of some six months, Romeo and little 'Alfredino' had kept in touch through letters, postcards and photographs, some of which have survived, as have some from Elvira, as well as souvenirs of the tour, including a vase from San Francisco - a relic of the great earthquake which had devastated the city only three years earlier. While Elvira was creating something of a sensation in many of the places where the Lambardi Company played, Romeo's career back in Italy was far less exciting, for if hers was on the operatic stage Romeo's was in the orchestral pit beneath it.

Romeo's career in Italy was centred largely at the Costanzi Theatre in Rome (now the Royal Opera House) and at La Scala. There is a photograph of the orchestra of the Costanzi Theatre taken about 1896 in which Romeo can be seen playing the violin and Arturo Toscanini the cello. Unfortunately, very little is known about his early life beyond that he was born in 1867 and studied with the great violinist and teacher Ettore Pinelli (1843-1915). Himself a student of Joachim, Pinelli passed that master's methods on to his own students. Together with the pianist Giovanni Sgambati he founded the Chamber Music Society of Rome, both men also alternating as Directors of the Royal Court Concerts. Some years later Pinelli founded and directed the Orchestral Society of Rome. The city was also indebted to Pinelli and Sgambati for founding a school in 1871 where children of poor families could learn violin and piano. It was eventually to become the Conservatorio of the Accademia Nazionale di S. Cecilia. It seems reasonable to assume that this was how Romeo may have got to study with one of the finest violin teachers in Rome at that time, and fortunate for his son that he could pass Pinelli's methods on to him. Indeed, Romeo was to be Alfredo's only teacher. As with Elvira, we know nothing of Romeo's family background and unusually for Italians - what family bonds there may once have been seem to have been lost sometime after the Campolis settled in England.

On her return from the United States, Elvira resumed her career in Italy gaining further success and critical acclaim. By the end of 1911 we find her singing the title-role in Aida at the Manzoni Theatre in Pistoia, near Florence, for which she received 'an indescribably enthusiastic ovation', as much for her robust voice as her dramatic characterisation. It seems to have been her last operatic triumph. According to family history, Elvira visited England, sending a message back to Romeo saying that she wanted to live there. By 1912 the Campoli family was settled in London.

There must have been good reasons for the move, but if Elvira had ambitions at Covent Garden these never materialised, for there is no record of her ever having sung there in any production - nor with any other English company. Possibly she may have appeared at some small event there, this in turn giving rise to Alfredo's belief that his mother had 'sung at Covent Garden'. But the true reason for the Campolis leaving Italy and living in England will probably never be known. If fact is stranger than fiction, one possibility is strange enough to be true - the weather. Elvira found the summer months in Rome unbearable, and, presumably, on a trip to England found the milder climate there much more to her liking.³ Whatever the reason, the reality was that they arrived in a country that two years later was to be dislocated by the outbreak of the First World War. It was not the best of times for newcomers who spoke no English to find musical employment there.

Elvira 's first engagement in London that can be definitely dated was at a Dinner Concert at the Hotel Cecil on 30 June 1912. Like many of the leading hotels in those days, its restaurant featured light orchestral music at lunch and tea and a more substantial programme at dinner. It was a tradition that Alfredo was to take full advantage of in the 1930s. For her contribution to the programme that evening Signora Elvira Campoli (as she was billed) sang Santazza's song from Cavalleria Rusticana, Tosti's La Serenata and Gianelli's Sulla Laguna accompanied at the piano by Mr P. Mavon-Ibbs. Her associate artists were Mr George Baker (baritone), and the conductor of the salon orchestra, Professor Candía.⁴

As an opera singer her career thus seems to have faded in England and her name features in none of the scholarly biographical sources, wiped from the records save those of the contemporary press. It would seem that her activities in the country where she chose to live became largely devoted to the careers of her husband and gifted son.

Romeo's first engagement in England that can be accurately dated was as a conductor of a Ladies' Orchestra at a silent movie theatre in Coventry in 1916. The Campolis had, in fact, arrived in Britain at a time when the silent movies were offering employment to the ever-growing ranks of musicians there on a scale unimagined before the advent of this revolutionary form of entertainment. For two decades up until the appearance of the 'talkies', silent movie theatres offered employment to more musicians than did any other industry, and to a total audience larger than had ever been imagined by those whose only appearances were on the concert or opera stage. Writing at the end of that period the well-known music-critic and writer Edwin Evans was to claim in Music & Letters

It is estimated, on the basis of union statistics, that picture theatres, great and small, are now providing between three-quarters and four-fifths of the paid musical employment in the country. It is further estimated, though on data less subject to verification, that the cinema is the sole, or at any rate the chief, avenue by which music reaches three-quarters of the potential audience in the population. For about fifty-nine hours weekly, music is being performed in upwards of three thousand cinemas, and for shorter periods in perhaps a thousand isolated halls. Setting aside all aesthetic considerations in favour of a purely objective view, one may say that the cinema is at present the most important musical institution in the country.⁵

A similar view about its musical importance had been expressed two years earlier in the short-lived magazine The Music Box, which claimed that the cinema provided 'the best medium through which the British public as a whole can be educated to a higher musical sense'.⁶

Cyril Ehrlich has quantified Evans' generalisations about employment as the equivalent of some 16,000 full-time jobs, which, in terms of the number of performers would take the figure to at least 20,000.' And, of course, for the music industry at large the cinema spawned more than just jobs for orchestral players, pianists and theatre organists. For example, a silent film of an hour or an hour-and-a half would usually need some hundred musical extracts to fit the changing moods and action on the screen. Accordingly, musicians were needed to arrange countless classical and light-music pieces, from which snippets could be taken at the performance. Similarly, there was often a call for 'original' pieces of music The Music Box, noting in 1927 how the standard of music in the cinemas had improved greatly over the years, also pointed to the opportunities opened up by the silent films to composers of all nationalities, observing sadly that few British composers were taking advantage of such opportunities, leaving these to foreign musicians.⁸

Arrangements of music also needed to be published, and collections suitable for playing with the silent movies were built up by musical directors, theatre owners and sometimes by public libraries.⁹ Such a collection was the Lyra Edition of Orchestral Music for Cinema, Cafe, Hotel and Restaurant, comprising movements from the works of Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Rubinstein, Poldini and others, 'suitable for any number of performers, from three or four upwards'. For keyboard players a useful collection was Emo Rapée's Motion Picture Moods for Pianists and Organists, published in the USA by Schirmer in 1924, featuring nearly 400 pieces mostly written by the classical masters. In this monumental collection Rapée describes how in the larger silent movie houses in the USA some half a dozen or so musical experts under a Music Director worked hard to find the music to fit the action on the screen for each movie and get it ready for the orchestra to rehearse. (Hence his collection to make it easier for the single individual at the piano or organ to find the right pieces for 'th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword by Sir Charles Mackerras
• Introduction
• 1 'The Wonderful Boy Violinist'
• 2 'Alfredo Campoli and his Salon Orchestra'
• 3 The War: Conflicts and Crises
• 4 The War: Crises and Resolutions
• 5 Campoli, Concert Artist
• 6 First International Tour: Australia and New Zealand
• 7 Campoli, International Artist
• 8 'At Home'
• Bibliography
• Index