Cesare Valletti – Italian Operatic Tenor

Born: December 18, 1922
Died: Rome – May 13, 2000
Italian Tenor.

Earlier in our survey, I mentioned the group of young Italian tenors that appeared immediately after the end of the Second World War.
They were to be found mostly in complete recordings of the more popular operas that appeared during this period.

The four who established international careers, Taldivini, Delmonaco, Corelli and Di Stefano, have already been heard. But I’d like to include two representatives from the rest of the pack, to speak.
A lyric tenor and a spinto, who were perhaps a little more celebrated and certainly more recorded than the rest.

The lyric tenor was Cesare Valetti, born in Rome on 18 December 1922. After studying privately, he made his debut at Bari in 1947 as Alfredo in La Traviata.
Before long he was singing all over Italy.
In 1950 he took part in the famous revival of Rossini’s The Tuck in Rome with the callus Unstable. That autumn he sang Fenton and Falstaff with the Scala Company at Covent Garden. During the next few seasons he sang regularly at La Scala in such operas as Elisier de More, the Babro of Seville, the Italian in Algiers and other Tenori di Grazia roles.

In 1953, he made his American debut at San Francisco as Verta and from 1953 to 1962 sang regularly at Metropolitans, where he was especially admired as Don Ottavio in Don Giovanni, a role he also sang at the Salzburg Festival, De Grue in Mano, Ferrando in Cosi Venturi and Ernesto in Don Pesquale.

Valetti returned to Covent Garden in 1953 to sing in Traviata opposite Calas. After leaving the Met in 1962, he devoted most of his time to concerts, although in 1968 he sang Nero in Monteverde’s “The Coronation of Poppaea” at the Caramouil Festival in New York.
He was a noted concert artist and an unusual feature for an Italian tenor was his mastery of French songs.

We hear him now in extracts from Rossini’s operas, from the Italian girl in Algiers, the lovely Languir per una bella..

and then C. Ilmiel Nomen….

….and Numero Quintitiu, both from the Barber of Seville. The baritone is Robert Merrill.