L’usignolo Fiorentino Luisa Tetrazzini

 

Her sister Eva, who was nine years older than Luisa, was the first to become a professional musician. She was a rising star who was much in demand in Italy’s opera community, making her operatic debut in 1882 at the Teatro Nicolini in Florence. While Eva was performing professionally, young Luisa spent much of her time studying to fol-low in her footsteps.

 

In her autobiography My Life of Song, she tells the story of receiving a parcel that was addressed to her older sister Eva. The parcel contained a part of the score from Giuseppe Verdi’s new opera Otello. Eva’s friend, an assistant to Verdi, sent it to Eva so that she could study the role of Desdemona, giving her a leg up on any others who would audition for the part.

 

Luisa—wanting to please her maestro at the music conservatory where she was studying—thought it would be a good idea to give him a peek of the yet-unpublished Verdi piece. The maestro was amazed by what he saw, and took it into a practice room where he began to play the music. Luisa began to sing the part of Desdemona, softly at first. Before long, she was singing so powerfully that she could be heard down the hall. A small crowd began pounding on the door, wanting to know what this incredible music was. Before opening the door, the maestro hid the music and claimed to be improvising with the young student.

 

As Luisa became more adept at opera, the coloratura soprano began to work opera houses from Florence to Rome, but decided to try her luck in South America where she felt her talents would be better appreciated and her fortunes increased. She boarded a ship from Genoa to Buenos Aires, and soon found South America to her liking.

 

Following the Risorgimento in Italy, a large number of Italian emigrants ended up there. They were, of course, opera fans, and Luisa gave them exactly what they wanted, while they gave her the recognition and acclaim that she sought.

 

The diva toured extensively in South America, and was not the least bit afraid to go off the beaten path to bring her talents to some of the most out of the way places. At one point, she even visited the small town of Tucumán, where the inhabitants asked her to sing a benefit concert to help raise money to build a wall around their cemetery. It seems that the hyenas were desecrating the graves. She consented to hold a benefit concert, but there was no concert hall. So the citizens built a theater for Tetrazzini’s performance—in just five days.

 

In 1903, Tetrazzini made her debut in Lucia di Lammermoor at the Teatro Arbeu in Mexico City, which was then the largest capital in the world. She would stay in Mexico City for a time, but the opera house was less than stellar, the sets were cheap and tacky, and the orchestra was considered to be second-rate at best. The only things going for it were the conductor, Giorgio Polacco, and Tetrazzini herself.

 

Meantime, back in San Francisco, Joseph Kreling was operating the Tivoli Opera House, which he had established in 1875. He also owned a furniture store where he employed a man by the name of William H. Leahy, known to his friends as “Doc” Leahy. When Leahy married Kreling’s daughter in 1893, Kreling made him manager of the Tivoli Opera House. Leahy had a keen ear for operatic talent, and soon became one of the most suc-cessful impresarios on the West Coast.

 

By 1904, Leahy was so overworked, his doctor told him to take a vacation before he collapsed from the pressure. His good friend Ettore Patrizi, publisher of the Italian daily newspaper L’Italia urged him to join him for a vacation to Mexico City. It was there that Patrizi introduced Leahy to his friend Giorgio Polacco, the conductor at the Teatro Arbeu.

 

After exchanging pleasantries, Polacco apologized that he had to leave as he had to conduct a matinee performance at the opera house. He invited Patrizi and Leahy to attend, warning them that it would be a mediocre performance at a mediocre venue, but that it did feature a rotund coloratura soprano, who seemed to be making a very good impres-sion on the audiences.

 

Patrizi and Leahy took Polacco up on his offer and attended the matinee performance of Lucia di Lammermoor. Upon hearing Luisa Tetrazzini, Leahy turned to Patrizi and said, “She could become a second (Adelina) Patti!”

 

Following the performance, the two men rushed backstage to talk to Tetrazzini. Leahy immediately offered her a contract to come to San Francisco and sing at the Tivoli Opera House. She declined, stating that to do so would mean leaving the rest of the opera company with nobody to replace her in the lead role. Leahy begged and pleaded, but the diva would not agree. Finally she capitulated, saying that if Leahy wanted her, he would have to hire the entire company. In order to get his star to San Francisco, he reluc-tantly acceded to her demands.

 

Even though Tetrazzini had agreed to go to San Francisco with Leahy, she had a problem bigger than providing for her fellow artists. Legally, she could not leave Mexico and go to San Francisco with Doc Leahy, as she already had an ironclad contract with the management at the Teatro Arbeu. But she knew that this was her big break—a chance to receive fame and fortune as a world-class opera star.

 

In his memoirs, Tetrazzini’s accompanist André Benoist recalled the story of how Tetrazzini dealt with the legal issue that was getting in the way of her future: “Disguised in a man’s clothes, wearing ‘a boyish wig’ and a false mustache, she boarded a steamer unrecognized. Then, once in her cabin, she heard a commotion on deck and learnt from the steward that the police were searching for a lady who was escaping from the law.

 

Not knowing what better to do, she ran to the men’s lavatory and stood alongside other men. As a result when the police looked through the doorway all they saw was her back, and as a result she avoided detection.”