Mirto Picchi

Picchi's parents produced handmade straw hats; he felt attracted by opera early on, but studied accounting first, obtaining even a doctorate, and worked in a Florence bank for several years: partly to accomodate his father's wish, partly to postpone military service as he was emphatically no friend of the Fascist Italian regime. Eventually, he had to join the army nonetheless, but remained stationed in Tuscany, and managed to deal with his military tasks as passively as possible.

All the time, while studying, banking and serving in the army, he took voice lessons at least occasionally, first as a basso, then as a baritone. Progress was slow and unsatisfactory, and when he was already determined to abandon his musical ambitions, an uncle organized an audition with Titta Ruffo for him – and it was Ruffo who recognized that Picchi was really a tenor. He continued his voice lessons, and in a roundabout way finally found the right teachers (soprano Giulia Tess and her husband, conductor Giacomo Armani). In 1946, he made his debut with the company of La Scala at the Palazzo dello Sport in Milano (the Scala theater had been destroyed in the war), as Radames.

His success was quick and international: Vienna Staatsoper (at the Volksoper, another case of a destroyed theater), London (Cambridge Theater first, later also Covent Garden), Glyndebourne Festival (Ballo in maschera 1949), Maggio musicale and Teatro Comunale in Florence, Rome, Naples, Torino, Edinburgh Festival, Lisbon, Monte Carlo, Zürich, Rio de Janeiro. But the center of his career was always La Scala, where he was a mainstay from his 1946 debut to his 1974 retirement.

In his first years, he sang only the traditional repertory, which he would never give up; but from 1949, he specialized in rarities of all kinds (some of them rarities just in Italy, of course): Florestan, Max, Tom Rakewell, Boito's Nerone, Dargomyzhskij's Kamennyj gost, La damnation de Faust... and above all, lots of contemporary works, Wozzeck (both Tambourmajor and Hauptmann), Peter Grimes, and a good deal of Ildebrando Pizzetti's oeuvre: Cagliostro, Fra Gherardo, Lo straniero, La figlia di Jorio, Fedra, Ifigenia, Clitennestra. He was much admired also for his acting.

Reference 1: Enciclopedia Treccani, reference 2: Kutsch & Riemens