Gianluca Terranova (no relationship, obviously, with Vittorio Terranova) was
already a registered composer at age 18, then he studied piano and voice. Both his piano diploma and his tenor debut
followed in 1994. His career took steam only slowly. In his early years, he worked a lot as a composer and arranger in
theater and television; as far as his own stage appearances, he was basically a musical singer until 2007 (in Rome at the
Teatro Sistina, in Palermo, in Lecce), although he made his debut with the
Rome Opera (at the Teatro Brancacci) in 2001 in a revival of Cilea's first opera Gina.
His operatic career really started in 2008: that year, he made his debuts at the Teatro Verdi in Trieste, at the Maggio
Musicale, the Deutsche Oper am Rhein, and at the Arena di Verona, where he was successful enough as Duca to be hired by
La Scala to sing the same role there in 2010, and that in turn earned him a contract with the Los Angeles Opera (debut in
2010, as well).
Now he made a good career: La Fenice in Venice, San Carlo in Naples, Comunale in Bologna, Regio in Torino, the Teatro
dell'Opera di Roma again, Carlo Felice in Genova, Opera Australia in both Sydney and Melbourne, Deutsche Oper Berlin,
Essen, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Leipzig, Warsaw, Amsterdam, Nancy, Liège, Torre del Lago, Atlanta, Tokyo,
Seoul. For a few years, he was a very reliable singer of parts like Duca, Alfredo, Gabriele Adorno, Rodolfo, Pinkerton,
Riccardo or even Don Carlo.
Of course, his career couldn't be long – he had been 38 when it had really taken off. In 2019, he made a belated
debut at the Vienna Staatsoper, and in 2020 at Covent Garden and in Athens. But around that time, he considerably reduced
the number of his performances; he developed a heavy wobble, and was now primarily a voice teacher.
Reference 1 and picture source, reference
2: Terranova's Facebook page, reference 3, reference 4, reference
5
