Remembering the conductor Tullio Serafin, fifty years after his death
Fifty years ago today, on 3 October 1968, Tullio Serafin died in Rome.
In a long career he conducted singers from Caruso to Pavarotti. He was born near Venice in 1878, but when he was 11 the family moved to Milan where he eventually played viola at La Scala under the baton of Arturo Toscanini, and he was still in his teens when he conducted his first opera, L’elisir d’amore.
The numbers are impressive: 683 performances at the Met and 243 different operas were in his repertory from Bellini to Britten, but ‘discovering’ Maria Callas was one of his most noted accomplishments, and she remained indebted to him through her lifetime. She said,
What [Tullio Serafin] said that impressed me was: “When one wants to find a gesture, when you want to find how to act on stage, all you have to do is listen to the music. The composer has already seen to that.” If you take the trouble to really listen with your soul and with your ears — and I say soul and ears because the mind must work, but not too much also — you will find every gesture there. And it is all true, you know.
Andrea Castello from the Tullio Serafin Archive, Barbara Frittoli who is the Ambassador of the archive, together with the music critic Enrico Stinchelli, will today talk about the great Maestro in the La Scala foyer at 6pm.
Free entrance.
Graham Spicer, aka ‘Gramilano’, is a writer, director and photographer based in Milan. He was a regular columnist for Opera Now magazine and wrote for the BBC until transferring to Italy. His articles have appeared in various publications from Woman’s Weekly to Gay Times, and he wrote the Danza in Italia column for Dancing Times magazine. Graham was the historical advisor on Codice Carla, the 2023 documentary on Carla Fracci.
Graham also works as a dance photographer, and his photos have appeared in many books, theatre programmes, and magazines, including Dancing Times, Dance Spirit and Ballet2000, as well as all the major Italian newspapers.
He is a member of the Dance Section of The Critics’ Circle.
Would love to see more posts about Tullio Serafin.
Interesting, but it is not generally known but he preferred Tebaldi and repeatedly asked her to do `Norma. Seems the writer didn’t do enough research. Should have read his Memoirs
This is a press release from La Scala for a conference in the theatre foyer. Callas’ indebtedness to Serafin was one of the themes.