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Of all Verdi's stubborn old men, Don Ruy Gomez de Silva is perhaps the most obdurate, clinging to an antiquated code of honor in order to destroy for others the happiness that he himself has been denied. But while the ethical framework of Ernani seems remote from today's values, the generational tensions that underpin the drama are as deeply felt as they ever were; in most contemporary opera audiences, you will find wealthy men with partners half their age and others who have turned spiteful when losing their loved ones to a younger rival. And one of the great merits of the distinguished Italian bass Ferruccio Furlanetto, who at fifty-eight sings Ernani for the first time at the Met this month, is that he makes us understand what it feels like to be someone like Silva. In a performance last November at Trieste's Teatro Verdi, the house where he made his official debut in 1974 as Colline, his voice and physical presence laid bare the character's emotions so powerfully and honestly that the other performers onstage appeared mere ciphers by comparison, their characters subordinate to Silva's private drama.

Furlanetto's ability to dominate the stage has grown steadily over the decades, along with the organic, unforced development of a voice that is now one of the most imposing of our era. It is not a voice that burns or bites or dazzles, and although he has rarely seemed technically ill at ease with the music he was singing (only occasionally does the line suffer from a certain throaty thickness of emission), he seldom goes in for virtuoso display, coloristic alchemy or fastidious verbal underlining. It is, however, a wide-ranging, perfectly equalized instrument with an immediately identifiable, mellow timbre. Few basses have succeeded in bringing such an ample range of psychologically challenging characters to life over a thirty-year career span. (His repertory includes about fifty operas.)

Many singers get by with expert simulations of feeling that leave the performer tightly buttoned up behind the emotional mask of the music. Furlanetto bares himself emotionally every time he sets foot onstage, as the close-ups in his video recordings reveal. In Don Carlo, a central work in his career, his Grand Inquisitor at the Met with James Levine in 1983 seems truly possessed alongside the generically weary Filippo of Nicolai Ghiaurov, and when he switches roles (at the Salzburg Easter Festival with Herbert von Karajan in 1986), the viewer is captured by the sadness, dismay and rebellion in the king's eyes, rather than by the straightforward dogmatism of Matti Salminen's Inquisitor. In a very different repertoire, his Don Pasquale, filmed at La Scala in 1994 with Riccardo Muti, proves to be the most credible assumption of the role captured on DVD. His singing guarantees more consistent musical pleasure than is usually offered in this role; in particular he proves admirably nimble and rhythmically alive in the rapid patter.

Most basses with capacious voices tend to specialize in elderly men. Furlanetto, whose surname speaks of the Friuli region in northeast Italy where he was born and still has a home, is no exception, but he attributes his vocal longevity to Mozart. "The most important thing that happened to me," he says the day after his Trieste Ernani in an interview conducted in Italian, "was being able to devote the central years of my career to the Mozart–da Ponte operas. I had started out singing Verdi, and when playing those old men it is always tempting for a young bass to darken the sound artificially. My very first stage role — sung in Lonigo, near Vicenza, on March 19, 1974, through winning a competition — was Sparafucile in Rigoletto, and that was the range I felt most comfortable in at the beginning. Mozart helped me achieve a complete command of the upper register and taught me to sing in a totally natural way — for in his music any sort of artifice sounds immediately wrong — with words and tone closely meshed. This is an approach I still adopt now that I have returned full-time to the heavier repertoire. I can now sing with the greatest ease the higher Verdi roles such as Oberto, which earlier in my career caused me anxiety, without sacrificing the richness of the middle and lower register."

As Boris Godunov at San Diego Opera, 2007
© Ken Howard 2008

Furlanetto was twenty-two when he had his first singing lessons, but he had long been aware of his unusual vocal gift. "I never had a treble voice," he insists. "At the age of five I was already a light tenor, and my great grandfather, who loved opera, taught me tunes like Manrico's 'Sconto col sangue mio,' from Il Trovatore. I never went to any opera performances as a boy, however, and as an adolescent in the '60s I became crazy about pop music. By then my voice had darkened considerably, and I sang in a group, took part in competitions and even made some successful solo recordings for CBS — Italian versions of English and American hits, such as Scott McKenzie's 'Holy Man' that in Italian became 'Ama me.' After a while, however, I became disillusioned — disgusted with the label, because they tricked me over sales figures, and, being at heart a good country boy, unhappy about the increasingly dominant drug culture.

"I had already started university when someone suggested I try a career as a classical singer. I knew relatively little about opera, although my mother sang, and her father had a splendid tenor voice, but when I started lessons with the famous teacher Ettore Campogalliani in Mantua — I remember that I had prepared Fiesco's aria for the audition, but he just made me sing some vocalises — I soon became enthusiastic and loved the idea of acting onstage.

"My debut in Rigoletto came just a year after I started studying. It was a bit traumatic, because we were allowed just three days' rehearsal. A couple of months later, I was assigned the role of Bouillon in Adriana Lecouvreur here in Trieste. It was a character part — not ideal for a beginner — in a cast headed by Montserrat Caballé and José Carreras. At the last minute, however, Caballé canceled, and the theater decided to stage a different opera. I learned the part of Colline in La Bohème in a single afternoon. It took me seven and a half hours, and even now I don't know how I managed it! That proved to be the real beginning of my career. It was followed — over the next three years — by a series of secondary roles in operas such as Un Ballo in Maschera, Ariane et Barbe-Bleue and La Fanciulla del West that enabled me to accumulate invaluable experience without being over-exposed."



As Don Giovanni at the Met, 1991 © Beth Bergman 2008

One of these roles was Raleigh in Roberto Devereux in Aix-en-Provence in 1977: a live recording reveals an already impressive and recognizable voice making much of a few lines of recitative. That year, he won the Toti Dal Monte competition in Treviso, which enabled him to make his debut as Don Giovanni. "It was practically impossible then for a bass in his twenties to get a chance to sing that role, but thanks to the success in Treviso I was engaged for the same role in Turin, where Pier Luigi Pizzi was making his debut as a director, and from then on my career really took off. In 1978, I made my U.S. debut in New Orleans as Zaccaria in Nabucco, and the year after, I sang Banquo in Macbeth with Abbado at La Scala and took part in the telecast Gioconda production in San Francisco during which Renata Scotto and Luciano Pavarotti famously fell out. A year later, I was at the Met singing the Inquisitor, and from that point on my career has been largely based abroad, with sporadic returns to Italy."

When speaking of other basses, Furlanetto reveals unconditional admiration for the superb technique of Boris Christoff — as a young singer he was fortunate enough to sing the Frate alongside his elder colleague in a Turin production of Don Carlo and was later deeply impressed by the Bulgarian bass's complete recording of Mussorgsky's songs — and the vocal beauty and interpretive flair of Cesare Siepi. "I missed an opportunity to hear his Don Giovanni live," says Furlanetto, "but I was familiar with the video of the magnificent 1954 performance with Furtwängler."

Furlanetto arguably became Siepi's greatest successor in this opera at the Salzburg Festival, although unlike his predecessor he alternated the roles of Giovanni and Leporello. He considers the servant his master's alter ego: "The two singers must be physically and vocally alike — otherwise Donna Elvira's belief in Leporello's disguise in Act II appears totally implausible." He also firmly insists on the need for genuine bass voices in both parts. "It is a great advantage to be a bass in the final encounter with the Commendatore," he notes, "where you have to contend with a heavy orchestra and another dark voice of impressive weight. It is no coincidence that the great Don Giovannis of the twentieth century, Pinza and Siepi, were both basses. I have given up Figaro and Leporello but would still consider performing Giovanni, although I am somewhat discouraged by the way directors — particularly of the German school — regularly betray the spirit of Mozart's masterpiece. The emotions you experience in that final scene, starting with the D-major chord, are quite indescribable and more deeply gratifying than any of the money or applause you may gain as a singer. In Patrice Chéreau's production in Salzburg in the mid-'90s, the effect was truly terrifying — the gigantic head of the Commendatore was catapulted through a ten-meter wall, and Giovanni was gradually crushed beneath it. Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's death scene was almost equally remarkable. Giovanni had a slow-motion heart attack in perfect synchronization with the music — a solution that foreshadowed the director's own death shortly afterwards."

The great Chéreau production was not filmed, but Furlanetto's Don Giovanni can be heard in a complete recording made with Daniel Barenboim in Berlin in 1990. The performance as a whole doesn't quite gel, but few singers have matched the Italian bass for variety of nuance or risen more thrillingly to the challenge of that death scene. Videos are available of Furlanetto's Leporello, and it is fascinating to compare the leaner and hungrier servant who interacts with Samuel Ramey in Salzburg in 1987 with the thicker-voiced but more richly inflected performance at the Met opposite Bryn Terfel in 2000. The earlier staging was conducted by Karajan, and the bass recalls the atmosphere created during the death of the Commendatore in Act I: "Karajan was already old, and one was aware that he contemplated death without fear, evoking a mood of melancholy acceptance."

The second version was led by Levine, whom the bass calls "the greatest opera conductor of our era." Furlanetto has given 159 Met performances over a span of twenty-eight years, singing a number of roles for the first time with Levine on the podium. The 1992 Sony audio recording of Don Carlo stands out as a high point in their collaboration: Filippo's opening of his heart to Rodrigo in Act II is arguably unrivaled in its eloquence. The recording producer on that occasion was Michel Glotz, Karajan's former artistic "factotum," who has managed the bass's career since the early 1980s, devoting a touching chapter to him in his autobiography La Note Bleue and encouraging his collaboration with pianist Alexis Weissenberg in the early '90s. Those recitals represented Furlanetto's introduction to the Russian repertoire, in which he has excelled in recent years. His three favorite roles today are Filippo, Don Quichotte and Boris Godunov, and while he regrettably has few opportunities to sing the Massenet work, his tsar has been widely heard and justly praised. No other recent singer has brought such deep humanity to the role, and in no other music does Furlanetto's voice sound so outstandingly beautiful. The Russian language seems to bring out its noblest colors and favor the silkiest legato.

Furlanetto claims to have sung all the roles he ever dreamed of performing, except one — Baron Ochs. "The third part I sang here in Trieste was the Polizeicommissar in Der Rosenkavalier, in a production with the superb Austrian bass Manfred Jungwirth as Ochs. I remember being intrigued by his performance and saying to myself, 'One day….' That day will come in 2011, the hundredth anniversary of the world premiere — a new production in San Diego that I have already started preparing for."

Furlanetto will be the first world-class Italian to sing in the original language a role that librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal once suggested assigning to the great buffo Antonio Pini-Corsi. Linguistically the part represents a formidable challenge, yet in psychological terms, what better training could a potential Ochs have than lengthy acquaintances with the likes of Don Giovanni, Leporello, Don Pasquale — and Silva? Like everything Furlanetto does, it should prove a natural fit.

STEPHEN HASTINGS, editor of the Italian magazine Musica, is OPERA NEWS's correspondent in Milan.

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