Giorgio Ronconi was an Italian operatic baritone celebrated for his brilliant acting and compelling stage presence. In 1842, he created the title-role in Giuseppe Verdi's Nabucco at La Scala, Milan.
Personal life
Ronconi was born in Milan and had been taught to sing by his father, Domenico Ronconi, who was a leading tenor. He married soprano Elguerra Giannoni on 8 October 1837 in Naples, Italy. By some accounts Giannoni had sung with some success at the Lyceum Theatre and at the King's Theatre in London. However, Harold Rosenthal has written: "This lady, who failed on virtually every opera stage in Europe, was considered a good concert-room singer only, but so indispensable was her husband to any Italian company that willy-nilly she had to be engaged as well." In his later years, Ronconi founded a school of singing at Granada in Spain and also accepted a professorial post at the Madrid Royal Conservatory. Ronconi died in Madrid, aged 79.
Career in opera
He made his operatic debut at Pavia in 1831, as Valdeburgo in Bellini's La straniera, and went on to sing at the Teatro alla Scala and elsewhere in Italy. In the 1830s and 1840s, he appeared in the first performances of seven operas by Donizetti:
1833, as Cardenio in Il furioso all'isola di San Domingo;
In 1842, Ronconi appeared for the first time in London, at Her Majesty's Theatre, performing the part of Henry Ashton in Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor. Ronconi's success with audiences outside Italy was immediate, and he continued to be one of the most popular and influential operatic artists in Europe until the early 1870s, when he retired. For instance, from 1847 and until 1866, he appeared at London's Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, in the second and third of the three theatres on that site Vienna heard him in 1843 and he sang in St Petersburg between 1850 and 1860 and New York City from 1866 to 1872.
Assessment and legacy
The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica offers the following assessment of Ronconi:
His voice was neither extensive in compass nor fine in quality, but the genius of his acting and the strength of his personality atoned for his vocal defects. He was equally at home in comedy and tragedy, and the two parts by which he is best remembered, Rigoletto and Figaro, show conclusively the range of his talent.
The two roles cited are the title character in Giuseppe Verdi's Rigoletto and the central character of Gioachino Rossini's The Barber of Seville. A large section is devoted to descriptions of Ronconi's powers in the critic Henry Fothergill Chorley's Recollections of 1862. Another celebrated 19th century baritone, Sir Charles Santley, recorded in his 1892 memoirs the following anecdote about Ronconi: Ronconi instigated a long line of great Italian baritones that continued into modern times. But the most esteemed of his contemporaries and immediate successors were probably Felice Varesi, Leone Giraldoni, Francesco Graziani and Antonio Cotogni, all of whom were chosen by Verdi himself to create or premiere his baritone roles.
