Arianna, February 1961 — Edited by Pier Maria Paoletti
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*Comment on Facebook*„The shyness I mentioned, this state of agitation, this constant caution are not congenial to me: they were born in me the first time I set foot on stage, and grew gradually as my responsibilities to the public increased”
The tenor Franco Corelli, who reached the pinnacle of fame when he sang "Poliuto" with Callas at La Scala, tells Arianna's readers exclusively about the novel of his life. Sporty and exuberant engineering student, he was very shy with women. He began his career in 1945 singing for the soldiers. Today, he is a favorite in every theater in the world.
Two different expressions of Franco Corelli: on the left on the stage of La Scala in the heroic guise of Poliuto: on the right sitting at the piano in his Milanese home. They are the images of Corelli's different personality: austere and self-confident on stage, tormented in his private life.
F.C.: The audience that follows me and knows me, used to consider me a rather bold and self-confident operatic character, on stage as well as in life, may find it hard to believe me: but - it is true - I am shy. And shyness brings with it fear: a terrible fear, before contact with the audience, which wears out my nervous system and makes me face the performance as a kind of battle. However, when I step out of the shadows of the wings and the lights of the limelight hit me, my nervous tension miraculously subsides and an absolute serenity penetrates me, I would almost say a state of grace, which makes me lucid and aware in every moment of my performance. These are the only truly happy hours of my day, during which I know no more worries, doubts or uncertainties.
The last "battle", the most important of my career, was of course the opening of La Scala with Poliuto, an opera in which I was the protagonist, fraught with so many vocal and technical difficulties that very few tenors have been able to deal with honorably, even in the past. For this Poliuto my constant tension, lovely companion of my whole career, rose to an intensity never reached before and directly proportional to it was then the heroic impulse on stage that made me succeed, if I may say so, in a really flattering way. When the applause of the public died down, I found myself alone in the dressing room, I had almost as a reaction a long, intense moment of meditation and I realized, perhaps for the first time since I have been singing, the radical changes that the opera career has slowly but surely imprinted on my personality and my psychology.
Corelli together with Callas in Donizetti's "Poliuto". When he wears the plumed helmet, Franco Corelli reaches 2 meters and twenty of height: a character much more fascinating than the opera singers of fifty years ago.
The shyness I mentioned, this state of agitation, this constant caution are not congenial to me: they were born in me the first time I set foot on stage, and grew gradually as my responsibilities to the public increased: the worry of always being up to the situation, I mean in perfect physical and mental efficiency so as never to betray - at least by my own negligence - the trust and esteem that an ever wider public is showing me.
When I was a boy I really was the hero without blemish and without fear: tall, thin, agile, I was a sort of gang leader of the neighborhood of Ancona where I lived and I don't know if the young men in blue-jeans of today are able to do more than we did with wavy and waxed hair, fixing the mind to a virile ideal impersonated by Bob Taylor, that is a rather romantic ideal and anything but "broken".
There were two types of cinematic heroes I liked to imitate: as a kid, the Roman warrior of Cleopatra or Sign of the Cross (since then, I've probably had a mania for the shiny armor and feathered helmets I wear in Norma or Poliuto); as a teenager, Johnny Weissmuller, the Tarzan of the 1930s, whose ideal accompanied me for a long time, in a brilliant sports career. I was born a few meters from the sea and swimming and rowing were my favorite sports, along with rugby and basketball. So the athletic victories gave me great prestige among the members of the band and set fire to the hearts of the young girls who attended the competitions in great numbers.
At the time, I really didn't know what shyness and caution were. And if now, with my throat wrapped in the silk handkerchief of all tenors, I'm terrified at the idea of a cold, back then I wasn't even scared of the possibility of breaking my head. Once, I remember, I sat behind the wheel of my uncle's big truck, loaded with hay, and I managed to start it up, and then I sped down a hill and drove straight into a store, smashing everything. Another time I secretly took my father's hunting rifle and went off to shoot pigeons and sparrows even in the public gardens, under the eyes of the local police. It didn't turn out well, though, because I got all blown up, and my face was injured quite seriously: that's why I now want my profile photos to be taken from the right side.
My youth, therefore, was spent under the sign of bravado. Less so with girls. I mean with the girls I liked. Those who pursued me because of my sporting achievements or my prestige as bandleader did not interest me. The ones I was interested in, who knows why, had quiet, middle-class ideals and hated me. There was a red-haired girl at school whose name (as fate would have it!) was Norma. My victories at the sports competitions and even the public praise of the secretary of "Gil" left her completely indifferent: she began to be interested in me only from the day in which, blushing and stammering, I asked her to let me copy her Latin test. I had awakened her maternal instinct of protection, and it was precisely my systematic failures in Latin that made her fall into my arms, head over heels in love.
After all, Loretta, my wife, was not conquered by my sandals and Pollione's feathered helmet - when the newspapers, I am ashamed to say, defined me as the first "hunk" in the history of opera theater - but by an act of kindness and shyness. In '53 ['52], little more than a debutante, I was doing Adriana Lecouvreur at the Rome Opera: during a rehearsal I saw a young artist, rather short-sighted, going down uncertainly, in the half-light, from the stairs to the dressing rooms: I gave her my hand and accompanied her to the wings. Later Loretta dedicated - or rather sacrificed - her life completely to me and now I must confess that I repay her with the darkest selfishness. A selfishness that is another aspect, then, of that form of worry and dissatisfaction that invariably takes me when I have to face a demanding challenge and that makes me become, as a reaction, overbearing, neurasthenic and despotic. And so my poor wife only manages to relax a little on her days off, when we go off to the country and she isn't haunted by my dreaded hoarseness, my pressing requests for pills and hot water bottles.
In his house in Milan, Franco Corelli spends many hours studying at the piano or listening to his voice in the magnetophone: an infallible means to discover the smallest defects of interpretation.
But to return to the happy years of Ancona, when no sense of responsibility towards "my" audience had yet transformed my character, I will say that the worst punishment, then, for my exploits as bandleader, was an evening at the opera. Not being able to go out, after dinner, to organize nightly swim races or punitive expeditions into the neighborhoods of opposing gangs, putting on my good suit and going like a prisoner between dad and mom to the Teatro delle Muse was an unbearable pain. I will always remember having slept wonderfully in the box one evening when Pertile sang the Ballo in Maschera: I woke up only when from the gallery they brought down on the stage a large boat with flowers in honor of the famous singer at his sunset.
However, I owe it to my friends of escapades if I found myself, later on, an unusual voice: in Ancona, as in all the Marche region, there was a mania for bel canto, choral societies flourished, as they do today, and in our company there were frequent heated discussions about the latest interpretation of Gigli or Lauri-Volpi heard on the radio. Competent discussions, of course, full of technical terms such as "volume", "emission", "diaphragm", "high note in the head", "deep breathing" and so on. Driven by my usual pride, by the desire to excel always and in any occasion, I began to sing too, in competitions with friends, or to serenade girls, based on 'Vivere', 'Mamma' and 'Torna piccina mia'. I sang like a dog, sloppy, ungainly, and the only thing I liked was to make mile-high, monotonous and annoying high notes. So I found myself on my way to what was to be my destiny almost without realizing it.
In 1945, when the Americans came in, with all their baggage of clichés about the singing Italy, there was the habit of organizing various entertainments in the different quarters of the city: one evening, when the program organized in our neighborhood was a bit poor, they sent a boy to call me: "Francooo...", he shouted under the windows, "come and sing 'Ch'ella mi creda'! It was the only romance I knew fairly well. I went, I sang - better, I shouted - and I triumphed. It was my first concert in public and the applause went to my head. So I got the passion for singing and the family situation turned upside down: this time it was my parents, scalded by an unhappy artistic career undertaken by my brother, who opposed in every way my desire to study singing - especially with that voice! - and insisted that I continue my hated engineering studies at the University. My father was born in the shipyards of Ancona, now he was a manager and he wanted me to become an engineer.
It was by chance, in 1951 [1949], that I read an announcement of a competition of the "Maggio Fiorentino" and decided with my friends to go on a trip to Florence: in order to run after a girl, I risked losing the audition, I arrived in a hurry without the score and when the examiners asked me what I wanted to sing, I answered with the recklessness of someone who has nothing to lose: 'Se quel guerrier io fossi'.
I sang very badly, but, as always happens in musical films, my voice impressed the jury and above all Pizzetti who, with his authority, convinced the management to award me a scholarship. So I firmly decided to become a tenor. A few months later, however, my mother, whom I loved with a deep tenderness, died - I still mourn her after ten years and I will mourn her until I have fulfilled my vow to dedicate a Requiem Mass to her - and I decided to stop studying. It was my sister, who believed in me, who one day secretly sent me an application for admission to the Spoleto school and when she heard that I had been accepted, she almost forced me onto the train, convincing me to take the audition. I sang the romance of the flower from Carmen and it was worse than in Florence: I was rejected. That was it: by then the idea of becoming a tenor had turned into an obsession, so I went back to Spoleto and, from one disappointment to another, I finally managed to win.