Varese, 7 October 1898. The forty-seven-year-old Francesco Tamagno commits to paper the first four bars of ‘Ora e per sempre addio’. This is the famous Act II aria from Verdi’s Otello which he had first sung at the opera’s premiere more than ten years earlier. Now, with hand rather than voice, Tamagno retraces its opening gestures. Below the musical excerpt, which consists solely of the vocal line (words and music), he places his own signature, complete with place and date. A deictic relationship is established between these elements and the valedictory utterance entrusted to the quotation. These bars mark the moment in the opera when Otello, convinced by Iago of Desdemona’s infidelity, bids farewell to his past glory and indeed his entire identity. Memories of his juvenile life – of flying arrows and galloping steeds, reveilles and clamour and songs of battle – crowd in upon him, and are given a sonic dimension through Verdi’s orchestration. Otello sings overtly of his intimate bereavement. Similarly, but quietly, in 1898 Tamagno also mourns, through writing, a personal loss.

It has been suggested that the tenor was preparing to take leave of his daughter Margherita on the day of her engagement.Footnote ¹ Even if impossible to prove, it is a compelling reading: the two were extremely close, largely because Tamagno had brought up his child on his own. The juxtaposition of the various items in his autograph would thus articulate a multi-layered discourse: traces of different times and places, of real as well as operatic Selves and their disintegration, become conjoined. The separation of father and daughter is graphically validated, almost emboldened, by a final, vehement stroke of the pen: a sign, devoid of semantic content, that in this context seems to evoke Tamagno’s famously stentorian voice; to fill the hollowness, both aural and emotional, opened wide by the musical excerpt.

Or maybe not. This is a vacuum we may well be too eager to fill up, encouraged by the protracted echoes of Tamagno’s vocal power. For this is the image – a voice with both a literally and metaphorically sweeping force – that history has handed down to us. Verdi’s aria had become one of the singer’s showpieces, in many ways the incarnation, together with ‘Esultate!’, of Otello-Tamagno; and this is at least partly due to the fact that its fanfare-like orchestral writing and sustained upper-register vocal expression chime with the resonant vocality that was regarded as one of the tenor’s distinctive traits.

A few years into the new century, in 1903, Tamagno made five takes of the piece for Gramophone & Typewriter,Footnote ² further substantiating his myth as ‘tenore-cannone’.Footnote ³ The picture of our tenor roaring into the mouthpiece of a cylinder recorder straight through to posterity can easily be conjured in our minds as we listen to his resonant, slow-paced declamation of Verdi’s aria. It is an image we have learnt to associate with the embalming preoccupations of the era of early recordings. There is, all the same, a subtle irony to the interweaving textual and contextual aspects of these ‘Ora e per sempre addio’ recordings: the fact that Otello-Tamagno blares his farewell to the past just as the tenor’s voice – the ‘authentic’ sonic embodiment of Verdi’s Otello, one of the very first voices to be captured in the history of singing – succeeds in annihilating spatial and temporal distance. Sound-reproduction technologies were from the outset nestled in a rhetoric of ‘preservation’ of classic works and voices;Footnote ⁴ but they also cast, on various levels, those very works and voices anew. Through Tamagno’s takes, Verdi’s aria can be said to have accrued (or perhaps enabled) long-lasting meanings. In tandem with the mythical baggage already piled on the singer, these recordings have contributed to hardening the ‘music itself’ into a militaristic ‘addio’, a resolute call to arms against the past, one authenticated by the voice of Verdi’s first Otello.Footnote ⁵

But what if we listen beneath these sonic as well as mythical traces? If for a moment we suspend the image of Tamagno the ‘tenore-cannone’ and pay heed to some of the discrepancies in those recordings? Could any fissures open up in Verdi’s text of ‘Ora e per sempre addio’? The four published recordings are strikingly similar at the level of tempo, expression and ornamentation. Listening to them in succession makes for a strangely self-validating ‘textual’ experience. But frictions also emerge, particularly at the close. The aria ends with Otello-Tamagno singing ‘È questo il fin’ (i.e., of Otello’s career) three times, each time sinking into a lower register and with each recording suggesting a slightly different sense of phrasal direction. But while in the first take (and, to a lesser extent, the second) he retains up to the end a stubbornly resolute vocal stance, in the next two recordings his voice dies out poignantly on the final statement (starting on ‘questo’).Footnote ⁶ It is as if, whether by choice or by force, after battling the memories of his past, Otello eventually lays down his arms, bemoaning his grief. These last few moments in these later takes, that is, become divorced both from the general character of the piece as sung by Tamagno and from the aria’s traditional implications of single-mindedness, which are bolstered by the prevailing narratives about the singer and the piece’s early performance history.Footnote ⁷

We are, of course, in the dark as to how Tamagno sang Otello’s ‘addio’ at the opera’s premiere and in subsequent performances; contemporary reviews and the recordings can illuminate this matter only up to a point. A number of critics in Milan did emphasise the ‘exceptional power’ of Tamagno’s voice; and commenting on Verdi’s aria they praised the ‘sound wave’ of Otello’s vocal utterances, as well as the ‘martial’ character and ‘bellicose tinta’ of the piece. But there is also, in their accounts, a fine sensitivity to more harrowing emotions: the ‘desolate farewell’ to the past, the ‘desperate B-flat’ (three bars before the end), the ‘deeply moving’ quality of (one would guess) both Verdi’s music and the singer’s interpretation.Footnote ⁸ Taking a different view, though, American soprano and writer Blanche Roosevelt was critical of the tenor’s rendition of the ‘addio’. Her comments, however caustic, open up a fresh spectrum of interpretative possibilities. She claimed, no doubt informed by knowledge of Shakespeare’s play, that the sentiments suited to Otello’s aria – to its aural incarnation – would have been ‘silence, secrecy, unbelief, vacillation, grief’.Footnote ⁹ Roosevelt was highlighting something that for her, in Tamagno’s performance, was amiss; she was responding to a disjunction similar to the one between the tenor’s voice (as per the myth) and his quiet mourning in 1898, a disjunction we can be tempted to dismiss – to write off by filling that gap with our imagination – when we approach his autograph. And yet her judgements may prompt us to hear his 1903 recordings afresh and, with it, to imagine a differently heroic Otello: one who, if only for this scene, perhaps a mezza voce, seeks a voice for his grief.Footnote ¹⁰