'Papa' Santi died today. Somehow Nello Santi conducted opera for nearly 70 years while being well over 300 lbs the whole time, but aside from his size, what made him truly great has died with him.
From Toscanini onward, Italians are known for producing particularly great conductors, but there's another type of Italian conductor, in many ways more valuable than the star maestro, who knows Italian opera so well that he can tell you exactly what every instrument plays in every bar of every opera and how to balance the instruments against the exact vowels and consonants of every singer's word. He came up through the old 'repertory' system of the Italian opera houses, beginning as piano accompanists to the singers, graduating to vocal coaches when they learned about the voice, graduating then to repetiteurs (who run offstage rehearsals) when he sufficiently learned the operas, who then graduated to choirmaster, then to assistant conductor, and then finally makes his debut with an opera without any rehearsal so the opera house can see if he sank or swam. After his debut, the orchestra and singers gave reports about whether or not the new conductor was any good, and if he was, the opera house gave him another few operas without rehearsal. Eventually he'd get a post somewhere as a third or second conductor in a small town opera house and he would get a few rehearsals to implement his own ideas, and if he proved talented, he'd get an opera house of his own, where he would mentor not just new singers, but the next generation of conductors who'd have to come up through a system just as rigorous as the system that trained him.
Nello Santi was probably the very last of these conductors, who by the thoroughness of their training had the entire Italian opera repertoire committed to memory - every note, every word. Opera is chaos, but by all accounts, musicians always felt completely secure under Santi, who was beloved all around the world and earned the widely used nickname 'Papa.' Claudio Abbado was just two years younger than Santi, but though Santi outlived Abbado, Abbado seemed like a thoroughly modern European, while Santi seemed from an era when Verdi and Puccini were still writing their next opera.
These old-school Italian opera maestri never get the credit they deserve. They're generally dismissed as anonymous and generic time-beaters who stayed out of singers' way, indulged singers' egos, and contributed nothing inspiring of their own. But if you go back to recordings of so many of these marginalized podium footnotes: Cleva, Gavazzeni, Molinari-Pradelli, Erede, Molajoli, Sabajno, de Fabritis, Prevatali, Gardelli, Cellini,..... every one of them is different from the other. Every one has their own personal signature on every opera that is, if anything, far more distinct, far more nuanced, and far more creative, than later conductors, often stars, who imposed their own vision and often shoehorned singers to fit within the framework they set rather than create a partnership.
Just play this one scene, Rigoletto's famous explosion on the courtiers who kidnapped his daughter, "Cortigiani, vil razza danata.' ("Courtiers, you race of the damned". Listen to the way Santi surrounds Rigoletto's lines. On the one hand, the strings have to be a mirror of Rigoletto's rage, they must sound like the flames of hell, on the other, the singer has to be heard over a wall of string sound. So every time Rigoletto stops singing, those fiery strings go off from soft to loud (piano to forte) like an ascending rocket, and then the moment Nucci starts singing again, the strings immediately go back to soft like they'd hit a brick wall. None of that's written in the score. Only a true maestro would think of a solution like this, and it makes the scene five times as exciting. That's the kind of problem a real maestro knows how to solve.
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