Tullio Serafin

Tulio Serafin earned widespread admiration as a leading Italian conductor during his lifetime, with opera forming the core of his reputation. He pursued advanced studies in composition and violin at the Milan Conservatory before making his podium debut in Ferrara during 1898. Arturo Toscanini then brought him to La Scala in Milan to serve as assistant conductor.

Serafin built his profile through appearances at prominent Italian opera houses, reaching London for the first time in 1907 when he conducted at Covent Garden. In 1909 he took the post of principal conductor at La Scala, a role he held from 1909 to 1914 and again in 1917–1918, interrupted by World War I. While there he broadened the company’s offerings beyond the usual Italian canon by adding Montemezzi’s L’Amore dei tre re in 1913 and La Nave in 1918, along with the Italian premieres of Richard Strauss’s Feursnot and Der Rosenkavalier, Charles Dukas’s Ariane et Barbe-Bleu, Weber’s Oberon, and works by Humperdinck and Rimsky-Korsakov.

From 1924 to 1934 he joined the conducting staff of New York’s Metropolitan Opera, where he introduced American audiences to Puccini’s Turandot, Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra, and operas by Mussorgsky, Falla, and Giordano. He also led the world premieres of Louis Gruenberg’s The Emperor Jones and Deems Taylor’s Peter Ibbetson and The King’s Henchman. During these years he played a key part in advancing the career of soprano Rosa Ponselle, one of the Met’s principal artists; he later directed her 1931 Covent Garden appearances in Verdi’s La forza del destino and Romani’s Fedra, both new to that house.

Returning to Italy in 1934, Serafin became artistic director of Rome’s Teatro Reale. There he continued his exploratory programming by presenting the first Italian-language Ring cycle of Wagner and the Italian premiere of Berg’s Wozzeck. After the war he returned briefly to La Scala for the 1946–1947 season and conducted the Italian premiere of Britten’s Peter Grimes.

A dedicated scholar of early Italian opera, he produced the major study Style, Tradition, and Conventions of Italian Melodrama of the 17th and 18th Century, published in Milan between 1958 and 1964. Before his efforts, only a few bel canto and earlier operas appeared regularly, often burdened by inaccurate performance traditions. He prepared critical editions and restored works by Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti. The great singer Tito Gobbi described his gift for discovering talent as “infallible”; two singers who benefited were Maria Callas and Joan Sutherland. Serafin led many of Callas’s most significant early performances and recordings and directed the 1959 Covent Garden production of Lucia di Lammermoor that launched Sutherland’s international career.

Known for a restrained podium manner, he guided orchestras with quiet gestures and grew stern only in the face of lapses. He maintained his forward-looking outlook even at eighty-four, when he revived Rossini’s Otello in Rome.