It is difficult to credit now, but when in 1965 Tito Gobbi directed a production at Covent Garden of Simon Boccanegra – one of Verdi’s most magnificent achievements – the work was little-known here and receiving its Royal Opera House premiere. Gobbi himself took the title role. There had been a couple of recordings, notably the Met’s with Lawrence Tibbett conducted by Ettore Panizza in 1939, but it was Gobbi’s EMI recording in 1957, under Gabriele Santini, with Victoria de los Angeles and Boris Christoff, that was key to the rediscovery of this masterpiece.

During the 1960s Gobbi was as central to opera at Covent Garden as was Margot Fonteyn to ballet. His legendary 1964 Scarpia to Maria Callas’s Tosca is the stuff of, well, mythology for me because I could find no way of actually getting a ticket. But his 1953 EMI recording, with Maria Callas and Giuseppe di Stefano, conducted by Victor de Sabata, has been reissued countless times and has been almost never out of the catalogue in 60 years. There are various studio and live recordings of Gobbi as Scarpia with Callas as Tosca, but this mono recording by Walter Legge for EMI is rightly hailed as one of the greatest opera releases of all time.

Through the 1960s I was fortunate enough to see Gobbi in many of his greatest roles. He was the consummate actor, vocally as well as physically, with a voice to die for. He could occasionally go over the top (his memorable Falstaff, in his own colourful costumes) but could still be the subtlest, most effective, actor I have seen on the operatic stage in half a century. He lived his roles (Daniel Day Lewis could have taken lessons from him) and was master of the nuance. His master classes will have been something else – I remember seeing one on television many years ago. He could have been a star of the straight theatre (he had plenty of offers) and I still today recall his gestures from the first time I ever saw him, in the early summer of 1963, in a role that, unaccountably, he never recorded – Count Almaviva in The Marriage of Figaro. I will never forget Gobbi’s horror at discovering the Cherubino of Teresa Berganza cowering in a chair. I’m sure a tape exists and it would be wonderful if it ever surfaces commercially as Solti was conducting the starriest of casts – Mirella Freni as Susanna, Geraint Evans as Figaro, Ilva Ligabue as the Countess. 

Sir Georg Solti was also in the pit on April 14, 1964 when I was in the old gallery at Covent Garden waiting to discover (and in the event be completely blown away by) Verdi’s Otello, with the unheralded James McCracken as Otello (a last-minute replacement for Mario del Monaco, who had been injured in a car crash). After the most incredible ‘Si, pel ciel’ at the end of Act 2 we applauded – and were generously afforded curtain calls – for the entire half-hour interval that followed. The clapping was stilled only by the start of the Third Act. There was another half-hour of applause at the end of the performance. That doesn’t happen very often.

I have a complete collection of more than 100 Gobbi LP releases; fortunately most have been reissued (with better sound) on CD and they form a backbone of our recorded operatic legacy. I have previously given my recommendations for 10 of his great recordings. When he died in 1984 the world lost one of the greatest operatic baritones there’s ever been. But the voice and the man live on in a fabulous recorded legacy.

Click here to vote for Gobbi to enter the Gramophone Hall of Fame.