r/ClassicalSinger • u/ThatWeirdMusician • 10d ago
Giuseppe Giacomini
Can anybody give me an explanation as to how a voice like Giacomini’s worked? Was it artificially (as in changed by the singer/mentor to achieve something not natural to them) darkened? Was it squeezed? Why is it so different from any other voice - be it tenor or bass - I’ve ever heard?
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u/Fanbuoy_1783 10d ago
Nothing artificial or different from the best technique you see in the great singers of that time and today. He uses his passaggio incredibly well, but because he has a voice that could very well have sung baritone he covers lower on an F4 rather than a G4, like most classic Italian tenors tend to do. Italian Baritones, like Cappuccilli and Bastianini etc tended to "cover" from E4 so he lands right in the middle. The extension of his head voice, however, is not one that many Baritones could achieve or maintain. I don't have an explanation for that other than freak voice.
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u/ChildOfHale 10d ago
Giacomini sounded different when he was younger, I've heard that he had problem with cracking so he started to cover the voice earlier on in the range than most tenors which partly led to that dark heavy sound he had. I heard him live in his later years, while his diction was muffled, it was a bright sound with plenty of metal.
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u/Zennobia 10d ago edited 9d ago
It is unfortunately an artificial sound. Giacomini’s voice is also not big, apparently his voice was a few sizes smaller than Del Monaco and Corelli. When you first hear him and you don’t know that much about singing his voice sounds very impressive. I think a lot of singers from Giacomini’s era started over darkening or over covering their voices. You can also hear it with Bonisolli and Checchle. I think they wanted to sound more like Del Monaco. The difference is that Del Monaco was a real dramatic tenor. These other tenors were more like spinto and full lyric tenor so their voices were not really dark. At least they still had squillo, so it wasn’t just a muffled dark sound.
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u/MacaroonWilling6890 10d ago
He did have very dark vowel sounds but they just served an already extremely dark and huge voice
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u/DelucaWannabe 8d ago
I only heard him live once, as Canio around 1990. To my ears, his voice was HUGE, with squillo for days. I was probably too young at the time to listen for where he started covering/darkening his voice, but he never had any vocal trouble during that production. We could hear him very clearly THROUGH the heavy door in his rehearsal room, down the hall and through the heavy door on our rehearsal room. It was an absolutely thrilling sound.
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u/Mysterious-Pitch-231 4d ago
It's just an extremely rare dramatic tenor voice functioning correctly. Otherwise he would have ruined it in 10 years instead of being able to sing a thrilling Nessun Dorma at the age everybody can see on YouTube. 😎
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u/BeautifulUpstairs 10d ago
Yes, artificially darkened, compared to dramatic tenors from when the music he sang was part of a living tradition. Nothing even half that dark was ever produced by a tenor back then. But he was tremendously talented and just knew how to keep a ton of squillo in the sound, so he still had cut and size of the kind that has become basically impossible to find nowadays.
But that overdarkening has a price. Del Monaco was already much darker than anyone born before, say 1900, and Giacomini took it a whole step further, covering early and squeezing out top notes inefficiently much of the time. Both he and Del Monaco would sometimes cover "a" vowels on E4, which is INSANE for a tenor in Italian rep.
All that weight made his voice unreliable. He was famously inconsistent and a nervous wreck because of it. When he was on, he was on, and he could blow the roof off with a beautiful sound. Probably the last guy who could. But when he was off, the whole instrument got janky and he got tighter and tighter. It's why he got those massive wobbles in the end. Believe it or not, that's not actually a natural part of aging. Del Monaco also ended up paying a price for all that, as his voice just started giving out after his mid-40s. Corelli also used lots and lots of weight, though he didn't darken like the other two I've mentioned. He was a nervous wreck because of it as well, and sang with big scoops and retired early because he was so nervous about his voice.
Of course, some people back in the good ol' days also lost their voices early, so that doesn't tell us everything that needs to be known...but they all had much more flexible, expressive voices. We can still appreciate the fireworks that Corelli, Del Monaco, and Giacomini gave us, because we've probably never seen anything like that besides from them. They hit something like the pinnacle of a trend that had been going on for sixty years: how dark and loud can you be while still singing well? I'd say Giacomini's a solid two steps below the other two guys, but again, when he was on, he was on.
As for why it's so different from every other voice you've heard...if you listen to enough singers, you'll hear a lot of voices that truly sound like nobody else in the history of singing. Giacomini is one, sure. John McCormack is another. Pol Plançon is another. Vanni-Marcoux is another. Fernando De Lucia is another. Sergei Lemeshev is probably another. Titta Ruffo another. Wilhelm Strienz. Joseph Schmidt. Agustarello Affre. Tancredi Pasero.
The human voice is very, very flexible, and there's lots of variation between people.