The Two Tenors

Rome’s opera house has memorials to two tenors: Beniamino Gigli and Nicola Ugo Stame.

In front of the opera house is an airy piazza. It was called Piazza Dell’ Opera until the late 1950s, when it was renamed Piazza Beniamino Gigli.

Beniamino Gigli

Early years

Beniamino Gigli was born in 1890 in the Marche region that borders the Adriatic coast, the youngest of six children. His father was a shoemaker and a sacristan at the cathedral. Beniamino sang there as a boy soprano and won a scholarship in 1911 to the Academy of Santa Sicilia in Rome, where he studied for three years.

In 1914 he won a famous international singing competition in Parma. The prize should have been an engagement at the Chicago Opera but the great war prevented him from making the journey. He performed instead in Italy and made his first overseas trip to Spain in 1917.

In 1919 he had his first tour of South America and at the end of the year travelled to the USA, where he performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. His professional association with the Met lasted for the next twelve years.

After the death of Enrico Caruso in 1921, many regarded Gigli as Italy’s leading tenor. Sometimes called “Caruso Secondo”, he preferred “Gigli Primo”!

Roles for which he became famous included Rudolfo in Puccini’s La Bohème and Andrea Chenier in Giordano’s opera of that name.  He had a lyric tenor voice, lighter than Caruso’s, but he performed dramatic roles to acclaim.

He travelled extensively but became a resident of Rome for many years.

World War II and Gigli

The fascist regime in Italy embraced Gigli and, when Italy entered the war, the fifty year old continued to perform. The war curtailed his overseas performances but he remained popular in war-time Italy.

By the end of the war he had acquired a reputation as Mussolini’s preferred tenor and a favourite of the German high command. His popularity suffered as a result, particularly at home, but he returned to the stage and concert halls elsewhere. He sang at Covent Garden in London in 1946 and embarked on extensive tours, including to South America, South Africa, the USA and Canada.

The tours probably exhausted him and he died, in Rome, in 1957.

Via Torino is the road on the right.

In the centre of the photo is the entrance to the opera house and in front of it is Piazza Beniamino Gigli. In Stame’s time, it was Piazza Dell’Opera.

Arrest and surveillance in the 1930s

Nicola Stame refused to join the fascist party, although he knew that the penalty could be exile or imprisonment. The fascist authorities watched him and arrested him in 1939 at Rome’s opera house, while he rehearsed the role of Calaf (the character who sings “Nessun Dorma”) in Puccini’s Turandot. They imprisoned him for several months for anti-fascist activity.

After his release, Stame resumed his singing career. The opera house probably faced political pressure not to re-engage him but, on 7 November 1939, he sang the role of Cavaradossi in Puccini’s Tosca at Circo Massimo. It was a leading role at a major venue in Rome and Stame was clearly too good to ignore.

World War II and Stame

Stame was allowed to rejoin the Italian Air Force and was in Rome when German forces attacked the city in September 1943. On hearing of the German approach, he immediately donned his uniform and hurried to the barracks, where he and his comrades commandeered a military vehicle full of weapons. They drove to Porta San Paolo and joined the Italian soldiers and citizens fighting the German invaders.

Once German victory was evident, Stame, who had suffered a minor wound, escaped and joined the “Bandiera Rossa” partisans outside of Rome.

The Bandiera Rossa

Stame commanded Zone I in the south of Rome for the Bandiera Rossa. His unit had more than thirty men and, during the first months of the German occupation, his role led him to make several clandestine forays into Rome. Sometimes, during these visits, he managed to see his wife and children, who lived in Via dei Volsci.

Stame’s trips into Rome became increasingly dangerous and, in January 1944, an informer recognised him in Piazza Mignanelli (adjacent to Piazza Di Spagna).  The informer betrayed him to the Germans, and they arrested him and imprisoned him, initially in Via Tasso, the Gestapo headquarters in Rome.

In Via Tasso, he briefly shared a cell with a teenager called Claudio Pica. The Germans soon released Pica, who, after the war, became one of Italy’s most popular singers, using the name Claudio Villa. Often known to his fans as “Reuccio”, Villa won the Sanremo song festival four times: in 1955, 1957, 1962 and 1967.

Trial and imprisonment

After a summary trial in February 1944, Stame was convicted of partisan membership and imprisoned in the third wing of Regina Coeli prison. The Germans controlled this wing, which housed partisans, resistance members and anti-fascist political prisoners. The conditions were grim and food scarce but Stame had not been sentenced to death and he would have hoped to survive the German occupation. He was popular with the other prisoners and tried to keep up their spirits by singing, often arias from Tosca.

In the city, the conflict between occupiers and resistance reached its height on 23 March 1944. The resistance hid a bomb in a dustcart and waited in Via Rasella for the daily march past of the 2nd Battalion of the Bozen regiment. The explosion killed more than thirty German soldiers.

The German command sought revenge and ordered that ten Italians would be killed for each German death. On 24 March 1944, the authorities rounded up more than three hundred Italians and crammed them into unmarked vehicles. Many were prisoners from Regina Coeli and Nicola Stame was amongst them. They were driven to the Ardeatine Caves on the outskirts of Rome and executed by the Gestapo.

Nicola Stame’s family received a telegram from the SS, typed in German, notifying them of his death.

After the war, a small number of his personal effects were retrieved from the Ardeatine Caves. They included the tuning fork that he always carried with him.