The Ups and Downs of a Singer’s Life

Italo Campanini’s career didn’t start with velvet curtains. It started with a forge.

After Garibaldi’s war, the boy—only fourteen when he joined the army—returned home to Parma and spent two years in his father’s blacksmith shop. Someone noticed his voice and arranged lessons in the evenings, after twelve hours of labor. Campanini didn’t even read music.

One day in a wine shop, strolling musicians played the Miserere from Verdi’s Il Trovatore. Campanini and his friends sang along, and a small old man listened. “Who sang the tenor part?” he asked. It was Maestro Dall’Argini. He invited Campanini to sing the next day. Campanini sang by ear—excerpts from Il Trovatore and La Sonnambula. The maestro offered to teach him, free of charge.

His father hated the idea. An opera singer, he said, was a beggar’s trade. Campanini pushed on anyway, taking tiny roles in local theatres. In his first part—a notary in La Sonnambula—stage fright crushed him. He barely produced a note. The audience jeered, and someone shouted, “He sings like a hunchback with his shoulders in his throat!” Campanini snapped back: “You may laugh now, but it will be my turn to laugh next. He who laughs last laughs best.” The quarrel ended his engagement.

Then came Russia: five years touring the provinces for four lire a day. It paid—until a small revolution shut the theatre, the manager vanished, his luggage was seized, and Campanini was dumped in the street penniless. He sold his coat to eat for two days. Only a chance acquaintance and a benefit concert got him through.

From that misery he learned the essential lesson: know your strengths and your weaknesses, and cultivate the voice relentlessly. He went to Milan, studied “day and night” with the famous Chevalier Francesco Lamperti for a year, and then secured first‑tenor roles at La Scala.

His debut as Faust was his first true success. Before the first act ended, the audience was cheering—“Bravo, Campanini!” It meant fortune to the manager, and for the unknown tenor it meant everything. And Campanini closed the story with a line that only someone who had starved could write: “There are fifty ways of starving, but after all, there is only one way of dining.”