Giovanni Matteo Mario - Operatic Career, Marriage & Death

Operatic Career, Marriage & Death

Because he possessed an exceptionally fine natural voice, Mario was encouraged by the composer Giacomo Meyerbeer to become a singer. He took singing lessons from two teachers, a Frenchman named Ponchard and the former Italian tenor Marco Bordogni, and proved so gifted that he was swiftly offered an engagement with the Opéra. The young tenor made his debut there on 30 November 1838 as the hero of Meyerbeer's Robert le diable. Meyerbeer had provided a new recitative and aria for him in the second act (the "Mario-Aria"), which generated great excitement, and "a new star was born".

Despite scoring an immediate success, owing to the splendid quality of his singing and a dashing stage presence, he did not choose to stay long at the Paris Opéra. In 1839 he joined the Théâtre Italien, where such illustrious singers as Maria Malibran, Henriette Sontag, Fanny Tacchinardi Persiani, Giulia Grisi, Giovanni Battista Rubini, Antonio Tamburini, and Luigi Lablache regularly performed. His first appearance there was as Nemorino in Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore. In the same year he was first heard in London, achieving instant success.

The acclaim that Mario received in Italian opera surpassed even that which he had won in French opera, and he soon acquired a Europe-wide reputation for the beauty of his singing and the elegance of his bearing. He possessed a handsome face and a lithe figure (he liked to show off his legs in tights), and his lyrical voice, though less dazzling than that of the older, virtuoso tenor Giovanni Battista Rubini nor so powerful as that of his younger rival Enrico Tamberlik, was described as having a gracefulness and a beguiling, velvety softness that made it unique. The music critic and playwright George Bernard Shaw, who was born in 1856 and therefore could not have heard Mario in his prime, said his singing featured a marked vibrato.

Mario created few operatic parts, the most notable being that of Ernesto in Donizetti's Don Pasquale (1843). He sang, however, in the première of Rossini's "Stabat Mater" and Verdi wrote for him a new cabaletta for the main tenor aria in I due Foscari for a production in Paris. In established roles, Mario's very greatest performances were as Otello in Rossini's opera of the same name, Gennaro in Lucrezia Borgia, Almaviva in Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Fernando in La favorite, the Duke in Rigoletto, and Manrico in Il trovatore. The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in London and the Théâtre Italien in Paris were the scenes of most of his stage triumphs. He sang in London from 1847 until 1867 and again during 1871.

Mario also made occasional appearances elsewhere in England in oratorio, for example at the Birmingham Festival of 1849 and at the Hereford Festival of 1855. He undertook, too, a string of concert tours around the United Kingdom. In about 1849 he acquired the "Villa Salviati" in Florence and made Italy his home base once again. At his salon there he received many distinguished cultural figures and members of the European nobility.

In 1854 he toured America with the eminent Italian soprano Giulia Grisi, earning much money and much adulation during their trans-Atlantic jaunt. Since several years he and Grisi were lovers, soon after she obtained a divorce from her previous husband, they were married in London. Her god-father was Lord Castlereagh junior. Mario and Grisi had six daughters, and a son. One of their daughters was the famous writer Cecilia Maria de Candia, who married an Englishman, Sir Godfrey Robarts Pearse, and left an account of her parents' careers.

Mario bade farewell to the London stage in 1871. His decision to retire followed the loss of his wife, the great Grisi, who had died in Berlin a few years earlier while returning from engagements in Russia. Mario brought his singing career to a close at the Imperial Theatre in St Petersburg. During this time, his daughters were put under the care of tutors assigned by their godmother, the Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaievna, Duchess of Leuchtenberg and president of the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg.

Mario eventually returned to Italy from Russia and spent his last years ensconced in Rome, composing music and writing: but he never fully recovered from the death of his wife, or from the financial difficulties which now beset him owing to his habitual extravagance. It is said that he used to smoke cigars continually, even when taking a bath.

A benefit concert was mounted for Mario in London in 1880. He then withdrew to Italy to see out his days and died in Rome three years later in near-poverty.