Apollo Granforte

Apollo Granforte (20 July 1886, Legnago – 11 June 1975, Milan) was an Italian opera singer and one of the leading baritones active during the inter-war period of the 20th century.

At 9 o'clock on the morning of July 22, 1886, when Granforte was two days old, he was left in a basket at the Ospedale Civile in Legnano, wrapped and wearing a bonnet to which a brass medal was attached by white cotton thread. The nuns at the hospice remarked on his large body and strong profile and thus dubbed him Apollinare Granforte, the name which the president Giovanni Tebon wrote down in the hospice's official records. He was adopted by Gaetano Brigo e Rosa Uccelli, a couple from Noventa Vicentina. At nine years old, he was an apprentice cobbler and enjoyed acting and singing at the small theatre in town. At 16, he took a tenor part in Lucia di Lammermoor, put on by a small company that traveled the countryside and performed in town squares.

On October 5, 1905 Granforte married the eighteen-year-old Amabile Frison. They had a daughter Maria in the same year and emigrated to Buenos Aires in Argentina to be with Granforte's brother Erminio Brigo. He continued to work as a shoemaker and on Sundays sang for the Italian immigrants in local taverns. There he was heard by a wealthy music lover named Pedro Valmagia (a.k.a. Pietro Balmaggia), who paid for him to study at the La Prensa Conservatory of Buenos Aires. He then transferred to the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia in the same city, studying with masters Nicholas Guerrera and Guido Capocci.

Granforte made his stage debut in Rosario, as Germont, in 1913 when he was 27. In that same year he debuted in a concert in La Plata, singing "Eri tu" from Un ballo in maschera and the "Ciel! mio padre" duet from Aida with a soprano student of the Verdi Conservatory in La Plata.

In 1913, at the age of 27, Granforte made his stage debut as Germont at the Rosario Politeama. His success there led to successive engagements at other provincial theatres in Buenos Aires. By 1915 he had also appeared at the Buenos Aires Politeama, the Solis of Montevideo and at Pelotas, Rio Grande and Porto Allegre in Brazil. In one four-week period at Montevideo he sang Silvio in Pagliacci, Marcello in La bohème, Alfio in Cavalleria rusticana, Germont in Traviata, Enrico in Lucia, Rigoletto, Barnaba in La Gioconda, Valentin in Faust, Amonasro in Aida, and Alfonso in La favorita.

...
Wikipedia