Sogno tosti pavarotti biography

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What crosses one’s mind if confronted with the terms “Italian song” and “Italian art song”? Well, titles like O sole mio and Torna a Surriento are for sure common connotations, as well as Mamma or Incantesimo. Sure, the first two are Neapolitan songs, and the latter are pop songs. Further brooding will put forth songs like Malinconia by Bellini and Rossini’s La Danza. And then? Does the Italian culture of song consist of Neapolitan and pop songs?

How different are the connotations when one thinks of the two other great European opera and singing nations! Names like Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Wolf and Mahler pop up for the German repertoire, celebrities like Richard Strauss, Goethe and Heine. The same applies for the French repertoire: Gounod, Debussy, Ravel, Fauré, Duparc and the poems by Villaine and Baudelaire. Russian composers like Mussorgsky and Rachmaninoff are famous creators of art songs, and even Northern Europe, which is, except for its famous singers, an operatic no man’s land, possessed song composers of international fame: G

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