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Tito Gobbi--baritone
London
1960
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"Tito Gobbi, the Italian operatic baritone, died in Rome yesterday at the age of 68. He had been suffering from cancer.
Mr. Gobbi earned enormous respect for his convincing character portrayals. His skill as an operatic actor, indeed, was thought by many to overshadow his talents as a singer.
He was identified most readily with the role of Scarpia in Puccini's ''Tosca.'' He made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera in that part in 1956. His last performance at the Met was also as Scarpia in 1976, a performance that marked Dorothy Kirsten's farewell to the house. In the Met years between, he sang the role altogether 22 times in New York and six times on tour.
Mr. Gobbi also played Scarpia opposite Maria Callas's Tosca for the soprano's historic return to the Met in 1965. The famous Callas recording of ''Tosca'' on Angel Records also featured Mr. Gobbi in his well-known role. Range and Reputation
Mr. Gobbi's range and reputation went beyond one character. At the Metropolitan, he sang the parts of Iago, Rigoletto and Falstaff over the years, and during his long career in Europe, he assumed roles as different as Wozzeck and Don Giovanni.
Mr. Gobbi took the dramatic side of opera performance seriously enough to maintain a parallel career as an opera director. He made his official directing debut in Chicago in 1965 in Verdi's ''Simon Boccanegra,'' and had been very active as a director at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in recent years.
In 1970, he both staged and sang the title role in the same composer's ''Falstaff,'' and in 1976, he directed a ''Tosca'' at the Met with Cornell MacNeil as Scarpia. He was also active at the Juilliard American Opera center. He canceled an engagement to direct ''La Boh eme'' there last December, but had accepted a Juilliard offer to stage ''Trittico'' next year. He had staged ''Falstaff'' and ''Un Ballo in Maschera'' at the school in the mid- 1970's.
In 1958, Howard Taubman of The New York Times described Mr. Gobbi's portrayal of Iago as showing outwardly an ''open-faced geniality'' while managing to express ''all Iago's bitter evil through the voice.''
Vocally, Mr. Taubman wrote, Mr. Gobbi ''phrased with a subtlety of tone and rhythm.''
''This is a good voice,'' he added, ''if not a great one.''
Harold C. Schonberg of The Times agreed in 1965 that Mr. Gobbi's ''was not a great voice'' but added, ''he has more than enough strength to rise fully to the big moments of Scarpia's role.'' Father an Engineer
Mr. Gobbi was born in Bassano del Grappo in Italy in 1915. He suffered from asthma as a child, and his father, a prosperous engineer, put him under the care of a personal athletic superviser. Mr. Gobbi became a proficient cross-country skier, mountain climber and cyclist as a teen-ager.
He entered the University of Padua in order to study law but soon switched to voice. In 1936, when he was 21 years old, Mr. Gobbi won a scholarship to work at La Scala's theater school in Milan, and in 1938 he won a voice contest in Vienna. Mr. Gobbi made his debut at La Scala in 1942 as Belcore in ''L'Elisir d'Amore.'' After World War II, his career broadened to include other parts of Europe and then America. In his spare moments, he retained a serious interest in sports, and was also a skilled painter. In recent years, besides directing, he had been giving frequent master classes in Europe and America.
Mr. Gobbi is survived by his wife, Tilde, and a daughter, Cecilia."; NYT
