Bidspirit auction | GINO BECHI - PHOTO WITH

GINO BECHI - PHOTO WITH AUTOGRAPH - Gino Bechi (Florence, October 16, 1913 – Florence, February 2, 1993) was an Italian baritone and actor. He approached music at the age of seventeen with the maestros Frazzi and De Giorgi, debuting in 1936 in Empoli as Germont in La traviata. He soon became one of the most important Italian opera singers, being called, among others, to the Teatro alla Scala, the Rome Opera, Lisbon and the major theaters of South America. In 1950, following the performance of Falstaff at Covent Garden in London with the Scala ensembles, the critics had no words of praise for him, probably also due to a certain well-known ”allergy” of English critics to the very timbred voices of the Italian school, which moreover a questionable tradition would have alien to the last Verdi character. In 1958 he returned to London, to Drury Lane, in William Tell, this time with great success. He retired from the stage in 1965. In the following years he ran a training school for young opera singers in Florence. He was president of the international singing competition named after Ettore Bastianini in Siena. Gifted with a voice of great breadth, extension and fine timbre, some memorable interpretations in Verdi's operas, such as Otello, Rigoletto, Nabucco, made him one of the most famous opera singers between the 1940s and 1950s. He formed with Maria Caniglia and Beniamino Gigli a trio of artists whose fame went beyond the sphere of the opera audience (they were jokingly nicknamed ”the Lescano Trio of opera”). He was cast several times in musical films, both opera-based and non-opera-based, and his popularity with the general public remains particularly linked to Cesare Andrea Bixio's song La strada del bosco, the soundtrack to the film Fuga a due voci, which became his signature tune. He is buried in the Cimitero Monumentale della Misericordia dell'Antella in Bagno a Ripoli, in the province of Florence UNFINDABLE AUTOGRAPH. UNMISSABLE FOR COLLECTORS.