Mirto Picchi

Mirto Picchi was born in San Mauro, Tuscany, in March 1915 and trained at the Florence Conservatory. He made his début at the Teatro Comunale in Florence in 1946 as Radames in *Aida* and through the late 1940s and early 1950s established himself in the Italian dramatic tenor repertoire at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, the Teatro San Carlo, La Scala, and the major regional houses.

His central repertoire was the dramatic Italian and verismo tenor roles — Otello, Calaf, Pollione in *Norma*, Pinkerton, Cavaradossi, Manrico, the title roles in *Andrea Chénier* and *Don Carlo*, Pinkerton in *Madama Butterfly* — alongside a substantial body of twentieth-century operatic work. He was a notable interpreter of Pizzetti’s operas and gave the world premiere of Pizzetti’s *L’oro* in Milan in 1947. He worked extensively at Covent Garden (from 1952) and at the Glyndebourne Festival, where his Mozart parts (Don Ottavio, Ferrando) were particularly admired. He also worked in early opera — Monteverdi’s *L’incoronazione di Poppea* at Glyndebourne — and in Stravinsky.

Picchi died in Florence in October 1980. Music Preserved’s archive includes a range of his Italian operatic work from the 1950s and 1960s.