Nello Santi, conductor in Italian opera, dies at 88
Nello Santi, a conductor who was one of the most authoritative interpreters of Italian opera, especially the works of Giuseppe Verdi, and a podium favorite of singers and orchestra players, died on Thursday at his home in Zurich. He was 88.
His death was confirmed by his manager, Robert Lombardo, who said Santi had been treated for a blood infection.
In the podium Santi upheld a traditionalist approach that called for close adherence to the score and a gentle but firm insistence that singers avoid exaggerated flights of coloratura and prolonged showstopping high notes.
At his best, he achieved great clarity from his musicians, conducting scores with insight and a deep understanding of voices. Orchestras under his direction rarely drowned out singers, even those with lighter voices.
Cutting a portly figure and wielding a vigorous baton, Santi was a favorite of audiences at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, where he led close to 400 performances from 1962 to 2000, overwhelmingly of operas by Puccini and Verdi. Musicians and singers referred to him affectionately as “Papa Santi” and complained that New York critics underrated him.
While the critics rarely disparaged Santi outright, they could damn his performances with faint praise, using words and phrases like “traditional and serviceable,” “capable” or “always in control.” The critic Will Crutchfield of The New York Times once recalled being asked by the famed baritone Sherrill Milnes, “Are you the one who finally gave Nello Santi a good review?”
Reviews of Santi improved markedly in his later appearances at the Met, as appreciation grew for his loyalty to the old ways. “Only recently,” Crutchfield wrote in 1988, “now that capable, secure and idiomatic conducting of the standard Italian repertory is no longer to be taken for granted, have some observers begun to be curious about what goes into it.”
Nello Santi was born on Sept. 22, 1931, in Adria, a small town south of Venice, to Giovanni and Alfonsina (Fonso) Santi. His father was a grocer, and his mother was an elementary schoolteacher with a passion for classical music. When Nello was three, she took him to a performance of Verdi’s “Rigoletto.” Thunderstruck, he had his parents replay a recording of the opera many times on their phonograph while he waved his arms about, as if conducting the orchestra.
As a child, Nello took piano lessons and learned to play the violin, viola and several wind instruments as well. He studied composition at the conservatory in Padua, and in 1951 he made his debut as conductor at Padua’s Teatro Verdi.
“Naturally, it was with ‘Rigoletto,’” Santi told the Milan daily newspaper Corriere della Sera a half-century later.
As a young man at the Teatro Verdi, he followed the usual apprenticeship in provincial Italy of that era.
“At the beginning I did everything,” he told The Times in 1988. “I was a prompter, chorus master. I accompanied singers’ concerts. I even played the anvil onstage in “Il Trovatore” dressed as a Gypsy.”