Piero Menescaldi

Menescaldi studied voice in his native Milano with Giuseppe Russitano, and made his debut in September 1921 as Duca di Mantova at the Teatro Sociale in Conselice. (The citizens of Conselice were so proud of this fact that they placed a commemorative plaque at their theater's facade in 1936.)

For the next few years, he was busy at important as well as small Italian theaters: Catania, Lucca, Cremona, Como, Piacenza, Verona (Teatro Filarmonico), Messina, Ancona, Modena, Bologna, Trapani, Marsala, Arezzo, Cagliari, Genova (Politeama), Trieste (Politeama Rossetti), Venice (Teatro Malibran), Imola. In January 1925, he arrived at La Scala, which was to remain the center of his career through 1933. During that time, he also returned to Bologna, Conselice (!) and Imola, and added new towns and theaters to his curriculum: Ferrara, Varese, Busseto, Macerata (Teatro della Filarmonica), Mantova, Novara, Brescia, Pisa, Trieste (Teatro Verdi), Bari (Teatro Petruzzelli), Palermo (Teatro Massimo), Ravenna.

In the years following his Scala tenure, he sang in Rome (Teatro Argentina). Sanremo, Florence (Teatro Verdi), Torino (Teatro Vittorio Emanuele as well as Teatro Regio), Genova (Teatro Carlo Felice), Amsterdam, Den Haag, Treviso, at Covent Garden (Manon Lescaut, 1936), in Camogli, Casalmaggiore, Casale Monferrato, Monte Carlo, Como, Trieste, Verona, Pisa, Fiume/Rijeka, and Palermo (Teatro Garibaldi) – always the same mix of first-class and provincial theaters. Other than that, he sang also opera on the radio. In 1940/41, he returned to La Scala once more and sang Achmed in Soleidas bunter Vogel by Max Donisch (a fervent Nazi, by the way, so no surprise that he is completely forgotten): likely Menescaldi's stage farewell.

He had always sung unusual and rare repertory: Il Pergolese by Lamberto Landi, Severo Torelli by Ugo Bottacchiari, Il diavolo nel campanile by Adriano Lualdi, Golitsyn in Khovanshchina, Italienischer Sänger (standard repertory elsewhere, but definitely not in Italy), La bella e il mostro and Le astuzie di Bertoldo, both by Luigi Ferrari Trecate, Ravel's L'heure espagnole, La campana sommersa by Respighi, La rosiera by Vittorio Gnecchi, Grigorij, Marouf, Julien and Laca (all four not exactly frequent in Italy, either), La vedova scaltra by Ermanno Wolf Ferrari, Basi e bote by Riccardo Pick-Mangiagalli, Il favorito del re by Antonio Veretti, Székely fonó/The spinning room by Kodály, Scampolo b< Ezio Camussi, La falce by Catalani. But he also had a lot of more conventional roles in his repertory: Alfredo (certainly his most-performed part), Duca, Edgardo, Enzo Grimaldo, Rodolfo, Turiddu, Loris, Puccini's des Grieux, Maurizio, Paolo (in Zandonai's Francesca da Rimini), Pinkerton, Fenton, Cavaradossi, Rinuccio, Luigi, David and Don Basilio (Le nozze di Figaro).

After his stage career, he taught voice in Milano.

Reference 1: the fantastic website of Roberto Marcocci; reference 2: Kutsch & Riemens
Source for the plaque photo