Merighi studied voice at the conservatory in Pesaro, and his first teacher there was Arturo Melocchi. (Melocchi died, however, in
1960, before Merighi had completed his studies.)
His debut took place at the Spoleto Festival in 1962, as Riccardo. He rose very quickly to the first ranks of the operatic business:
already in 1963, he sang at La Scala, and he returned there regularly until 1975. He was in fact present at every important theater
and festival throughout Italy: Rome, Naples, Venice, Florence, Torre del Lago, Arena di Verona, Trieste, Palermo, Torino, Genova,
Macerata, Bologna, Bergamo...
Internationally, too, it's difficult to find an opera house of renown where he did not sing: he appeared a lot at the Deutsche
Oper Berlin (1970–94) and the Vienna Staatsoper (1967–89); further at the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich, the
Metropolitan Opera (1977–98), the Paris Opéra, Covent Garden, the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires; in Dallas, San
Francisco, Hamburg, Stuttgart, Brussels, Lisbon, Barcelona, Bordeaux, Marseille, Lyon, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Düsseldorf and
Duisburg, Nice, Geneva, Chicago, Monte Carlo, Toulouse, Montpellier, Wiesbaden, Santiago de Chile, Tokyo: an extraordinary career,
and yet an anything but prominent singer, probably due to the fact that he was certainly no yellow press personality.
From 1992 to 1994, he was director of the Teatro Pergolesi in Jesi; but his career was by no means over at that time, rather, he sang
until 2004, and when he finally retired, it wasn't because his voice had deteriorated: a video excerpt from 2012 proves that at
age 72, he sounded very precisely like 30 years earlier. He lived in Jesi for decades, and also died there after a long illness.
His most important role was Cavaradossi, but his repertory was fairly large: Manrico, Alfredo, Duca, Radames, Don Alvaro, Gabriele
Adorno, Macduff, Pollione, Pinkerton, Rodolfo, Luigi, Calaf, Turiddu, Maurizio, Loris, Lefèbvre (Madame Sans-Gêne
by Giordano), Offizier (Cardillac by Hindemith), Andrej Khovanskij, Don José, Enzo Grimaldo, Boito's Faust... He was as
uniformly loud as can be expected from a Melocchi student, but his voice production was noble and elegant, he was utterly secure, and
a good (and good-looking) actor. I heard him several times, and above all his Cavaradossi was excellent, his "Vittoria! Vittoria!"
definitely memorable.
Reference 1, reference 2, reference 3: La Scala archives, reference 4: Metropolitan Opera
archives, reference 5: Wiener Staatsoper archives, reference 6: Teatro Comunale di Bologna archives, reference 7: Kutsch & Riemens
