Isidoro Fagoaga

Fagoaga was from a poor family. At 14 years old, he emigrated to Argentina, where he lived with his uncle and also took his first voice lessons. He returned to Spain in 1914, and studied with Luis Iribarne at the Real Conservatorio in Madrid, and finally at the conservatory in Parma.

He made his debut in 1920 and had his first major successes in Lisbon. In 1921, he made his Italian debut as Siegmund at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples; before long, he was considered Italy's foremost Wagnerian tenor. In 1924, he was Parsifal at the Arena di Verona (!), from 1925 to 1933, he was regularly at La Scala (as Siegmund, both Siegfrieds and Parsifal), plus he sang Wagner (and a few other roles) in Rome, Bologna and so on.

From 1925 to 1930, he traveled every year to Buenos Aires to sing at the Colón. Siegfried Wagner invited him to Bayreuth, so he studied his Wagnerian parts also in German, but eventually, those Bayreuth plans came to nothing.

Fagoaga was a Basque patriot, and hence a fierce antifascist. When in the course of the Spanish Civil War, the German and Italian Fascist regimes bombed Basque Gernika/Guernica to the ground, Fagoaga left Italy, and actually left the stage altogether. Being unable to stay in Franco's Spain, he went into French exile (presumably in 1939, since he was briefly interned in a French camp for Spanish Republicans that opened only in that year). He lived in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, primarily as a writer and journalist: he was one of the leading figures of the Basque magazine "Gernika". But he also taught voice, and incredibly, one of his students was the Austrian butcher-tenor Hubert Grabner (actually, a well-known butcher and salami producer, who intermittently sang tenor as his second job) – Grabner had been deployed to south-west France by the Wehrmacht.

After World War II, Fagoaga moved to Argentina, where he continued to work as a writer (on musical topics), and as a correspondent of the Spanish newspaper "La Prensa". He only returned to Spain in 1964.

Reference 1: Opera Nostalgia, reference 2, reference 3: Kutsch & Riemens