Luis Lima

He was born in Córdoba, Argentina and studied at the Instituto Superior de Arte del Teatro Colón, from which he graduated. Later he studied with m° Alfredo Bonta and Carlos Guichandut. He sang a small role at the Teatro Colón, it was in Manon by Massenet in 1970, where Nicolai Gedda and Beverly Sills sang the main roles. Lima must have stepped in at the very last moment since his name is not in the Colón database for that Manon series. He departed for Europe, where he studied with the tenor Miguel Barrosa and the famous soprano Gina Cigna. He was rewarded with many important awards.
His European debut was at Teatro São Carlos in Lisboa, and later he sang at the most important opera houses in the world such as La Scala, Covent Garden, Metropolitan, Staatsoper Vienna, Staatsoper Munich, San Francisco, Liceu in Barcelona, Berlin and Tokio among many others. At the Vienna Staatsoper, he sang Don Carlo with Claudio Abbado, and returned many times for other important productions such as Werther, La bohème, Cavalleria rusticana, Carmen, Contes d'Hoffmann, Fedora or Tosca. At the Met he sang many times in productions like Il tabarro, La bohème, Carmen, Traviata, Adriana Lecouvreur and so on. He also sang Bohème in Frankfurt and Köln, Carmen with Teresa Berganza in Madrid, Fedora with Agnes Baltsa in Zürich, Tosca and Cavalleria in Hamburg...

After his triumphs in Europe and North America, and receiving international acclaim as one of the most promising tenors, he made his official debut at the Teatro Colón in 1982, where he replaced Plácido Domingo as Cavaradossi in Tosca with Eva Marton, Gian Piero Mastromei, Mario Peruso. At the same theater he sang: Un ballo in maschera, Roméo et Juliette, L'elisir d'amore, Mefistofele with Adelaida Negri and Ghiuselev, La bohème, Werther, Faust, Don Carlo with Leona Mitchell, Vasily Gerello, Furlanetto/Lloyd, Cassola and Miguel Angel Veltri, and Tosca with Gorchakova and Jurij Vedeneev.

At the Vienna Staatsoper, Lima sang 162 evenings between 1981 and 2003 (17 operatic roles and one charity concert). I heard him quite often. He was a nice, intelligent and unpretentious guy, and the best stage actor that I've ever seen in opera – better even than Neil Shicoff and Giuseppe Taddei, which is saying something! Unfortunately, he also had to sing, and he always did it badly – with one exception, in the unlikeliest role that I heard from him: he was a good Hoffmann! Everything else, well... vulgar, unsteady voice production, no nuances, throaty, shouting, always overstressed in dramatic passages, and nowhere as good as in the above Bohème selection. His Don Carlo, above all, was so extremely well-played that you just had to go and see it, but it was tough indeed on the ears.

I would like to thank Thomas Silverbörg for the recording (Bohème).

I wish to thank Roberto Falcone for the biographical notes, the recording (Werther) and the picture.