Pietro Friggi

Italy, Motta Visconti 1885 – Milano 1948

A man who should never be forgotten.

Pietro was a singer, a poet and a painter. He was an idealist, who loved his family and his fellow man and who was in turn widely loved for his purity of spirit. He had no enemies. He led a life of peace and altruism that expressed itself in his art, deeply personal, private, shunning self-promotion.

He was a magnificent singer and his voice had purity of style as well as deep, thoughtful interpretation. For almost forty years in theatres the world over his marvellous bass voice was heard in a hundred roles in some sixty different operas.

He chose his own path, not that dictated by others, because, in the words that he nobly sang in “La Boheme” he never ‘bowed down to the rich and powerful.’ He studied at the Milan Conservatory and his talent was recognised by Arturo Toscanini and Maestro Emilio Piccoli.

He made close friendship with Giacomo Puccini and worked with all the great names of his day. During the First World War he met Ernest Hemingway at the US mission in Treviglio.

Pietro Friggi was also a great writer of poetry in dialect as can be seen in his superb odes, rich with fresh immediacy and good-natured simplicity. He expressed himself in lively and genuine dialect, with humour and social concern, and his poems are steeped in human decency.

And..he excelled also as a painter. His compositions are so many small jewels that earned him renown in this form of art as well.

Pietro Friggi loved painting portraits including self-portraits, panoramas and living and improvised scenes that presented themselves to him and stirred his emotions.

He used watercolours and oils but he also did crayon sketches, many of them of the squares and hidden corners of Milan.

A collection of these sketches, which has significant historical and documentary value, can be viewed by the public in the Sforzesco Castle in Milan – it is the Bertarelli Collection – and it shows scenes of the city in the immediate aftermath of the bombing of 1945.

Pietro Friggi’s life came to a sudden end when he was at the height of his career.

He was struck down without warning at Milan’s Central Station on his return from Savona where the previous evening he had sung in Verdi’s “Forza del Destino.”

His funeral was a massive public event. Hundreds of people from all walks of life

followed his coffin to the point from where it would be taken to Motta Visconti, his birthplace, whose citizens demanded that it be buried there. A farewell tribute was paid to him by the noted tenor Mattioli whose heartfelt words in the name of all his colleagues made a deep impression on those present.

Whoever might view one of his paintings or read a poem of his or recall that warm and powerful voice could not fail to admire that man who shied away from honours, the humble artist who with the utmost originality had these three ways of expressing his soul.