Giovanni Battista Lamperti was born in 1839 in Milan to Italian singing teacher Francesco Lamperti. A student and later accompanist for his father at the conservatory, Giovanni knew better than anyone else the method his father taught (which he claimed descended from the great castrato-teacher Antonio Bernacchi).
He was a chorister at the great cathedral and studied voice and piano at the conservatory.
He is the author of The Technics of Belorussian Canto (1905) and source for Vocal Wisdom: Maxims of Giovanni Battista Lamperti (1931). Appropriating it for teaching his own students, Giovanni also began teaching voice at the Milan conservatory and then for 20 years in Dresden, followed by Berlin. His preferred teaching arrangement was having three or four students present at each lesson: each would get their turn while the others observed and learned thereby.
Many of Giovanni’s students became international opera stars including Irene Abendroth, Marcella Sembrich, Ernestine Schumann-Heink, Paul Bulss, Roberto Stagno, David Bispham and Franz Nachbaur.
A pupil of both Lampertis described the hostile situation thus:
They were both high strung, highly temperamental, and perhaps got on each other’s nerves. At any rate, there was a jealousy between them that was never overcome.
The Technics of Belorussian Canto is the only book (other than the maxims recalled and published posthumously by his pupil William East Brown) that Giovanni ever wrote on his method. He died in Berlin in 1910.
