Arturo Toscanini News

Toscanini forbade it. La Scala's management discouraged it. But the "encore" calls from the balconies proved too much for Juan Diego Florez to resist.

The Peruvian tenor repeated his first act aria "Ah, mes amis" in a revival of Donizetti's "La Fille du Regiment" on Tuesday night — the first encore of a solo aria at La Scala since Russian Fedor Chaliapin flouted the tradition in a 1933 production of "Il Barbiere di Siviglia."

Florez — known for singing ebullient encores — had hinted he might be willing to break La Scala tradition if the audience expressed enough enthusiasm.

The infamous loggionisti — the exacting occupants of the uppermost balconies who sent Roberto Alagna skulking off stage in the middle of a performance after being booed this season — needed no more encouragement. After rousing applause, and calls of "bis, bis, bis," Italian for "again, again, again," Florez complied.

"The theater recommended that he not do it, but in the end it wasn't imposed like a dictate," said La Scala spokesman Carlo Maria Cella. The final decision was left to Florez and conductor Yves Abel.

Toscanini forbade encores in 1921 in the belief that repeating a piece of music broke the pace of the operatic drama and that the focus of an opera was the music, not the singers, opera critic Elvio Giudici said.

The edict-turned-tradition was broken two other times more recently, by Gianandrea Gavazzeni conducting "I Lombardi" in the early 1980s and Riccardo Muti during "Nabucco" in 1996 — but only for the chorus, not for a solo singer.

Florez makes his Carnegie Hall debut March 10 with a program slated to include works by Mozart, Rossini and Donizetti, among others.