Baritone Pasquale Amato as Napoleon in silent film Glorious Betsy 1928
It was no accident that the great Neapolitan baritone Pasquale Amato was enlisted to play the role of Napoleon Bonaparte in this semihistorical film. He had created the role of Napoleon in Umberto Giordano s opera Madame SansGêne. While it is basically a silent film, Vitaphone talking sequences were recorded, but the sound disks seem now to be lost. Nevertheless Amato s noble, natural bearing gives one a tantalizing hint of his stage persona. When Glorious Betsy premiered, it was preceded by a Vitaphone short of Beniamino Gigli and Marion Talley singing Verranno a te from Lucia di Lammermoor. The film has been lost, but the audio survives: Interestingly Pasquale Amato s only electrical recording and the only footage of him singing also a Vitaphone short whose film and sound disk have apparently survived but have never been restored and rejoined. But stay I ll be working on that as part of a larger undertaking soon :)
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