It was 1965; I was a 16-year-old schoolboy besotted by classical music but only, so far, on record. Of a Friday night, my school chums and I used to roam the West End, drinking strong tea at Joe Lyons, chain-smoking and riffing on Sartrean themes. One of these Fridays, we wandered into Covent Garden, then still a vegetable and fruit market with an Opera House at its centre.
Padding across the cabbage leaves, I idly looked at the posters outside and saw that that night they were doing Il Trittico, Puccini’s triple bill of one-acters. I’d never heard of it, but I did recognise one of the names in the cast list – Tito Gobbi. My grandmother, once a singer, had any number of his recordings among the piles of battered and scratched shellac 78s, many of them with bite-sized chunks around the edges. I persuaded my chums to shell out the 3/6 for a seat in the slips and up the back stairs we trooped.
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