Tosti

Trained in the Neapolitan school, he moved to London, became singing teacher to the British royal family, and was knighted in 1908. He wrote almost nothing but songs for solo voice and piano — around five hundred of them.

They sit between the art song and the salon romance, and parts of the vocal world look down on them, but every Italian tenor sings them. Non t'amo più, L'ultima canzone and Aprile are the ones most often heard; the vocal lines are fitted so exactly to Italian stress that they could almost be spoken. As encores they essentially never fail.