Italian tenor Flaviano Labo was born in Agazzino, a part of Borgonovo Val Tidone, Piacenza, on 27 February 1927. He was born into a family of amateur singers and while working on the railways in Milano, a music lover overheard him sing and tipped conductor Antonino Votti about his talent. He entered the very next day La Scala's singing academy with a scholarship and stayed there for 4 years under the tutorship of Carmen Melis, Gina Cigna and Ettore Campogalliani. He then studied for one year at the conservatory of Parma.

His debut came on 15 December 1954 in Tosca at the Teatro Municipale di Piacenza. Here he was offered a contract to sing Turandot at the Teatro di Mantova, with following performances in Bergamo, where Rudolph Bing, the managing director of the Met, heard him sing. It was settled that Labo were to appear at the Met in the 1957-58 season, and the first performance came in La Forza del Destino in November 1957. His career with the Met turned out rather short, however, and an anecdote tells how Labo called in sick to Bing at the Met, only to turn up in splendid voice on the same night in Mexico City as his scheduled Met performance. This shall have infuriated Bing immensly and subsequently he refrained from hiring the tenor, moreover, he attempted to prevent him from singing in other major American theatres.

In the years to follow, Labo was utterly successful in Mexico and at the Teatro Colon of Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he was applauded again during the seasons of 1960, 1961, 1964 and 1968. In the season 1960-61 he was engaged at La Scala to sing 40 performances of Don Carlo and Forza. During the remainder of the 1960s, he sang in the major Italian theatres (Roma, Torino, Milano), as well as in Wien, London, Lisboa, Paris and Barcelona. In the 1970s he mostly confined himself to Italian theatres. His definite farewell came in 1989 with a performance of Simon Boccanegra in his native Piacenza.

Labo had a loud, ringing voice of a burnished timbre, with a secure legato and a refined sense of style. Unfortunately, he never received the acknowledgement he deserved, he was short of stature and competition was hard. Posteriority has sadly alsmost sent him into oblivion.

He was first and foremost a Verdi tenor, with one of the finest representations of Don Alvaro (La Forza del Destino) and Don Carlo (Don Carlo) in the 2nd half of the 20th century, but he was also a much admired Calaf in Puccini's Turandot. His repertory also included Aida (1958), Rigoletto (1959), Trovatore (1959), Traviata (1959), Simon Boccanegra (1961), Un Ballo in Maschera (1963), Ernani (1964), Luisa Miller (1968), Giovanna d'Arco (1970), Macbeth (1981), Nabucco (1986) and Attila (1987), all Verdi. Of the non Verdi-operas, he performed in La Boheme (1955), Madama Butterfly (1956), Lucia di Lammermoor (1958), Cavalleria Rusticana (1958), La Gioconda (1960), Faust (1962), Mefistofele (1964), Il Pirata (1967), Der Rosenkavalier (1969), Gloria (Mascagni; 1969), Andrea Chenier (1970), Pagliacci (1973), Manon Lescaut (1974), Iris (1976) and Fanciulla del West (1981), making a total of 29 roles.

He only recorded one of these operas in the studio, a 1962 Don Carlo under Gabriele Santini with the La Scala Orchestra, and recorded for Deutsche Grammophon. There are, however, several live performances available, including a complete Il Pirata from Firenze, June 1967 (issued by Opera D'Oro) and Mascagni's rare Opera Gloria, recorded in Torino, July 1968 (available from the German label Memories). Bongiovanni offers two volumes of live material from the 1960s in their series Il Mito Dell'Opera.

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Flaviano Labò tragically died in a car accident in Melogmano, 13 February 1991. He was 64.