Et was a day that changed her life. It was after a so-called Callas scandal at a guest performance by Milan’s Teatro alla Scala at the Edinburgh Festival. Five performances of Vincenzo Bellini’s opera “La Sonnambula” were agreed. Because of the success, a sixth was promised, but without consulting Maria Callas. She decided: “I’ll leave the role to a young singer who will cover herself with fame.” For Renata Scotto, the evening of September 3, 1957 brought her breakthrough – and the praise that she was the “new Callas”. It was praise that was more unreasonable than the criticism that each of the many “successors” was exposed to: not being it after all.
Alfredo Kraus helped her
Renata Scotto, born on February 24, 1934 in Savona, had already made her debut at La Scala in Milan when the Spanish tenor Alfredo Kraus pointed out a deficit in her technique in 1956: the trouble with the transition (passage) in the high position. On his advice, she began a second degree at Mercedes Llopart. Just a few years later, Scotto became Kraus’s singing partner in excellent recordings of Gioachino Rossini’s Barbiere di Siviglia (1958), Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto (1960) and Bellini’s La Sonnambula.
As a member of the ensemble at La Scala, she began in 1957 with lyrically ornamented roles by Gaetano Donizetti such as Adina in “L’elisir d’amore” or Norina in “Don Pasquale”.
The role of Violetta in Verdi’s “La Traviata”, which she had sung on many stages, was refused to her at La Scala by the Sovrintendente Antonio Ghiringhelli. She doesn’t have the looks for the role, explained director Franco Zeffirelli, who was met with disaster when he, along with Herbert von Karajan, chose Mirella Freni. She felt the Circus Maximus atmosphere there in 1970 at the season opening in Verdi’s “I Vespri Sciliani”, when she was greeted with shouts of “Brava Callas”. Five years earlier, however, she had found her new home after her debut as Butterfly at the Metropolitan Opera. There she embodied 25 roles in over 230 performances until 1987. It was, according to the Herald Tribune, “love at first sight between Miss Scotto and the New York public.”
James Levine became her boyfriend
Only manager Rudolf Bing proved, as with Maria Callas, that an iron heart beat behind his chest. When, after many performances and successes, she asked for new roles, and in new productions, he replied, “I’m sorry, miss, but you have to wait your turn.” That changed when she starred in James Levine , Music Director since 1971, found the “ideal colleague on the podium and also a good friend” under whose direction she sang and recorded many central roles by Mozart, Bellini, Verdi and Puccini.
You can hear, just to take Bellini’s “Norma”, how subtly she forms the texts of the recitatives, how she (very similar to Callas) spans melodic arcs, how sensitively she colors her voice; unfortunately also that her voice began to rebel in the mid-seventies and the high notes began to fray.
It is an old and well-known problem when lyric sopranos venture into spinto parts. Even if the tone has power and “carries”, the reserves of the sound are lacking, with the result that the exposed tones have to be wrested from the voice system. Even if in later recordings under Riccardo Muti (“Nabucco”, 1978, and “La Traviata”, 1980) or James Levine (“Cavalleria Rusticana”, 1978, and “Tosca”, 1980), the expressive singing comparable to Maria Callas was still present actress can be experienced, the magic of her voice is more likely to be preserved in the recordings of the 1960s. She ended her career with roles such as Marschallin in Rosenkavalier, Venus in Tannhäuser and as a director. She died in her birthplace on Wednesday, aged 89.
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