Word: moffo
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...left Radnor, the brunette became one of the best lyric-coloratura sopranos in the world. Last week a busload of teachers journeyed to Manhattan to cheer the school's most famous alumna in a new kind of starring role. Young (24), shapely (36-24-36) Soprano Anna Moffo was making her debut at the Met in Verdi's La Traviata...
...three years Soprano Moffo has been riding high on the European opera and concert circuit. To U.S. opera buffs, she is known as the star of several fine recordings, including Madame Butterfly (RCA Victor) and Capriccio (Angel). As Verdi's consumptive heroine, she demonstrated last week that her acting is almost as good as her voice. Strikingly handsome in a hoopskirted, bare-shouldered, pink ball gown, she made the Violetta of Act I into a moving figure of feverishly hectic gaiety. As the opera progressed, the coquettish attitudes gave way gradually, until by the final act Violetta emerged...
...Voice, Too. Soprano Moffo's success at the Met caps a career that developed almost by accident. The daughter of an Italian-descended shoemaker, Anna grew up in Wayne. Pa., made her debut at seven, singing Mighty Lak' a Rose in a school assembly program. After that she sang in choirs, school recitals, at weddings and funerals, without ever taking a lesson. When she left school, she turned down a Hollywood offer because she wanted to, become a nun. Later she decided that she lacked a true vocation, won a scholarship to Philadelphia's Curtis Institute singing...
...break in 1956 when she won the title role in an Italian TV production of Butterfly. Overnight Italy claimed her. "A voice of the sweetness and brilliance of our heavens!" wrote the Carriere della Sera critic. Voted one of Italy's ten most beautiful women, Soprano Moffo was soon singing in major European opera houses, was signed by the Chicago Lyric Opera in 1957. She had turned down two previous offers from the Met on the ground that the proposed schedule demanded too much of her time. (This season she will appear also in the Met's Faust...
Uneasy Virtue. Now married to Italian Director-Producer Mario Lanfranchi (who originally signed her for Butterfly), Diva Moffo lives in an apartment in Milan, collects jazz records as an antidote to a steady opera diet. With her husband as lyricist, she writes pop songs, one of which, Citta, became an instant hit when she sang it on Italian TV ("Always, my city Your aroma is like a garden without flowers Like a tear...