Word: renata
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When she was 3½ years old, Renata contracted a case of polio that prevented her from walking until she was six (even today her right leg is still weak, which sometimes hampers her onstage). The polio attack and her father's absence (he returned when she was ten, left again when she was 18) left Renata desperately dependent on her mother. One of the bitterest shocks of her childhood, she remembers, was going to see Giuseppina after a mastoid operation. A surgeon had sliced through a facial nerve, paralyzing one side of her mother's face...
Arias for Dolls. A solemn, solitary child, Renata started playing the piano when she was eight. Grandfather occasionally took her over to the opera house in Parma, and Renata took to putting her dolls to bed at night while singing Parigi, O cara from La Traviata. By ten, her voice was so penetrating that the merchants downstairs complained...
...operatic circuit. In her rise to the top she has experienced only one real failure-a performance of Traviata at La Scala in 1951 in which her voice broke twice on high notes. The audience of rabid Tebaldi fans "exclaimed in wonder and dismay," as she puts it, and Renata took to her room for two months. But with characteristic stubbornness, she then accepted an invitation from the San Carlo Opera in Naples to sing nine successive performances of Traviata, and earned nine successive ovations...
...Tebaldi, life at the top of the operatic world has proved only slightly different from the life she knew on the way up. "Outside the theater," says Renata, "I feel that nothing in me has changed since adolescence." Although she has had several vague romantic attachments (including one to Bass Nicola Rossi-Lemeni), she has never seriously considered marriage. Says Callas, wife of wealthy Giovanni Battista Meneghini: "What I really wish for her is that she find some wonderful person to marry. Love completes a woman; her art would be even better...
...Carabiniere. Until she died last winter, Renata Tebaldi's mother accompanied her on all her tours, acted so effectively as a backstage buffer for her daughter that fellow singers affectionately nicknamed her "The Carabiniere." She handled Renata's mail (weeding out the occasional poison-pen letters from over-zealous Callas fans), took care of her clothes and costumes, stationed herself in the wings to minister to Renata with a Thermos jug of warm tea and an emergency flask of brandy when she came offstage. She was quick to resent any affronts to her daughter. Backstage lore...