Word: renata
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...woman, would probably take a bite out of the apple. Soprano Callas would coolly accept it as her due and have it mounted in diamonds. Soprano Tebaldi, if she followed form, would place it on her dressing table amid her collection of toy animals. On the surface, at least, Renata Tebaldi is that rarest of phenomena in the posturing, wigged-and-powdered world of grand opera-a soprano without apparent temper, temperament or obtrusive...
...repertoire, by God's will and nature's blessing, is complete. I have contributed to the history of music. I have taken music that has long been dead and buried and have brought it back to life again. If the time comes when my dear friend Renata Tebaldi will sing, among others, Norma or Lucia or Anna Bolena one night, then La Traviata or Gioconda or Medea the next-then, and only then, will we be rivals. Otherwise it is like comparing champagne with cognac. No-champagne with Coca-Cola...
...competition. "I was born with very normal cries-different from one of my celebrated colleagues, whose very first cries were musical and admirable." Tebaldi's first raucously normal cries sounded 36 years ago, in the fishing town of Pesaro on Italy's Adriatic coast. Renata's father, Teobaldo Tebaldi, was a theater-orchestra cellist of dashing good looks. His wife, Giuseppina, six years older than he and a former volunteer nurse, was an iron-willed woman. When Renata was only three months old, Teobaldo deserted his family, and Giuseppina returned with the baby to her family...
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...