Word: tebaldi
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...loyal fans of Soprano Renata Tebaldi had a hard time in recent years detecting the girlish silhouette of Mimi, say, or Leonora beneath their favorite's puffed-up form. Unlike her archrival Callas. who had the theatrical canniness to diet to a sleek whisper of her former self, Tebaldi apparently felt that it was sufficient for a soprano simply to trundle on stage and sing...
...last year, while in Japan, Tebaldi looked in the mirror and was appalled by what she saw. Her late mother was no longer at her side to tempt her with plates of pasta, so she promptly went on a diet. She hired two Japanese masseuses, who pounded away at her for an hour and a half every day, and she dropped 24 Ibs. in six months and dyed her hair red. When she returned to the Metropolitan Opera last week after an absence of a year, she decided that having refurbished her form, she would also refurbish...
...seize the stage before the tenor has a chance to plant himself with arms thrown wide to uncoil one of the soaring rhapsodies that billow through the length of the opera. The trick is particularly tough when the tenor is as talented a scene stealer as Franco Corelli, but Tebaldi handled the job nicely. When she came on in Act I in an ivory gown and red hair, she looked so startlingly unlike the matronly Tebaldi of other years that even her devoted claque paused in surprise for the space of a hand-beat before crashing into applause...
...voice dwindled with the poundage. Adriana is an opera in which Tebaldi can sing much of the time toward the center of her range, where she is happiest, and in last week's performance her voice had all the remembered caressing skill that can breathe dramatic life into a line with effortless ease. Her role gave her ample opportunity to float out those clear, carrying pianissimos that reach to the last row in the house...
That brings me, unfortunately, to the great problem of Sunday night's performance. Tacko Tsukamoto is the prettiest Butterfly I have ever seen: she is slim, graceful, and really looks "just fifteen." All this is infinitely preferable to Renata Tebaldi lumbering about the stage in yards of flowered silk, but vocally, Miss Tsukamoto provided only the barest outlines of any kind of Butterfly at all. Her pleasant voice was often completely inaudible in low-lying or pianissimo passages, and only occasionally did she summon anything like the power necessary for Butterfly's big moments. A soprano who can sing...