Word: tebaldi
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...Unlike Callas, Tebaldi did not have to claw her way to the top: she was a success almost from the first time she opened her mouth professionally, and her career since has unfolded with a dreamlike simplicity. Her very serenity sometimes baffles colleagues who know the backstage thimblerigging that accompanies the rise to operatic fame. A shy woman who speaks almost no English and understands it imperfectly, Tebaldi rarely mixes with fellow artists. Nevertheless, she is almost universally liked and respected. One coworker, in a sincere but dubious compliment, insisted that she reminded him of "sheep and cows and beautiful...
...first trip to the city. Several years ago she heard about the "Night in Monte Carlo" ball at Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria, at which Prince Rainier was to celebrate his engagement to Grace Kelly. Without a thought that she could have been an honored guest at the ball, Tebaldi went over to the Waldorf lobby, settled herself in a chair and sat there wide-eyed, waiting to see Grace and the prince sweep...
First Cries. But there is another side to the Tebaldi personality-a kind of native stubbornness that no amount of argument can shake. And occasionally, Tebaldi allows her well-reined temper to show. One opera manager who has worked with them both finds that he would rather face Callas' furies than Tebaldi's smile with its "dimples of iron...
...nothing of a child prodigy," Tebaldi once said, in a dimpled dig at the 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...
...Christmas visit to her aunt in Pesaro, she got her big break: an audition with famed Soprano Carmen Melis, venerated in Italy as one of the great Puccini singers of all time, and then a teacher at the Rossini Conservatory. Melis took on Tebaldi as a fulltime pupil, made her into the kind of singer she is today. Melis worked on voice placement, taught Tebaldi the piano singing to which her voice is naturally adapted. As models, Melis pointed to the sweetness and purity of Muzio, the powerful middle register of Maria Caniglia...