Word: tebaldi
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Every opera fan knows how high Tosca bounced, when the next swan left and what Maria Callas thought of Renata Tebaldi; disasters, bons mots and bitchy remarks seem integral to the art. Ethan Mordden, who knows his way around backstage (Demented: The World of the Opera Diva; The Splendid Art of Opera), has gleefully amassed hundreds of such anecdotes, exchanges and choice bits of opera lore, along with some less celebrated stories. "Yet there is history here," he says, "for if many of the tales are silly, many others are telling...
...strictest and most scrupulous. She sang with complete fidelity to the composer and his idiom; yet the human essence of each heroine shone through her interpretation. Audiences felt that they were seeing Norma or Violetta. Hers was not a conventionally "beautiful" voice, like that of her great rival Renata Tebaldi. It could be volatile and reedy. Her wanderings impaired her health and her voice. She enjoyed only about ten years of international fame before serious vocal trouble began...
...folks distracted by sibling rivalries. The compendium is impressive. Among the artists and poets, actors and statesmen, comics and scientists who were only children: Ann-Margret, Ansel Adams, Hannah Arendt, Charles Baudelaire, Willy Brandt, Arthur Burns, Richard Daley, Indira Gandhi, Elvis Presley, Richard Pryor, Franklin Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin, Renata Tebaldi, Queen Victoria, Mary Wells, Jonathan Winters, Edmund Wilson. The trouble is, one could easily draw up at least as impressive a litany of luminaries who had brothers and sisters. Let's see, there was Moses, Milton, Napoleon...
...London Philharmonic, Zubin Mehta conducting; London; 3 LPs; $17.94). Puccini's last opera is filled with bold orchestral touches and ravishing arias made to order for an all-star cast like this. Though she does not erase memories of the Nilsson Turandot (especially in the RCA set with Tebaldi and Bjoerling), Sutherland is now the only coloratura around with the right tessitura and sufficient vocal weight-at least on records-to bring off the role of the riddle-happy princess. A delight...
...eight years, Callas bowed out with an eye infection, plunging London Impresario Sandor Gorlinsky and 3,000 fans, some of whom had paid over ? 100 a ticket on the black market, into purgatorio. Before her vision clouded, however, Callas had seen Gorlinsky schedule her old archrival Soprano Renata Tebaldi, 51, for a London recital just 17 days after her own comeback...