Word: tebaldi
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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...
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...
Walk in the Rain. Suddenly Sophia Loren was a star. Mouthing Verdi while Renata Tebaldi's voice was fed into the sound track, she became a voluptuous, musky Aïda. And in Gold of Naples, the picture that spread her reputation across continents and seas, she played a Neapolitan pizza vendor's wife whose wonderful, self-congratulating look seemed to say: "Look at me. I'm all woman, and it will be a long time before you see such a woman again." She took a long, unforgettable walk in the rain through the streets...
...want the impossible, just the listenable." But in Parma, where almost everybody knows the operas of Verdi and Puccini by heart, and where youngsters pack the galleries instead of going to football games, the "listenable" is not easy to achieve. Tenors Corelli and Del Monaco, Sopranos Callas, Tebaldi and Stella, among others, have failed to achieve it. Famed Baritone Tito Gobbi fell so far short in a performance of The Barber of Seville that the opera was booed to a halt after the second act. Newspapers the length of Italy argued the Parmensi's right to sound...