Word: violetta
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Munich heard her for the first time last year. Staatsoper's Director Rudolf Hartmann was so impressed by her performance that he staged last week's special La Traviata for her. Stratas did not let him down. Her singing of Verdi's virginal strumpet, Violetta, swept the packed house into a record 43 minutes of tumultuous applause. Raved the Süddeutsche Zeitung: "Stratas intuitively found everything that makes the part touching, the erotic flair of the doomed girl, the fire and despair of her heart. Her light, balanced soprano obeys each impulse: from tender lyricism...
Pistol-Packin' Mama. In the death scene, Stratas shed real tears and made her audience suffer with her as the strings surged upward to a great chord, punctured by Violetta's desperate cry: "Ah! gran' Dio! Morir si giovine [Ah, great God! To die so young]." After the performance, Teresa, smothered in flowers, wearing a green Florentine velvet gown, was seized by a hollow cough. "You see, Violetta is contagious," she said...
...debut was one of the rare victories of art over advertising. It was also among the season's most difficult. Without the comfort of a single stage rehearsal in one of opera's most treacherous roles, she sang La Traviata's Violetta only three weeks after Joan Sutherland's Met debut in the same role. With La Stupenda's triumph still fresh in mind, the critics expected only a nice try from La Costa. But after a faint and breathless first act, she became the very spirit of Verdi's epic courtesan. "It seemed...
...Violetta in La Traviata, Soprano Dorothy Kirsten, the first American ever to sing with Russia's 110-year-old Tiflis Opera, earned a shower of bouquets, 22 curtain calls and an enraptured chain of escorts all the way back to her hotel. (Ardent Georgians shouted in English: "May I kiss you?") Saving her voice for the remainder of a month-long Soviet tour, Miss Kirsten was later cajoled into a command demonstration of the twist. Said she: "The entire party applauded ecstatically. American culture has triumphed again...
...Bikini. At 39, Curtin has the rare good fortune to be as talented an actress as she is a singer. Her Violetta in Traviata is rendingly pathetic, her Cathy in Carlisle Floyd's Wuthering Heights surgingly passionate, her Mistress Ford in Otto Nicolai's Merry Wives of Windsor broadly comic. Essentially a dramatic singer, she has power, purity and flexibility. At the Staatsoper, her voice was lush and intense. Although she had abandoned the bikini to which she customarily peels in Salome's Dance of the Veils (she had a daughter only three months ago, does...