Part One: The Career

A year ago today, we received the sad news that soprano Renata Scotto had died. As a result, I’ve finished a tribute piece that’s been sitting on the metaphoric desk for some time. I’m sorry that it had to turn into a memorial piece. An entire era seems to have passed with Scotto, and there can be little doubt that the opera singer who has had the greatest influence on my life was Renata Scotto. That’s not to say that there aren’t other singers very dear to my heart, but Scotto, more than any of the others, played a role in shaping, not only my operatic taste, but also my overall fate. Pull Leonie Rysanek out of my life and, while my existence would have been unspeakably poorer, I’d probably still have ended up where I am today. Try to pull Scotto out, on the other hand, and, I think, a significantly different life would have resulted for me.  I don’t think it would have changed everything, but Scotto did make for a red thread running through my life, and not just during my highly formative twenties, when I lived in New York and was going to three or four performances a week at the Met.

I rarely missed a Scotto performance, starting from when I discovered the economic feasibility of standing room in 1982, and ending with her last Butterfly in the house in 1987. Before I moved to New York, I’d make the commute on New Jersey Transit from Princeton to get to the Met (you can get a lot read on the train), and, then, once I graduated, I made the far shorter trudge from my 72^nd Street apartment to hear the singer who best fits the title of my diva.

I also had the considerable pleasure of going backstage after all those performances to meet Scotto and exchange a few words with her and her husband, Lorenzo Anselmi. I don’t flatter myself that Renata Scotto became one of my best friends and that we used to have have lunch at The Saloon once a week, but I did get to know her  at least somewhat, so, in addition to an analysis of her career, I’m including some personal reminiscences of someone I’m still used to calling by her first name. As typing “Scotto” for three paragraphs has felt awkward and impersonal, I’m going to refer to Renata as I’m used to referring to her. I hope it doesn’t come off sounding too schmucky.

Renata, then, was born on February 24, 1934, in Savona, and was, for a full thirty years (1957 to 1987), if not the leading Italian soprano of her day, then definitely one of them. The full span of her career was even longer than that: she made her debut in 1953 and was still singing Strauss’ Klytämnestra as late as 2002.  During the course of those nearly fifty years, Renata sang the entire Italian repertory for soprano. All of it. From La serva padrona and L’elisir d’amore all the way through to Macbeth and La Gioconda. No other soprano in memory covered that much terrain, let alone as well as she did.

The Scotto career breaks down almost along the lines of the five decades during which she sang: the anticamera di provincia of the ‘50s, international fame as a lirico-leggero in the ‘60s, the gradual reinvention of herself as a Verdi soprano in the ‘70s, the soprano drammatico years of the ‘80s, and, then, a somewhat haphazard last act that didn’t occupy the same starry heights as the rest of her career. She wasn’t the only star soprano whose career petered out rather than ending with a bang, but the only way to go out with that kind of a bang is to stop before you’re finished. Scotto was nothing if not a bête de scène, and, while she reinvented herself brilliantly at an age when sopranos generally seek new roles after having sung all the ones in their original Fach, she never quite reinvented herself for her last act the way, for example, Mirella Freni did with her late-career shift to verismo and Russian roles at an age quite a bit more advanced than that of Pushkin’s Tatiana.

Renata’s salad days weren’t very long. She started out at the age of 17 in no less a role than Violetta. I recall a story she told in an early New York master class about having been passed over at her early auditions. A sixteen-year-old singing “Son pochi fiori” from Mascagni’s L’amico Fritz didn’t attract much attention. So she decided that she’d go for broke (Renata wasn’t without a degree of chutzpah when it came to career matters) and, at her next audition, sang Violetta’s act one scena, E-flat and all. She got hired. Opera careers are not for the faint-hearted. (Of course, the gamble only worked because she sang the scena in some early iteration of the Scotto voice and musicianship, which, although she would refine it over the next fifty years, must always have been there. You either got it or you ain’t, and, believe me, Renata had it in spades.)

Although she was probably characterized at first as a soprano lirico-leggiero, she would champ at the Fach’s bit as early as her debut year of 1953, when she first sang what would be one of her most celebrated roles, the title part in Madama Butterfly. She did it with some precedent: Toti dal Monte, one of the best-known lirico-leggero sopranos of the preceding generation had made Butterfly her own, and even recorded it complete. Dal Monte was an important, gifted Cio-Cio-San, but the inescapable reality is that her voice was better suited to the first act (where she really did sound quindici netti netti) than to the more dramatic demands of the other two acts. Scotto was unquestionably influenced by Dal Monte, both vocally and dramatically, as Dal Monte’s recordings show a soprano who sang with feeling and sensitivity as well as virtuosity: a lirico-leggero who was as much one as the other. Scotto would definitely follow in the Dal Monte path, although, with a bigger instrument that made her always more lirico than leggero.

Renata progressed along quickly, and reached Milan’s Holy of Holies, La Scala, on December 7 of that same 1953, the opening night of the 1953-54 season. The catch was that she was given the second banana role of Walter in La Wally; Renata Tebaldi had the title role. The shorter of the two Renatas had a success (Wikipedia questionably maintains that she received fifteen curtain calls), and was asked back to sing La Sonnambula, again as the second banana, Lisa, to Maria Callas’ Amina. Her answer, according to her first book of memoirs, Perchè Sono, was “prima donna o niente.”

Ironically, her big break came in that same Sonnambula production during a guest appearnce by the La Scala forces at the Edinburgh Festival.  There are multiple versions of the story of how Callas ended up not singing the performance (and ended up instead meeting a certain Greek millionaire at an Elsa Maxwell party in Venice), but the upshot as far as the Scotto career was concerned was that she scored a major international success.  Although the Edinburgh Sonnambula doesn’t seem to have survived, later tapes of Renata’s Amina show that she could manage Amina’s bravura and E-flats handily (although her bravura as Amina was restrained when compared to that of Joan Sutherland), but she could also wring degreess of passion and heartbreak from “Ah, non credea” in a way that Sutherland couldn’t.

Renata would encounter Callas shortly thereafter, this time in the recording studio. The opera was Medea. Callas of course took the title role, and Renata agreed to sing the seconda donna role of Glauce.  One of the stories told about those sessions was that, when Callas was warned that the opera was running too long, her suggestion for shortening it was to cut Glauce’s aria, which is pretty much the only thing of which the role consists. Scotto got her aria, but the ill will with Callas would return to haunt her.

If the recording of Medea was minor Scotto (it was also, it must be admitted, minor Callas compared to her live performances of the role), she would, still in her mid-twenties treat posterity to uncommonly fine and surprisingly mature complete recordings of Lucia and Rigoletto, along with a recital disc for EMI that showed both maturity and room for growth in a buffet of Puccini chestnuts, an ambitious take on Margherita’s prison scene from Mefistofele, the Lucia and Puritani mad scenes and what was already a cavallo di battaglia, Violetta’s big scena, oddly without its E-flat. In these recordings, Renata was always driven as much by the words as by the music, and she was guided by the principle of making dramatic sense out of the moment, while always returning to the music, even when being what she’d subsequently describe as naughty for sticking in unwritten high notes that were, however, firmly part of the Italian tradition from which she sprang.

Renata made it to the United States in 1960, singing Mimì in Chicago. She got to the Met in 1965, with a triumph as Butterfly (a tape has survived of that performance; the audience goes wild after the love duet and stays wild through the rest of the opera.)  That was the auspicious beginning of her occasionally fraught but generally successful connection with the house. That same season, Butterfly was followed a couple of months later by Lucia and Elisir. She’d return for the first season at Lincoln Center as Lucia, rack up a second Butterfly broadcast in as many seasons, and add Traviata to fare that would increasingly leave her feeling boxed in and cause her to leave the company for a season as part of her 1970s reinvention project.

Back in Italy, which, at that point, was still the center of her professional activities, she made the important acquisition in 1967 of a bel canto role with considerable lyric scope: Giulietta in Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi. She did the role at La Scala under Abbado in a production that traveled to Montréal for Expo67. It gave her a chance to show off her magical way with the Bellinian melodia lunga lunga as well as her top E natural. (She was the possessor of a sensational upper extension at this point in her career.) In 1968, she offered the outstanding bravura performance of her career as Isabella in Meyerbeer’s Roberto il diavolo (again with her high E), and the next year she took on Giselda in I Lombardi in Rome, the first indicator that she had her eyes on heavier parts. A recording survivies, and, in it, you can hear her stretching and trying to find ways to get more out of her voice than her lighter roles required.

Her next role was even heavier. On December 7, 1970, she opened the La Scala season as Elena in I vespri sciliani. The role would initiate a full-scale shiftinto the dramatic soprano Fach over the next decade. Nobody knew the Scotto voice better than Renata, and she had the intelligence and the technique to scale her dramatic roles to the vocally possible.  Alas, what should have been a defining breakthrough turned into the defining scandal of her career. A tape of the dress rehearsal has been available on CD, and it shows that Renata was entirely capable of singing a marvelous Elena, interpolated top E and all. The scandal, however, had nothing to do with her voice, or anything else that was happening onstage. The drama unfolded on the audience’s side of the curtain.

At its center lay Renata’s intermittent nemesis, Callas, who, five years after her final operatic performances, and eight years after her last appearance at La Scala, turned up in the audience for the 1970 opening night. The audience made a huge fuss over the return of the retired diva to what had been her home theater. Callas apparently did nothing to discourage the ovation she received at every intermission. That annoyed the proverbial heck out of Renata, whose evening it was supposed to have been.

Her reaction was swift but foolhardy: she gave an interview to the Italian scandal sheet Stop that appeared with the headline “Gli applausi si fanno a chi sta sulla scena!”. Rather uncharitably, she went on to say that Callas, with neither career, nor husband nor chidren, had to survive on “applausi rubati.” It was a declaration of war on the vedovi Callas who occupied La Scala’s fractious loggione. More unfortunately, she used a not very nice vegetable term to describe the latter when they confronted her after one of the subsequent performances at the stage door in the Via Filodrammatici. Renata bravely sang the rest of the run, facing a very vocally hostile audience, but she had gravely damaged her reputation in her native country.

She unquestionably had a point, but the editors of Stop took full advantage of the lack of dipomacy that characterized the two major scandals of Renata’s career. The most immediate result was finding herself replaced by Mirella Freni in the famous Strehler/Abbado production of Simon Boccanegra. Renata would never sing at La Scala again.

She became something of a gypsy in the next years, singing around Italy, elsewhere in Europe, and at the Met. She progressed into heavier fare, and added Ballo, Luisa Miller, Trovatore and Otello in various European cities, and sang her first Norma in Torino, not a major stop on the international operatic circuit, in 1974. Meanwhile, her Met repertory consisted mostly of lirico-leggero fare: Lucia, Gilda, Adina, Amina, plus quite a few Butterflys, and a few chances at slightly heavier fare such as Violetta and Marguerite. (Curiously, she didn’t sing her Mimì in New York until 1972.) Her New York repertory clearly wasn’t keeping pace with her more ambitious European roles, as Rudolf Bing seemed unable to see Renata as anything but a very talented lyric coloratura.

Her decision was to withdraw from the Met for a season, and then to return, with a good dose of the chutzpah that could characterize her, as Elena in Vespri. The return performance was captured on tape, and she stops the show cold with her first aria. She had made her point about being more than just an Adina.

Those three performances of Elena and a single Butterfly were her only performances in the house in 1974-1975, but she did sing a few Mimìs on tour and a bevy of Butterflys in the parks. The following season, her only appearances in the house were two goes at another of those chutzpah projects that confirmed her reinvention as a dramatic soprano: the three female leads in Puccini’s Trittico, which she also sang on the Met’s spring tour.

I don’t know exactly how or when it happened, but, somewhere after the Vespri success and the opening night of the 1976-77 season, the Met presented Scotto with the keys to the kingdom, and the Anselmis made the decision to move to the United States. They bought a house in Westchester and a pied à terre a few blocks from Lincoln Center, as opportunity for Renata clearly lay more in the New World than the Old.  There were other factors as well, no doubt:  a rash of kidnappings in Italy perhaps made the Anselmis feel that their children might be safer in the United States, and Laura and Filippo were still young enough to move without having their lives unduly disrupted.

The result was that, by 1976, Renata became the unofficial Queen of the Met. James Levine, then moving into power in the house, was a big admirer, and she was soon everywhere: she opened the 1976-77 season as Leonora in Trovatore (opposite Pavarotti), and went on to be the recipient of an almost unheard-of two new productions in one season: Meyerbeer’s Le Prophète (which was being revived for Marilyn Horne, although Scotto did her considerable best not to let Berthe sink into a seconda donna assignment) and Bohème, again opposite Pavarotti. The Bohème was more than a new production, however: it was a plum among plums, given that it came with the first Live from the Met telecast, which allowed her to appear before a bigger audience in one night than in all her other performances combined.

That same season, she sang a couple performances of Musetta as well. The star turn was a huge success, and Levine came THIS close to having to stop the orchestra to handle the ovation she received during the second act. Everything was going along swimmingly, but something went wrong along the way, and, instead of succeeding Tebaldi as the Met’s beloved Italian prima donna, Scotto became controversial.

Renata followed her record-breaking 1976-77 season of Leonora, Berthe, Mimì and Musetta with a 1977-78 season consisting of ten Mimìs and ten Butterflys, plus three performances of Adriana Lecouvreur, in which I saw her live for the first time. The following season, she took on Desdemona for four performances with a telecast, Luisa Miller five times, with a second telecast in one season, as well as a broadcast. She followed that by starring in one of the jewels in the crown of the era at the Met, Don Carlo, which she sang nine times, including the broadcast. (A telecast would have to wait until the following season.) That made for eighteen performances in the house in a single season, along with a pair of telecasts and a pair of broadcasts. Although these were the peak years for the Scotto artistry, and the telecasts and broadcasts show that she was giving extraordinary performances, everyone seemed to be turning a blind eye to the dangers of overexposure.

The Luisa Miller telecast, while not a full-fledged scandal, did include a highly unpleasant incident courtesy a mentally unbalanced man who was a part of what can be termed the standing room community at the Met, and who who harbored a fanatical devotion to Maria Callas. (It was from his tape recorder one morning that I first heard the Mexico City Aïda high E-flat.) His addled brain developed a vendetta against Renata, probably as a result of the Vespri incident. He was the person responsible for yelling out “Brava, brava Maria Callas!” right at the pause in the music preceding Luisa’s demanding “Lo vidi e il primo palpito.”  Everyone in televisionland heard the interjection. Renata, caught in a medium shot I still remember, didn’t bat a visible eyelash and went on with the opera, but, to judge from what she says about the incident in her second book, she had been highly disturbed by the incident.

That was followed by another televised incident at the outset of the 1980-81 campaign. The locale wasn’t the Met, but, rather, San Francisco. Renata had originally been contracted to open the season with a new production of Anna Bolena, a role she’d already sung in Philadelphia and Dallas and that nicely bridged her bel canto credentials and her new status as a dramatic soprano. Once the conract had been signed, however, Pavarotti became available for the opening night. He certainly wasn’t going to sing the fourth banana role of Percy in Bolena, even if it had been written for Rubini and was packed with high Cs. Actually, Pavarotti might have made a good Percy in the 1970s, but, at the height of his overhyped popularity, Pavarotti was in the process of trying to reinvent himself as a spinto tenor and was seeking to add heavier roles to his repertoire. For some reason, he settled on Enzo in La Gioconda, Kurt Herbert Adler agreed, probably with the expectation that Scotto would bow out of the production. Unwisely, but perhaps beause a telecast was involved, she went along with the change of opera.

The results were minor Pavarotti and, bottom line, relatively minor Scotto, who was caught in a part that required a more powerful chest voice than she was able to muster, even with her new technique. The whole thing might have been forgotten, except for another incident in which Renata’s lack of diplomacy under stress again proved her undoing. Somehwere behind Scotto’s back, the San Francisco powers that were decided that Pavarotti would be accorded a solo curtain call after the second act (the act that contains Enzo’s “Cielo e mar”), despite operatic custom that generally restricts solo curtain calls to the end of the opera. Scotto was apparently physically prevented from going out in front of the curtain to allow for Pavarotti’s solo call, and stormed back to her dressing room where, unfortunately for her, a television camera was waiting to interview her.

What the camera captured was a diva having a tantrum which climaxed with the declaration that “this would never have happened with Placido Domingo, who is the world’s greatest tenor” and a calling Pavarotti, Kurt Herbert Adler and the rest of the staff of the San Francisco Opera, “gente di merda” – shitty people. Suffice it to say that it was a public relations disaster for Renata, one which caused considerable damage to the beloved Italian soprano image she had been acquiring.

The Scotto-Pavarotti dream team only appeared once again onstage, in 1980 in Un ballo in maschera in Chicago, another opening night, the contracts for which had been signed before the Gioconda débâcle in San Francisco. I have it on very good authority that the rehearsals and performances were extremely stressful, as the soprano and tenor refused to speak to – or even look at – each other. They played their love scenes onstage, and cut each other dead the rest of the time.

Pavarotti struck back childishly by omitting all references to Renata in his book that was published around that time. Renata retaliated by refusing to name Pavarotti in More than a Diva, which came out a few years later.  She did, however, tell a few choice stories about a very famous tenor who was fat. They did finally make it up before their deaths, but the feud certainly deprived the operatic public of what could have been a very rewarding collaboration between two native Italian singers.

After her misadventures in San Francisco, Renata was probably glad to be back in New York, where she was again everywhere on the Met schedule: five performances of La Gioconda (including a broadcast), five more Elisabettas (with a telecast), and a wonderful new production of Manon Lescaut, which she sang eight times, including a telecast and a broadcast. The production headlined the tour, during which she also sang the Verdi Requiem in Detroit and Boston, and wrapped it all up with a single Tosca in Central Park.

Gioconda continued to be a bad luck proposition for her. The role probably shortened her career by five years: it was simply too heavy for her and not open to being finessed the way the heavy Verdi heroines she sang could be. She was to have recorded the opera complete for RCA with Troyanos, Domingo and Milnes, but something happened and the sessions fell through. EMI had the good idea to capitalize on the singers who were freed up by the lost Gioconda sessions, and recorded Bohème under Levine, with Renata, Carol Neblett, Alfredo Kraus, and the available Milnes. It proved an outstanding recording of the opera. The only problem was that Renata had a contract with CBS/Sony to record all the Puccini operas, which meant she oughtn’t to have recorded the Bohème. The result was pretty much the collapse of the Lorin Maazel Puccini cycle, and a bunch of Scotto recordings we might have had.  (Especially La fanciulla del west, an opera that Renata adjudged as unsuitable to her vocal means, but which, according to her book, her son Filippo always wanted her to sing, as he couldn’t understand why his mother always had to die onstage.)

Scotto was to have sung Tosca (another opera she’d record with Levine after the CBS deal went pear-shaped) in the house in the 1980-81 season, but the season was truncated by a strike, and Scotto didn’t appear in New York at all. In 1981-82, she sang a lot, and it was then that her high level of exposure caught up with her. She opened the season doing her first New York Norma, a role she’d been singing with great success since her first go at it in Torino in 1974.

The same mentally unabalanced person who sought to interrupt the Luisa Miller telecast, now in cahoots with a small group of Scotto-hating standees, sought to interrupt the opening night Norma. The idea this time was to upset her by booing her before she’d even gotten to open her mouth, and, once again, Scotto weathered a storm that became the story more than the opera being performed. The New York Times covered the incident and not much else in its review of the opening night, with the result that the talk around time was that Renata’s Met Norma had been a fiasco. Bootleg recordings of subsquent performances show how untrue that was: her Norma was a tremendous achievement that was loudly applauded by the audience. That said, she did cancel the broadcast for reasons that have never been entirely clear: was she sick or was she avoiding another possible incident? (I can say I was there, disappointed, but present for Adelaide Negri’s interesting house debut.)

All told, Renata sang six Normas that season. She followed that by six performances of all three roles in the Trittico (telecast), and then ten repeats of her star turn as Musetta, now in the sumptuous Zeffirelli production (telecast and broadcast.) As if that weren’t enough to keep her busy for one season, she also sang seven performances of Elena in Vespri, including a broadcast. That makes for 29 performances in the house in a single season, something of a record among star sopranos who, in those years, generally came for one run of one opera, rarely for more than eight performances. There were eleven performances (Norma and Cio-Cio-San) on that year’s tour as well.

One has to admit that it was around this time that the voice was starting to show signs of wear and tear, especially where those always persnickety high fortes were concerned. You can compare her two Musettas on YouTube to get the idea, although B was always the note (not C) that was out of line in the voice. The Waltz as a result did unduly expose shortcomings. Strident high notes were easy to point a finger at, and people did. Renata didn’t have the luck Milanov and Tebaldi did with their later performances, which, when you listen to them (as wonderful as they are), are a great deal more vocally disorganized that the Scotto of this period, and, yet, to which the Met audiences seemingly turned a blind ear.

Perhaps that’s why things quieted down on the Scotto front as the 1980s wore on, although she steadily received new productions, including, in 1982-83, Peter Hall’s unfortunate Macbeth (that was the one with the stuffed cats and the bow in Renata’s hair for her first costume), which she sang for nine performances, followed by eight performances of Adriana Lecouvreur and a Sunday evening recital with Levine at the piano in which she performed her usual fare of Italian composizioni da camera.

For reasons that never came to light, Renata chose to be in Vienna singing Tosca the day of the Met’s Centennial Gala, although she participated in the 1983-84 season by reviving Macbeth (seven performances including a broadcast and minus most of Peter Hall’s Hallowe’en tchochkes) and taking on Zandonai’s Francesca da Rimini for eight performances (telecast and broadcast), plus fifteen performances on tour (two in each city) of Tosca and Francesca.

Renata would sing another three seasons at the Met, but in only one opera each year, markedly less than in years past. Thus 1984-85 saw her in a very interesting experiment in Mozart, Vitellia in La clemenza di Tito (eight performances, oddly no broadcast) 1985-86 brought a revival of Francesca for seven performances (broadcast included), and, then, in 1986-87, a final round of the opera of her debut twenty-one years earlier, Butterfly, which she also was given the opportunity to direct as something of a kiss-off. That was given nine times, climaxing in a January broadcast that was her de facto farewell. Although there was the eminently logical possibility of at least Werther opposite Alfredo Kraus, I think we all knew that that was the end. There was even champagne in the Green Room to mark the occasion.

That wasn’t the end of her career, however. She added the inevitable Fedora to her repertoire, sang Charlotte in Werther, and, as the years rolled on, took on such interesting projects as a double bill of Menotti’s The Medium and Poulenc’s La voix humaine. There was also the Marschallin, a concert version of the second act of Parsifal, and, eventually, Strauss’ Klytämnestra, which would be her final stage role, as late as 2002. Compared to the glory years, it all combined to make a rather underpowered last act, but leading Italian sopranos don’t come from a tradition in which the passage of time was accompanied by a shift into character roles, and few are the singers who, like Leonie Rysanek, retained the adulation they had for their leading roles as they took on Elektra’s dreadful mother and Tchaikovsky’s gambling Grafinya.