Part Two: The Voice

In an Italian interview done later in life and available on YouTube, Renata pointed out to her interviewer that she was never a soprano lirico-leggero, although she sang (a lot of) lirico-leggero roles, partly because she could, partly because that’s what she was offered, and partly because they formed a coherent part of the trajectory of a career that, as she maintained in the same interview, was always carefully planned. Renata didn’t wander aimlessly into dramatic soprano roles the way so many sopranos who want to prove that they could sing anything do. There was enormous foresight to the evolution of the Scotto career, thanks to Renata’s intelligence and the sound advice she received throughout her career from the man she was fortunate to call her husband.

Any appreciation of Renata Scotto wouldn’t be complete without mention of Lorenzo. Renata, like Joan Sutherland, was lucky to have a musical advisor available full-time. A violinist from the La Scala orchestra, Scotto credited her flawless intonation (and it really was flawless) to the fact that she was married to a string player. But Lorenzo gave Renata more than a good ear. He was there all through the career, helping and coaching her through her journey through all of the Italian repertory. He even conducted on occasion, and is reponsible for leading both Renata’s Christmas record and her duet album (both sides of it, despite what the liner notes say) with Mirella Freni. Credit is unquestionably due to Lorenzo, but he wasn’t one to look for credit, and was a decidedly unassuming man. Alhtough a somewhat silent partner, Lorenzo was a big part of Scotto’s career as well as an obviously important part of her personal life, the father of Laura and Filippo, and a life partner until his death in 2021,

Lirico-leggero or not, at the outset of the career, the bel canto repertory made a safe harbor for what was still a very young voice. Renata wasn’t really a leader in the bel canto revival of the ‘60s, although she was at least partly responsible for getting Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi into the semi-standard repertory. She would also sing Bellini’s La straniera, and, a few years after that, she participated in the unearthing of a third Bellini title, Zaïra (which never caught on.) Renata wasn’t another Gencer or Sutherland (or, yes, Callas) when it came to reviving lost operas from the previous century, partly because Gencer and Sutherland had a lock on that particular repertoire. Moreover, Renata’s interest ranged to include other things besides the bel canto repertory: she was always in the forefront of Puccini sopranos, something Gencer and Sutherland obviously weren’t. She was also more concerned with Verdi, and she probably had parts like Amelia, Desdemona and Luisa Miller in her sights even when she was specializing in lighter fare. (I believe she also knew from early on that Aïda and Forza wouldn’t ever be for her.) This is emphatically not to say that she wasn’t a great Lucia and Amina, since she unquestionably was.  But, as her experience with Bing at the Met showed in the early 1970s, she was able to see past those roles to broader horizons that lay beyond the parts she had been singing for two decades.

This poses one of the more controversial questions where Renata was concerned: did she ruin her voice? Many people claim she did, by dint of singing repertory that was too heavy. But how can you say she ruined a voice that kept her going for fifty years? There were certainly vocal problems towards the end of the main part of her career, especially high fortes. Yes, the voice developed a metallic wobble, and, yes, her most ardent fans were aware of it. Lady Macbeth’s first aria (esepeciallly the cabaletta) was definitely rocky terrain for her, but, on the other hand, she was still able to float the D-flat at the end of the Sleepwalking Scene. I may be remembering it wrong, but my memory is of her even doing it with her back to the spellbound audience.

Although some observers might have thought that she started to take on heavier rolls higgedly-piggeldly in the mid-1970s, with no apparent aim but to ruin an important instrument, the reality is that her steps were carefully planned and responded to a voice that was evolving with time and which let her know that her days as Lucia were numbered. Lombardi to Vespri to Otello to Ballo to Trovatore to Norma to Anna Bolena to the Trittico to Adriana Lecouvreur, her showstopping turn as Musetta and then on to Don Carlo and Macbeth was actually a very carefully planned course. (Yes, I left Gioconda off that list on purpose.) She may have taken Ballo’s very heavy Amelia on as early as 1972, but her careful study of the score (and no one studied a score more intently than Renata Scotto) led her to believe that she could handle the part, letting finesse handle what sheer volume couldn’t.

That said, Renata did unquestionably encounter her share of vocal problems in the 1980s. I suspect that, as in the case of Callas, a dramatic weight loss may have been one of the reasons her top became so unsteady. Scotto said that seeing herself in the Bohème telecast of 1977 made her realize that she was (she uses the word in More than a Diva, so I can use it here) fat. While she certainly was, as my grandmother used to say, rather heavy set, she was hardly an operatic Lizzo. Still, she made the decision to lose weight, and lose weight she did. The result was a newly chic and mysterious Renata, who was clearly most satisfied with her new figure, modeled fur coats andeven appeared in Opera News wearing a tennis outfit, visor and all. Still, the weight loss could well have been a factor in throwing the voice out of whack. At the point she lost the weight, she’d been what Andrew Porter once termed “a delicious little butterball” for over 25 years, and her technique was based on a support mechanism of a certain heft. A rule of support is that you need more of it as the voice moves upwards, and it’s very possible that the physiological change in the lower half of the breathing apparatus caused (or at least precipiated) the wobble in the upper quarter of the voice. One also needs to add that, while the top certainly became problematic at forte, the rest of the voice remained intact, including her miraculous high pianissimo.  

 Although she sang roles in French (Marguerite, Manon and Charlotte in Werther) and, eventually, in German (the Marschallin, and, in concert, Kundry), Renata was always emphatically an Italian soprano. And she sang the Italian repertory literally from A (Adina) to Z (Zaïra). Her focus was always on the music of her countrymen, and did much to promote their cause, both in terms of the obscure operas she sang (Capuleti, Francesca, even Refice’s Cecilia) and her recital repertory, which, earlier on, was built along the Bellini-Donizetti-Rossini-Verdi axis, and subsequently came to include composizioni da camera by composers of Puccini’s generation.

This means that Scotto spent most of her stage career singing in her native tongue. And she sang in a gorgeous Italian, the vowels exemplary, and, except when getting to the highest notes was concerned, nary a dropped consonant. (She did have an oddity, which she shared with that other great stylist, Carlo Bergonzi, of closing down on the “u” vowel so that, in particular, “qui” almost sounded like “qvi”.) The words were always there, because, to Renata, there was no such thing as vocal music without text.

In a nutshell, she had a way with words, and, so often, my memories of Renata’s performances are of words infused with seemingly infinite shades of musical meaning. An example of her way of handling things: the “vergogna, signore” in the Act II finale of Macbeth. She was withering in her rejection of the ranting Macbeth, and, then, forged a connection between that and the equally conspicuous Verdian parola scenica “o vergogna” in the Sleepwalking Scene. There was always extraordinary verbal acuity to Scotto’s interpretations, an acuity linked to her native language, which, it probably comes as no surprise, she spoke very beautifully when she wasn’t busy singing in it.

As the misunderstanding of a certain Greek-American soprano’s art has proliferated, people have come to distinguish operatic acting from operatic singing, as though the two could be separated. Scotto was definitely a great actress, as anyone who saw her could attest. She was short of stature (she regularly wore wedgies under her costumes to disguise her lack of height), but was able to be incredibly expressive with it, as with small hands that she was able to make read at the back of the Family Circle.

Her stage presence was extraordinary. Not something that can be taught, Renata had it in spades. My friends who had the good fortune to see her Adina were years later still raving about how she was able to dominate the stage in the opening scene with her back to the audience. When she was on stage, you knew it.

However good (and savvy) an actress Scotto was, the acting was always linked to the music. Her acting was so good because it was born of the music and the words she was singing. That’s not to say she moved to the music (only an Olympia should do that), but she moved with the music so that it infused and intensified every gesture she made. She never sang unmusically; she also never moved unmusically.

I kind of put my foot in it early in my years of visiting Renata after performances. The opera had been Adriana Lecouvreur, and her delivery of the Racine monologue in the third act was brilliant. Thinking that I was giving her an apt compliment, I said, “you should play Phèdre on the stage.” She thanked me…and then said “yes…but for the moment I prefer to sing.” Looking back (with a bit of a blush) at my comment, I wonder whether I was even right. Would Scotto have been so great an actress without the music to guide her? It’s an interesting question. I guess we’ll never get the answer to it.

By the time I got to know her, Renata was an experienced stage animal who knew exactly what worked for her. And what didn’t. She wasn’t happy with the Peter Hall staging of Macbeth, and, when the production came back the following year, a lot of the silliness along with Peter Hall’s name had been removed. Renata then restaged her entire performance, especially the Sleepwalking Scene, to far greater effect than when the production was new. Her comment was, “I am my own director this year. It’s better, no?”

Of course it was.

The first time I got to experience Renata Scotto live was in the 1977-78 Met season, when she took on a few performances of what was then a recent addition to her repertory, Adriana Lecouvreur. I was still getting my operatic sea legs, and didn’t know the piece as well as I subsequently would, but one thing remains with me from that performance: the way she put out the candles during the act two intermezzo. It was just one woman on stage with a candle snuffer, but she made the moment into unforgettable magic.

I saw her next on numerous telecasts, and got to see the newly chic and mysterious Renata live in a newly chic and mysterious black dress singing a stunninng Verdi Requiem with the LA Philharmonic. I also bought many of the bonanza of studio recordings she made in the 1970s. I was already a fan. A big one. The next time I saw her live was after I moved east for college and was able to get to the Met door-to-door from my dorm room in under two hours. The occasion was the dress rehearsal of her Trittico trifecta. The panel that I remember the most was her transfiguring Suor Angelica. I still consider it one of the greatest things I ever saw on a stage anywhere. There was exquisite, incredibly nuanced singing, even a pianissimo high C sung from the wings, but it was a performance in which the acting couldn’t be separated the singing. It was Renata (as well as Angelica) in a state of grace.

That same season, I got to see her Musetta, and, again, she was unforgettable. There certainly never was a Musetta like Renata’s, and I’m quite sure there’ll never be another one like it. It wasn’t the most disciplined of performances, and there were some strident high Bs, but, although she was a bit naughty in the second act and stole the show, the other two acts showed her ability to scale it down and portray Musetta as a character. One of my friends, no fan of the evening’s Mimì, Teresa Stratas (whom I rather still fancied at the advanced age of 17), said that the only drama in the death scene was coming from Renata’s back.

Not only did I try to attend all her performances from that point on, but I was also one of the people responsible for throwing her flowers after every performance. Admittedly, the floral tributes were a little sparse, but, I was on a student’s budget. And, when the flowers did make it to the stage, Renata cradled them as though I’d thrown her the most spectacular bouquet in the history of flowers. I must also confess that I had an irritating knack for missing the stage and landing my flowers in the orchestra pit. Sometimes a kind player would toss the flowers up on the stage. Sometimes.

As with the “vergogna, signore!” in Macbeth, many of the most memorable things in a Renata performance were tiny touches. The “va!” before Maurizio’s exit in the first act of Adriana Lecouvreur, for instance. Or “innebria il cor” in the first act of Tosca (which I got to see her do in concert.) Or even just the “ah!” before “m’ha scordata?” in the second act of Butterfly. Very often, these moments were tied to musical cues that just went overlooked by other sopranos. One reason her Francesca was so effective was that she followed the composer’s markings exactly. There was more art to her pianissimo “lo sparviero torna?” in act three than a lot of singers put into a whole performance. And I’ll never forget my reaction (I nearly fell off the couch) to her “enfin!” at the end of the Saint-Sulpice scene when I heard the broadcast of her Manon. (Renata subsequently told me her idea had been that it was the one moment when Manon’s mask slipped. It was a masterstroke.)

The greatest lesson I ever learned from Renata (as a strictly amateur singer whose aspirations never went beyond singing first tenor in the synagogue choir) was that, whatever the question is, the answer is always in the music. She put it in so many words in one of her early master classes, when she was still learning the teaching ropes, but nonetheless proved herself an exceptional teacher, simply because she knew and understood so much and was able to communicate what today we’d call her process. She urged her pupils to look into (and not just in) the score whenever they were stumped as to how to interpret this, that or the other phrase.   

That Italian YouTube interview shows Renata describing her system for learning a new role.  She would begin by reading up on the character, then turned to the text…and then, and only then, to the music. Prima le parole, dopo la musica, in other words. Except that, for Renata, the music was always paramount. It came last because it was the most important thing, and, I think she was trying to say, you can only understand the music properly if you’ve done your research first.

Renata also made no secret of the fact that she listened to recordings when preparing a role. That’s one of the factors that kept her so securely within the Italian tradition: she never imitated Toti dal Monte, but she knew how dal Monte sang, how a lighter soprano might interpret Butterfly, and, in her coloratura days, what sorts of cadenzas and ornaments were customary. (She did occasionally write her own ornaments, as in Roberto il diavolo, for which she wrote a lot of them, but her grounding in the established tradition ensured that they were always very much in keeping with the style of the music. Her copies of the Ricci Variazioni, Tradizioni e Candenze Per Canto must have been falling apart from constant use.)

I mention recordings because of a very telling anecdote in which I had the luck to play a role. In the early 1990s, I was a clerk at Tower Records, which then stood two blocks from the Met. One afternoon, Renata came into the store.  I knew that she’d been contracted to sing her first Marschallin, and she came in asking for recordings of Rosenkavalier. I asked her about the ones she’d heard as yet, and her answer was that Régine Crespin’s Marschallin was her favorite. I suggested Lotte Lehmann’s abridged recording, to which she said of Lehmann, “she no follow the music.” I don’t think she meant any great disrespect to her illustrious predecessor, but I do understand what she meant. Lehmann did tend to make up her own music: her partiuclar genius was that what she made up worked so well for her. But things like the composer’s dynamics were sacrosanct to Renata, and she would work to understand why a certain phrase was marked in a certain way. She would then work technically to be able to do the composer justice: she needed quite a few performances of Vespri before she was able to manage to sing the two-and-a-half octave cadenza to “Arrigo, ah parli a un core.” I always suspected she was unhappy about having to resort to Verdi’s less outrageous alternative in her earlier performances of the opera.

In the event, her Marschallin (which I caught in Charleston in 1995, the last time I saw her perform) turned out to be a great deal closer to Crespin’s than Lehmann’s. My memory of the performance is that she was extemely careful to sing every single one of Strauss’ notes. I also recall what I said to her after the performance. I didn’t stick my foot in my mouth that time, but I did praise her for singing the role and for not lapsing into the traditional Viennese parlando. Her answer was the she wouldn’t have had the vaguest idea (“la più pallida idea”) of how to do that. Renata Scotto’s Marschallin was going to follow the music. It’s the only way she knew how to approach that – or any other – role.

Follow the music, she taught us, and you can’t go wrong.

There was one role Renata coveted, but never sang: Berg’s Lulu. She kind of had the role on the brain in the mid-80s. A friend (my partner in tossing bouquets onto the stage, or, as happened to both of us, into the orchestra pit) was directing an amateur production of Leoncavallo’s Zazà at a church on the Upper West Side, and I jokingly asked whether he’d offered the title role to Renata. He said, yes, of course, but she turned it down: “I no like Leoncavallo; I like Lulu.” When she took on Vitellia, she told me “I make a little Lulu”. Vitellia was as close as she got to Berg’s anti-heroine, although I asked her why she didn’t try for the part. Ten or fifteen years earlier, she’d probably have had exactly the voice for which Berg wrote the part, although Heaven knows what that would have done to her vocal longevity. Her answer about taking on Lulu was that it was written for a singer with a totally different type of ear training than she had. And it wouldn’t have done at all for Renata to take on a role in which she had to approximate the composer’s written pitches. So she didn’t exactly miss a bet, but I’d still like to know what a Scotto Lulu might have been like.

A few words about how Renata Scotto actually sang seem appropriate. Very much unlike that famous Greek-American soprano, who was an almost entirely intuitive musician, Scotto was, when it came to preparing a role, an intellectual one. I had an Italian professor at Princeton (this was around the time Scotto was singing Vitellia at the Met) who said, a bit patronizingly, that, if Scotto understood one thing, it was the impact of Maria Callas – the implication being that Scotto was trying to be the Second Coming of Maria. I disagreed with him then, and I disagree with him now as well. While Scotto didn’t exactly set herself up as the anti-Callas (that was left to Joan Sutherland, which is fodder for an unwritten article), and while she certainly understood what Callas had been out to achieve, there were few singers who were more different than Scotto and Callas.

Although both were great and incredibly expressive singers, they arrived at their end products in very different ways. Whereas Callas is reputed to have said that there was no sense in researching the historical Anne Boleyn in preparation for Anna Bolena, and she has a point (how much historical research did Donizetti do, after all?), Renata has told us that she researched her roles before she even began to tackle the music.

The voices were also very different: Callas was a dramatic soprano who tried to sing lirico-leggero roles (probably, as I’ve written elsewhere, to her own detriment.) Scotto was essentially a lyric soprano who began by singing lirico-leggero roles before, by dint of a voice that was changing naturally, determination, and, yes, chutzpah, was able to take on dramatic soprano roles in the later stages of her career. Callas’ repertory was indeed assembled higgledy-piggeldy in an effort to prove that she could sing everything. She burnt her candle at both ends, and she lasted all of thirteen years. Scotto had a plan, an increasingly controversial one, perhaps, but still a plan, and was able to sing for over thirty years as a result.

One of the reasons for Scotto’s vocal longevity was the absolute security of her technique. She spoke little of her first teacher in Savona, and gave the bulk of the credit for her singing to Mercedes Llopart. She only worked with Llopart for a year or so, so she must have been something of a prodigy at absorbing what her teacher was showing her. Scotto’s techinque, like that of all great singers, was based on an absolutely rock-solid column of air upon which the tone was always securely perched. As a result, she was possessed of a level of dynamic control over her instrument that few, if any, singers ever equalled. I’ve often wondered why Caballé always got credit for being the Queen of the Pianissimo. Certainly, Caballé’s pianissmo was exquisite, but Scotto used hers more musically, more frequently, more imaginatively, more reliably (with Caballé, sometimes you got the soft B-flat in “Pace, pace mio Dio” and sometimes you didn’t), and she was able to take it up as far as that memorable D-flat in Macbeth. Even when Scotto’s high fortes became rocky, the piannissimo was always there, and she knew how to use it. She knew that the way to get the audience to prick up its ears is to sing softly.

Her technique also enabled her to distinguish p from pp to ppp and to modulate the tone between all these different gradients of soft singing. At Renata’s first master class, a young soprano sang “Senza Mamma.” Renata first chided her for singing what’s part of a larger scene as a separate aria. (She said this applied to “Un bel dì” as well, although she herself had been “guilty” of singing that aria in concert many times.) In any event, after the soprano finished the aria on a good enough pianissmo A-natural, Scotto asked whether she could do a diminuendo on the note. The soprano may have thought Renata was insane to suggest such a thing, but another entry in the Scotto Rulebook was to vary dynamics as often as possible: the music is simply more interesting when not sung at a constant mf the way so many singers do. Her last encore at the end of her thrilling 1964 Moscow recital is that eternal chestnut, “O mio babbino caro.” She sings the aria with a wealth of expression while maintaining the basic simplicity of Lauretta’s appeal to her father. And she ends it in true Scotto fashion: the first of the concluding repetitions of “pietà” is attacked pianissimo, she then performs a small mesa di voce, and distinguishes between the last two iterations of “pietà” by singing the first one without connecting the notes, then slows down and sings a lovely portamento the final time she sings the word.

Most sopranos just sing the aria – it’s an awfully good tune, after all – without worrying too much about the dramatic situation, let alone all details Scotto discovers. She puts the music under a microscope , but, unlike other singers who do the same (a certain German soprano comes to mind), Scotto was able to put the pieces back together seamlessly. She put an enormous amount of work into preparing her roles. That’s what makes her recordings (official and unofficial, of which there are many) so compelling, even some forty years after she stopped making them.

This dynamic control was also wedded closely to her expressive use of the Italian language. The ebb and flow of dynamics was always dictated by what she was trying to say at any given moment, as was another key feature to Renata’s singing, the ebb and flow of the line. Her sense of rubato was second to none, and, indeed, I understood what rubato was when she explained at a master class that it was a matter of “rubare e dare al tempo” – that you have to give back what you’ve taken away from the tempo, and from that results the elasticity and Italianate quality of the line.

Renata had a full arsenal of vocal accomplishemnts at her disposal, and used them for maximum effect. She could sing coloratura, she possessed a real trill, although, even if it’s a tired bromide, her vocal displays were rarely for their own sake. There was always a dramatic and a musical purpose to her showier moments, although she understood what display for display’s sake was all about as well. My favorite memory of Renata in a master class was when she was helping a soprano who sang Semiramide’s “Bel raggio.” After being duly impressed by the soprano’s high E, she gave a totally simple and totally brilliant piece of advice: when you get to the second verse of the cabaletta, take a couple steps forward, as if to say to the audience “here are the variazioni.” She had her share of tricks up her sleeve, but they never came out as tricks, simply because they were always applied to some larger musico-dramatic purpose. She knew what worked for an audience after all those years on stage, and she wasn’t shy about making use of that knowledge. She also possed the intelligence and whatever else it took to transform a trick into magic.

Among Renata’s other accomplishments was the ability to sing legato. Her sense of phrasing was so effective precisely because she could bind the notes together into a cohesive phrase, and then animate the phrase by adding dynamic variety to it. Few (if any) sopranos are able, for example, to sing the great arching phrases towards the end of Amelia’s Gibbet Aria the way Verdi must have intended: piano the first time with the top note pianissimo, and only then forte for the repetition. One reason why so few people do it that way is because they lack the technique required to do it. While some people insist on remembering the acidulous top notes of the later part of her career and missing the rest, the reality is that Renata was one of the vocally most accomplished singers of her day. At her finest, she could make the voice do anything she wanted it to do.

She also knew how to employ the glottal stroke to add emphasis to phrases she didn’t possess the volume to make effective otherwise. Another friend (yes, we were a closely-knit group of superfans) once declared that Renata glottaled when she was in good voice.  That was the case, but one has to look past Caballé and even past Gencer and to Rysanek for someone who was able to use the glottal so effectively. Indeed, it was her use of the glottal stroke that allowed her to create emphasis without using chest tones she didn’t have when taking on Gioconda and (on record only) Santuzza. Or, to go to her magnificent Butterfly, the way she glottaled “lui” in “a lui lo posso dare” in the last act. There was a whole world of foreboding in just that single word.

She also had a way of, if it’s an expression, compressing a vowel (expecially ee and i) and placing the tone firmly in the mask, giving the tone a bit of the edge endemic to the Italian light soprano. This was essential to her navigating some of the more dramatic passages in the roles she sang. I don’t know whether I described that correctly, or if it’s just a fantasy of mine, but consider “in casa mia” in the second act of Traviata or Mimì’s “è mio” in her first aria. (or, and yet another “mio,” the one in Lady Macbeth’s “La luce langue” which has Verdi’s specific direction of “marcate il ‘mio’”.) One of the keys to Scotto’s longevity was that, for the most part, she went for emphasis over volume (that’s about as smart as an opera singer can get), and could avoid forcing that way.  

Overall, though, the quality that best describes Renata’s singing is imagination. Her musical imagination was second to none, which is why she was always able to find something in the music that she could make unforgettable with a touch of her vocal paintbrush. You listen to Renata and, when you hear something new, you think “of course!” so natural and so anchored in the music are her solutions to difficult phrases. Scotto often did things differently, but it wasn’t difference for difference’s sake.  It was because she was able to find things in the music no one else could.

In the later years of her career, she tried her hand at directing, beginning with the Butterfly revival that served as her farewell to the Metropolitan Opera. She made the stage action absolutely clear, and, among other things, got maybe the most detailed performance I’d ever seen from the once and future Charles Anthony as Goro. She also looked beyond marvelous in the Hanae Mori costumes borrowed from La Scala, including a stark white kimono for her suicide, which, in her staging was followed by seeing only Pinkerton’s shadow on the shoji behind her while Butterfly remained alone onstage.

She did a Traviata at City Opera that was televised, and, I have to admit, not especially transformative when I saw a revival of the production. She continued in this vein, relying on her years of experience on the stage, and those of being her own director (as with the Macbeth revival in New York.) But, I think, as with my suggestion that she play Phèdre on the spoken stage, she preferred to sing. Directing didn’t provide her with that elusive last act for her career.

What probably did was when she turned to teaching. Those master classes in New York were only the beginning of her work in that direction that led to the opening of a school in her hometown of Savona, where she taught, I believe, until her death. She had a great deal to pass on, and, given how her process for learning a role was something of which she was so acutely conscious, and, being a highly intelligent woman, she was able to articulate what she did. Not necessarily to singers who shared her musical sensibilities (which cannot be taught) or imagination (ditto), but she was better poised to be a teacher than a lot of other singers. With her school and her dedication to keeping the torch aflame, she may have found the last act to her career that eluded her otherwise.

Scotto was unquestionably one of the greatest singers of the 20^th century, and continued to influence singers into the 21^st. She was one of the greatest interpreters of the music of her countrymen: not too many singers were equally adept at both Verdi and Puccini, as well as Donizetti and Bellini and Cilèa and Zandonai. She was in all likelihood the greatest of all Cio-Cio-Sans, although she was perhaps even greater in the Verdi repertory. On a personal level, she left an indelible mark on my life, which might have turned out differently, not just without her, but without my friends who constituted the nucleus of what today would be called Renata’s superfans. I was deeply saddened by the news of her death a year ago. She was a huge part of some very formative years, and she gave me an immense amount of pleasure and thrills in the opera house, pleasure and thrills that continue whenever I play one of her recordings, which is frequently. We’re not going to see or hear performances like that ever again.

The world is less melodious and magical without her.