Renata Scotto, the last great opera diva, dies

2023-08-16 17:25:06

With the death of Renata Scotto, the opera loses one of its most legendary singers. The Italian soprano was 89 years old and she was considered one of the most beautiful and important voices of world poetry in the 20th century. So much so that she was considered the ultimate opera diva. In her long and prolific career she sang in the best theaters in the world.

The great María Callas, whom he replaced with resounding success in 1957, Luciano Pavarotti, José Carreras and Alfredo Kraus or Plácido Domingo were some of his stage partners. Scotto had been the widow of the violinist Lorenzo Anselmi since 2011, with whom she had two children.

Born in 1934 in the town of Savona, in northern Italy, she received her first singing lessons there, which she began at the age of 14. Two years later she moved to Milan to continue her studies. She made her debut in 1952, at the Teatro Chiabrera in her hometown, in the role of Violeta in Verdi’s ‘La Traviata’. Just a year later she sang at La Scala in Milan alongside Renata Tebaldi and Mario Del Monaco as part of the cast of Catalani’s ‘La Wally’.

His Spanish teacher, Mercedes Llopart, was essential for Scotto’s career, which triumphed on the world’s great opera stages, from the Bolshoi in Moscow to the Royal Opera House in London, where he made his debut in 1960, to the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. , where she performed as Madama Butterfly in 1965. It was the Spanish Alfredo Kraus who recommended Scotto to go to Llopart when the vertigo of success led the soprano to a serious vocal and personal crisis.

Strengthened, she returned to the stage and performed at La Fenice, at the Stoll Theater in London and at the Edinburgh Festival between 1956 and 1957. In Edinburgh, she replaced Maria Callas as Amina in ‘La sonnambula’, a role that established the Italian singer as one of the best interpreters of the bel cantístico repertoire. Among her most remembered roles, her unforgettable Cio-Cio-San in ‘Madama Butterfly’; Mimi in ‘La bohème’ or Lucia in ‘Lucia di Lammermoor’.

He then alternated the canonical titles with the recovery of less popular operas, such as Bellini’s ‘Zaira’, Donizetti’s ‘Maria di Rohan’ and Meyerbeer’s ‘Robert le Diable’. In New York, in James Levine’s stint as musical director of the Metropolitan, she starred in such epic productions as ‘Puccini’s Manon Lescaut’, with Plácido Domingo and Renato Capecchi; ‘Luisa Miller’, also with Domingo and Sherrill Milnes, and ‘La Bohème’ with Luciano Pavarotti, in the first of the Metropolitan Opera House’s television broadcasts.

With Plácido Domingo the soprano would sing in 1988 at the Liceo in Barcelona and a year later at the Zarzuela in Madrid the opera ‘Fedora’, by Giordano. Domingo said goodbye to her like this on her social networks: «With my heart broken by the death of Renata Scotto, one of the great singers in history, a teacher dedicated to young singers, and for me, personally, one of my stage partners. more frequent, with more than a hundred performances together throughout our careers».

Since 1997 Scotto was a member of the National Academy of Santa Cecilia. He lived in the United States in recent years, where after leaving the stage he dedicated himself to conducting opera and teaching at the Juillard School of Music in New York and at Yale University. In 2017 Scotto taught for the first time in Spain a vocal interpretation course organized by Amigos de la Ópera de La Coruña.