Remembering Renata Tebaldi

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February 1, 2022 is the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Renata Tebaldi, a revered interpreter of 19^th-century and early 20^th-century Italian opera. We would not want the moment to pass without marking the occasion on OperaPost.

 

Tebaldi was born in Pesaro, a city on Italy’s Adriatic coast. At the age of seventeen she was encouraged to study voice and made her debut in 1944 in the provincial opera house of Rovigo. Her professional career began in earnest in post-War Italy when she was engaged for leading roles in La Bohème, Otello, and Andrea Chénier by the theaters of Parma, Trieste, and Bologna. In May 1946, she auditioned for Arturo Toscanini who tapped her for the prestigious inaugural concert of the reconstructed La Scala, Milan’s opera house devastated during the war. 

 

Tebaldi’s career securely launched, she appeared on Italy's major lyric stages alongside the country’s leading artists. London and San Francisco audiences heard her in 1950. The legendary rivalry with Maria Callas, hyped by the media, began in 1951 when they were together on tour in South America. By the late 1950s, when both had become stars in the United States, the dueling sopranos were pictured separately on covers of Time, attesting to the extraordinary publicity their ostensible feud had garnered.

 

In 1955, Tebaldi made an unforgettable Met debut as Desdemona in Verdi’s Otello.  From then on, New York would be her operatic home, in effect leaving the Milanese field to Callas. Renata Tebaldi’s name promised a sold-out house. But it was not only the voice that captured the public. The soprano’s warmth radiated across the footlights to endear her to Met audiences. She charmed her passionate fans for nearly two decades. In 1973, she said farewell as Desdemona, her debut role. For two years thereafter she was active as a recitalist.

 

We begin with one of Tebaldi’s first commercial recordings, made in Geneva by Decca/London in November 1949. The amalgam of the strong and the sweet, uniquely hers, is already on full display. She sings “In quelle trine morbide (In those soft lace curtains)” from Act II of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut. The soprano’s sustained legato and doleful tone carry Manon’s regret as she compares the luxurious abode of her elderly sugar-daddy to the humble room she had shared with her young lover. The conductor is Alberto Erede.

In 1958, at the height of her fame, and at the powers Tebaldi sang La Forza del destino in Naples. In this clip ( "Pace, pace" from the complete performance, available on YouTube) the soprano meets with astonishing, and perhaps unparalled authority the wide emotional, technical, and dynamic challenges Verdi set for the soprano.

The release of the 1952 album of Madama Butterfly, one of her first complete opera recordings, was instrumental in promoting Tebaldi’s celebrity. During the initial period of copious release of complete operas on long-playing records, she was the prima donna assoluta of Decca/London. Tebaldi’s onstage presence is discernable in this clip drawn from an installment of the regularly televised Bell Telephone Hour (1959). We see her in the opera’s final scene. Before taking her own life, the tragic figure bids farewell to her young son.

On the opera stage in Italy and elsewhere Tebaldi never once sang other than in Italian, whether the text was originally in Italian or not--as was the practice in Italy until the late 1950s. In the United States, that meant that she performed only the Italian repertoire. Her Marguerite (Gounod, Faust), Elisabeth, Elsa, and Eva (Wagner, Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Die Mesitersinger), and Tatiana (Tchaikovsky, Eugene Onegin), roles she sang early in her career in Italian for Italian audiences, of course, are very much worth your search on YouTube.