Everything about Anna Moffo totally explained
Anna Moffo (
June 27 1932 -
March 9 2006) was an Italian-American
lyric-
coloratura soprano admired for her warm and radiant voice and great beauty.
Biography and career
Moffo was born in
Wayne, Pennsylvania to Italian parents, Nicola Moffo (a shoemaker) and Regina Cinti. After graduating from
Radnor High School she turned down an offer to go to Hollywood and went instead to the
Curtis Institute of Music in
Philadelphia to study there with Eufemia Giannini-Gregory. She was the recipient of a
Fulbright Program scholarship in 1954 and went to Italy to complete her studies at the
Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome where she studied with
Mercedes Llopart and
Luigi Ricci.
Moffo made her official operatic debut in 1955 in
Spoleto as Norina in
Don Pasquale. The following year, Moffo, still virtually unknown and little experienced, took on the challenging role of Cio-Cio-San in a television production of
Madama Butterfly for
RAI - the telecast aired on
January 24 1956 and made Moffo an overnight sensation throughout Italy. Offers quickly followed and she appeared in two other television productions, as Nanetta in
Falstaff and as Amina in
La Sonnambula. That same year she made her debut as Zerlina in
Don Giovanni at the
Aix-en-Provence Festival and also made her recording debut for
EMI as Nanetta in
Falstaff under
Herbert Von Karajan and as Musetta in
La Bohème with
Maria Callas,
Giuseppe di Stefano and
Rolando Panerai. The following year (1957) saw her debut at the
Vienna State Opera, the
Salzburg Festival and at
La Scala in Milan.
Moffo returned to America for her debut there as Mimi in
La Bohème next to
Jussi Bjorling's Rodolfo at the
Lyric Opera of Chicago on
October 16 1957. Her
Metropolitan Opera of New York took place on
November 14 1959 as Violetta in
La Traviata, a part that would quickly become her signature role. She performed at The Metropolitan Opera for seventeen seasons in roles such as
Lucia,
Gilda,
Adina,
Mimi,
Liu,
Nedda,
Pamina,
Marguerite,
Juliette,
Manon,
Mélisande, the four heroines of
Les contes d'Hoffmann, etc.
Moffo was also invited at the
San Francisco Opera where she made her debut as
Amina on
October 1 1960. During that period she also made several appearances on American television, while enjoying a successful international career singing at all the major opera houses around the world, making her debut at the
Royal Opera House in London, as Gilda in a
Franco Zeffirelli production, in 1964, also appearing in
Hamburg,
Stockholm,
Berlin,
Buenos Aires, etc.
Moffo remained particularly popular in Italy and performed there regularly. She hosted a weekly program on Italian television "The Anna Moffo Show" from 1960 to 1973 and was voted one of the ten most beautiful women in Italy. Moffo made film versions of
La Traviata (1968) and
Lucia di Lammermoor (1971) both directed by her first husband,
Mario Lanfranchi.
Moffo had also a prolific recording career. After recording Susanna in
Nozze di Figaro with
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and
Giuseppe Taddei, under
Carlo Maria Giulini, and recital of Mozart Arias and Coloratura Arias for EMI in the late 1950s, she became an exclusive artist for
RCA Victor with whom she recorded most of her best roles:
Lucia di Lammermoor,
Rigoletto,
Luisa Miller,
La Traviata,
La Bohème and
Madama Butterfly. She also recorded a recital of
Joseph Canteloube 's
Chants d'Auvergne,
Heitor Villa-Lobos 's
Bachianas Brasileiras No.5, and
Sergei Rachmaninov 's
Vocalise, under
Leopold Stokowski.
Moffo went through a vocal-crisis in the mid 1970s and withdrew little
by little from performing. Her final recording, Montemezzi's "L'Amore dei tre Re," with
Placido Domingo,
Pablo Elvira, and a surprisingly youthful
Cesare Siepi, showed some recovery from her vocal difficulties and hope for the future, but it wasn't sustained. Her last performance at the Met was for the 1983 Met Centennial concert, in which she sang the
Sigmund Romberg duet, "Sweetheart" with Robert Merrill, who also had also returned from retirement, and who was a frequent partner in
La Traviata,
Rigoletto,
La Boheme, and other operas. After retiring from singing Moffo remained active in the opera community as a Board Member of the Metropolitan Opera Guild and by hosting several tributes and giving occasional masterclasses. To the end, she was known as one of the most beautiful women in opera.
Personal life
Moffo was married twice, first to stage director and producer Mario Lanfranchi on
December 8 1957; the couple divorced in 1972. Her second marriage was to
RCA executive, Robert Sarnoff on
November 14 1974. Sarnoff died on
February 22 1997.
Anna Moffo spent the last years of her life in
New York City where she died on
March 9 2006, aged 73, of a stroke following a decade-long battle with
breast cancer.
Sources
- Alain Pâris, Dictionnaire des interprètes et de l'interpretation musicale au XX siècle (2 vols), Ed. Robert Laffont (Bouquins, Paris 1982, 4th Edn. 1995, 5th Edn 2004). ISBN 2-221-06660-X
- D. Hamilton (ed.),The Metropolitan Opera Encyclopedia: A Complete Guide to the World of Opera (Simon and Schuster, New York 1987). ISBN 0-671-16732-X
- Roland Mancini and Jean-Jacques Rouveroux, (orig. H. Rosenthal and J. Warrack, French edition), Guide de l’opéra, Les indispensables de la musique (Fayard, 1995). ISBN 2-213-01563-6
Further Information
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