- Opera singer (soprano).
- Long before she sang in the leading opera houses of the world, before she reigned at the Metropolitan Opera in New York and shared the stage with Luciano Pavarotti, Renata Scotto knew how to draw a crowd. She gave her first concerts as a young girl in Italy during World War II, serenading neighbors from her apartment window.They would thank her with candies - a rare pleasure amid the deprivations of the war and an early taste of the adoration of an audience.
- The Italian singer was regarded by some opera aficionados as an heir to the legacy of Maria Callas.
- Maria Callas, perhaps unwittingly, had helped launch Renata Scotto to stardom in 1957, during a production of Bellini's "La Sonnambula" at the Edinburgh festival in Scotland. Renata Scotto was 23 at the time and a rising soprano in the opera houses of Italy. By Scotto's account, Callas, ever the jet-setter, had a party to attend elsewhere and refused to sing when an extra performance was added to the run. In another version of the episode, Callas was advised by her physician not to exert herself by performing. Either way, Callas withdrew. On only a few days' notice, and having never before sung the opera,Renata Scotto agreed to stand in. She pulled off the feat with such aplomb that the audience kept summoning her back for curtain calls, Scotto recounted, until the conductor finally walked onstage and implored the house to "let her go.".
- Renata Scotto was a soprano of electrifying dramatic power who embraced the role of prima donna, and she became one of the most celebrated opera singers of the 20th century.
- She also taught voice in Italy and America, along with academic posts at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome and the Juilliard School in New York City.
- She made her operatic debut in her hometown on Christmas Eve of 1952 at the age of 18 in front of a sold-out house in the title role of Verdi's La traviata.The next day, she made her 'official' opera debut at the Teatro Nuovo in Milan in the same role.
- Ger repertoire included many of the most beloved soprano roles in Italian opera. In the bel canto tradition, she played the tragic title character of "Lucia di Lammermoor" and the lovely Adina in the comic opera "L'Elisir d'Amore," both by Donizetti.
- Renata Scotto willingly accepted the label of "prima donna." She at times demanded that conductors follow her rather than the other way around.
- In 1964 she performed with La Scala at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, the first opera company tour to the Soviet Union during the Cold War years.
- She debuted at the Met in 1965 as Cio-Cio-San, the title character of Puccini's "Madame Butterfly" and perhaps her defining role.
- She performed more than 300 times with the Met over two decades, often with such star tenors as Plácido Domingo and José Carreras, in addition to Pavarotti.
- She was an Italian soprano, opera director and academic teacher.
- In February 2008, Scotto hosted an artists' roundtable during the intermission of the Met broadcast of Adriana Lecouvreur and in 2009 she returned for another round-table with Natalie Dessay and Juan Diego Florez.
- She found a powerful patron in conductor James Levine and, had become the Met's unofficial house soprano.
- In the late part of her career, Scotto took on the roles of Giordano's Fedora (Barcelona, 1988), Charlotte in Massenet's Werther, the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier by Richard Strauss (Charleston Spoleto Festival, 1995 and Catania), Kundry in Wagner's Parsifal (Schwerin, 995), Elle in Poulenc's La voix humaine (Florence, 1993; Amsterdam and Barcelona, 1996; Torino, 1999), Madame Flora in Samuel Barber's The Medium (Torino, 1999) and Klytemnestra in Elektra by Richard Strauss (Baltimore, 2000 and Sevilla, 2002). Later concert appearances included Berlioz's Les nuits d'été, lieder by Mahler and Richard Strauss, as well as Schoenberg's Erwartung with the Accademia di Santa Cecilia Orchestra and RAI Orchestra of Torino.
- She and Pavarotti had been "like brother and sister," she said, until a 1979 televised performance of Ponchielli's "La Gioconda" in San Francisco, where the tenor helped himself to what . Scotto said was an unplanned solo curtain call. Storming off to her dressing room, Renata Scotto let slip an obscenity recorded on camera.
- Renata Scotto appeared as Mimì, with Pavarotti as Rodolfo, in the 1977 performance of "La Bohème" that inaugurated the "Live From the Met" broadcasts, a television series that brought opera - and herself - into millions of American homes.
- Scotto is considered one of the preeminent opera singers of her generation.
- In 1953, Scotto auditioned at La Scala for the role of Walter in Catalani's La Wally, with Renata Tebaldi and Mario del Monaco in lead roles. After her audition, one of the judges, the conductor Victor de Sabata, was heard saying, "Forget about the rest." La Wally opened on 7 December 1953, and Scotto was called back for fifteen curtain calls while Tebaldi and Del Monaco each received seven.
- She won two Emmys, for the telecast of La Gioconda and her direction of La traviata from NYCO.
- Also like Callas, she was known for fully inhabiting her roles, bringing intense dramaticism to an art form in which singers had once been content to stand on the stage and trill. She recalled crying the first time she sang "Madame Butterfly," the story of a Japanese geisha who dies by suicide.
- Like Callas, who sang the same roles to acclaim, Renata Scotto possessed a voice that was riveting without being traditionally beautiful. The nastier contingent of her critics dubbed her "Renata Screecho" for the strain sometimes detected in the upper range of her voice. But for her, and for those who admired her, opera was more than technique or even sound.
- After retiring from the stage in 2002, Scotto turned successfully to directing opera as well; her director credits include: Madama Butterfly (Metropolitan Opera, Arena di Verona, Florida Grand Opera, Palm Beach Opera); Bellini's Il pirata (Festival Belliniano, Catania, 1993) and La sonnambula (Catania, 1994); an Emmy Award-winning telecast of La traviata (New York City Opera, 1995); Norma (Finnish National Opera); Adriana Lecouvreur (Santiago, 2002); Lucia di Lammermoor (Music Hall of Thessaloniki, 2004); La Wally (Dallas, Bern); La bohème (Lyric Opera of Chicago, 2007 and Palm Beach Opera, 2009); Turandot (Athens, 2009); La sonnambula (Miami and Michigan Opera Theatre, 2008), and Un ballo in maschera (Lyric Opera of Chicago, 2010).
- Scotto's major breakthrough came in 1957 when she performed at the Edinburgh Festival in a La Scala production of Bellini's La Sonnambula; Maria Callas was cast as Amina. It was so successful that the company added an unscheduled fifth performance.
- In addition to directing at opera houses around the world, Renata Scotto ran opera academies in Italy and in New York and served as a coach over the years, to major singers including Renée Fleming, Anna Netrebko and Deborah Voigt.
- On February 27, 2011 he received the "Met Legends" award.
- She was the daughter of a police officer and a seamstress.
- The year before she retired from the Met stage, she became, in a performance of "Madame Butterfly," the first woman in the company's history to direct a production as well as star in it.
- Scotto sang 120 roles, focusing in the latter part of her career on heavier parts such as Puccini's Tosca and Lady Macbeth in Verdi's operatic adaptation of the Shakespearean tragedy.
- Scotto ended her career at the Met as she began it, as Cio-Cio-San, with her final performance in 1987. By then, she had begun to try her hand at stage direction.
- She was 12 when an uncle took her to first opera - "Rigoletto" with Tito Gobbi in the title role - at the opera house in Savona shortly after the war. The experience transfixed her, she said, and made her decide that very night to become an opera singer.
- She has been an Academician of Santa Cecilia (= one of the oldest musical institutions in the world) since 1997.
- In 2009 she received an 'Honorary doctorate' by The Juilliard School.
- She ventured beyond her traditional repertoire into works including Mozart's "La Clemenza di Tito" and Riccardo Zandonai's "Francesa da Rimini.".
- From the late 1990s, she developed a second career as a director. Furiously intelligent, she tolerated no fools.
- In 1972, she griped publicly, in an interview with the New York Times, that more than seven years after her debut on its stage, the Met had given her not "one new production, never, and no opening night either!" She conspicuously scaled back her appearances on the Met's New York stage until 1976, when she opened the season as Leonora, opposite Pavarotti as Manrico, in Verdi's "Il Trovatore.".
- Scotto's extensive discography included two recordings of "Madame Butterfly," one with tenor Carlo Bergonzi and another with Placido Domingo.
- She received 'Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung award' for her interpretation of the Marschallin in 'Der Rosenkavalier' ( her first German-language role).
- During the war, she fled with her mother and sister to a town in the nearby mountains, while their father remained behind.
- At 16 she moved to Milan, where she lived and worked, sewing and cleaning, in a convent of nuns while studying music.
- Her mother, Renata Scotto wrote in her memoir, took any work she could find, sewing uniforms for the Italian fascists, the Nazis and later the Americans.
- In 1997 she founded the "Renata Scotto Opera Academy".
- She was married in 1960 to Lorenzo Anselmi, who had been the first violinist in La Scala's orchestra and later became her manager and coach.
- She believed strongly in the theatrical elements of performing and always focused her energies on the meaning of a text. She also felt much of the standard verismo performing tradition to be exaggerated and vulgar, and strove to keep her performances as close to the composer's marked intentions as possible, especially with respect to subtleties of dynamics.
- She didn't really like Mario Del Monaco.
- She had a vocal crisis, losing most of her upper range; she credited her recovery to Alfredo Kraus (himself renowned for a solid technique and vocal longevity), who introducing her to his teacher, Mercedes Llopart. After completely restudying her technique, she re-began her career as a coloratura, making her London debut at the Stoll Theater as Adina in L'elisir d'amore.
- She perfected herself with Mercedes Llopart and from there began her long career which led her to sing in the most important theaters in the world.
- Once she gave Giuseppe Di Stefano a slap on stage. During a duet in "L'elisir d'amore", instead of singing, he wandered towards the back of the stage to eat an apple. She looked at the conductor asking him, with her glance, what I should do? Continue alone? In the next scene Di Stefano returned to the footlights. Her character, Adina, was meant to give him a pinch on the cheek, but instead she gave him a loud slap.
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