Farewell to the last great diva of the Italian opera school, the true heiress of Maria Callas, by temperament and stage charisma. Renata Scotto has passed away at the age of 89 after an extensive career that led her to sing in the best theaters in the world, leaving referential recordings of the most emblematic titles in her repertoire. She leaves one of the great opera figures of the second half of the 20th century.
Along with Renata Tebaldi (the great rival of Maria Callas) and later Mirella Freni, her contemporary, Renata Scotto was part of the last club of sopranos that reigned in the opera houses. She was also a great actress and her career went beyond singing, as she found another great passion in stage direction, which she combined with master classes.
Born in Savona, in northern Italy, in 1934, she made her debut at a very young age, in 1952, in the theater of her native town in the role of Violetta in La traviata and a year later she sang for the first time at La Scala in Milan with Renata. Tebaldi and Mario Del Monaco. The public would no longer stop adore her.
If she excelled in bel canto when she was young (La sonnambula, Lucia di Lammermoor…), she would later become a great Verdiana, which she recorded on records with operas such as Rigoletto or Traviata itself. To further excel in verismo and Puccini: Tosca, Madama Butterfly… Scotto interpreted the great roles for soprano in a referential way. Because of her style, technique and charisma. Mythical are his recordings of Norma, Butterfly or that Sonnambula that he sang with Alfredo Krauss.
Callas contributed to his success by canceling his appearance in a production of Bellini’s La Sonnambula at the Edinburgh (Scotland) festival. It was running in 1957 and it was presented by Scala itself with Lucchino Visconti directing the stage. Scotto was then 23 years old and a rising soprano in the opera houses of Italy. She replaced her with such aplomb that the public became so enthusiastic that they would not let her go, demanding that she come out to say hello again and again.
The following years it was constantly requested. She debuted at the Met in 1965 as Cio-Cio-San (Madame Butterfly) and under the influence of director James Levine she ended up becoming the diva of the Met. She sang with Pavarotti in La Bohème, which in 1977 opened the broadcasts of Live From the Met, a television series that brought opera to millions of American homes. She would sing with Plácido Domino at the Liceu Fedora, in 1988, although already in the sixties she had fascinated the Barcelona public in La Traviata and in Werther. In 2012 she would receive the Gold Medal from the Liceu.
His career found a second life in operatic stage directing: the first was Madama Butterfly in 1986 at the Met. Later, she took this opera to the Verona Arena, the Miami Opera and Genoa, while in 1995 she directed La Traviata, also in New York.
Since 1997, the soprano has been a member of the Academia Nacional de Santa Cecilia and in her last years she had lived in the United States where she taught at the Juillard School of Music in New York and at Yale University. Since 2011, Ella Scotto was the widow of the violinist Lorenzo Anselmi.
