A God-Given Voice, a Life Devoted to Opera

Listening to Renata Tebaldi’s voice for the first time is a startling experience. I first heard it more than 20 years ago, while shopping for Maria Callas LPs at Tower Records. Suddenly, the air gleamed with an incredibly pure, honest, high, and commanding sound. It wasn’t just that her voice was so beautiful: the rich, powerful Italian soprano made you redefine what “beauty” might mean.Tebaldi’s voice wasn’t just dramatic; it had a calming, even healing power, giving a listener a sense of completeness and serenity similar to that achieved by viewing Greek sculpture. Even for those who never saw her during her nearly 30 years on the operatic stage, listeners for whom Tebaldi was only a voice on records, there was – is – something more than loveliness and charm to her sound: It’s a kind of glory, a radiance of creation and being, that makes you understand why admirers called her talent “God-given.”The voice is not only large, it’s grand, able to swamp listeners with sound and sentiment. Yet it has an intimacy in its softer moments that has all the embarrassed ardor of a secret being gushed into your ear by someone who wants to love you. Tebaldi was not as innovative an actress as Callas, but she certainly shared and expressed the pain of her characters. She didn’t come onstage just to show off that beautiful sound (as others, with less beautiful sounds, still do).Listen to her as Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, and it’s impossible not to swoon from the gorgeous tones coming from her throat, even as you wince over the loss and despair freighting them. As Butterfly realizes she’s been abandoned by the American father of her child and resolves to die with honor rather than live in shame, Tebaldi’s voice softens, glows, grows lighter: it’s as if her soul were already struggling to be freed from her body. She can make the horrific almost exultant, as if she knew what her character knows and we may not want to know: that death is not the worst thing that can happen.Tebaldi will go down in history as the great rival of Callas. Both began their careers after World War II, and they had problems with each other right away, since there was no one else in their own league to plot or politic against. In those days, divas had feuds that rival the wars of today’s rap artists. Fans literally fought on standing-room lines and booed one or the other (people threw vegetables at Callas).This was unfair, as their “rivality” (as Tebaldi termed it in her not-perfect English) was ridiculous. Callas was the most dramatic and musical singer of her day, a pioneer in reviving older, often forgotten operas. Tebaldi’s career was completely different, and on its face the more conventional: standards like Verdi’s Desdemona and Puccini’s heroines, concert appearances in the grand manner (long gowns, huge hair, predictable repertoire, screaming fans, and lots of encores).A modest, soft-spoken woman, devoted to her mother and her dogs and friends, she never married – or rather, she married music. Music was good to her during the 1950s, when she debuted and triumphed at most of the world’s opera houses (she came to the Met in 1955 and stayed almost 20 years) and dozens of recordings made her even more famous and beloved.Later, there were some career stumbles. In 1963 she withdrew from a Met production of “Adriana Lecouvreur,” a rarely performed verismo opera she had insisted upon appearing in, and for more than a year nursed and repaired her voice. It never quite returned to full form, but the last decade of her career still contained plenty of successes, especially when she took up the title role in Puccini’s “La Fanciulla del West,” in which she got to play a Wild West saloon keeper, pack a set of pistols, and ride a horse to rescue her sweetheart.Retired by 1976, Tebaldi taught and lectured to young singers, in part because she was worried about the future of her art form and in part because she couldn’t simply stop the flow of energy and love she had poured into it. It was this same dedication that had made what she did onstage possible.Tebaldi was a religious woman sometimes observed lighting candles in church on her way to a performance (those high notes didn’t always come easily). And her art had something devotional about it: Beneath the thundering chords of the orchestra and the soaring high notes, she caught opera’s instructional, comforting aspect.Operas can be musical lessons in how to live, or at least aids to get through living. Tebaldi’s singing not only took part in those lessons – they embodied them. You simply couldn’t believe human beings are, at heart, hopeless, when one of us could sing like that.That many got this message can be illustrated by recalling her last appearance in New York, in 1995, when she signed autographs at the Metropolitan Opera store – all day, as many as thousands, most far too young to have heard the diva live, showed up with albums, CDs, and hundreds of bouquets of flowers. Tebaldi seemed dazed at the crowd and its youth: I hope that day she saw how vast her achievement was, and how enduring it might be.

A God-Given Voice, a Life Devoted to Opera

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