Opera singer Anna Moffo, a soprano hailed for her glamorous looks as much as her singing, has died, the Metropolitan Opera said on Friday. She was 73, according to the Grove Dictionary of Music.
Opera News Online, operated by the Metropolitan Opera Guild, said she died on Friday, and a Manhattan funeral home confirmed her death to the company, where she starred for two decades.
The dark, graceful Moffo thrilled audiences on television’s Bell Telephone Hour as well as in opera houses in the United States and Europe starting in the late 1950s, but her career ended when she was just in her 40s, her voice only a shadow of what it was.
Moffo made her debut as Cio-Cio-San in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly in a 1955 television production directed by future husband Mario Lanfranchi, according to Opera News. Other early appearances included Norina in Donizetti’s Don Pasquale at Spoleto in 1955 and Zerlina in Mozart’s Don Giovanni at the 1956 Aix-en-Provence festival in France.
Moffo made her US debut at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1957 as Mimi in Puccini’s La Bohème, then had her Met debut on November 14 1959 in the role of Violetta in Verdi’s La Traviata.
The New York Times‘ Harold C Schonberg wrote that her work ”still seems just a shade tentative”. But he also said she had ”quite a lovely voice” and was ”one of the most beautiful women ever to grace the stage of an opera house”.
”The first impression Saturday afternoon was of a very pretty and graceful young lady, tall and slender, who seemed completely at ease in all the festive commotion of the first act,” Louis Biancolli wrote in The New York World-Telegram and The Sun. ”In neither quality nor size is the voice spectacular. But she has the makings of a star, and the stamina.”
When she sang the title role in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor at the Met opposite Carlo Bergonzi’s Edgardo on January 4 1965, the Times‘ Theodore Strongin wrote she ”sang the whole role, including the Mad Scene, for pathos, for lyricism, for purity of musical line. Her Lucia is a gentle, willowy creature, quite defeated by the events that surround her.”
Several classical albums featuring Moffo were nominated for Grammy awards over the years. Among them, she was nominated in the category of best classical performance, vocal soloist, in 1962 for A Verdi Collaboration, and again in that category in 1972 for Songs of Debussy.
She even made a couple of appearances on film, including Austerlitz, a 1960 film by the noted French director Abel Gance, and The Adventurers, in 1970.
Her last regular performance at the Met was as Violetta on March 15 1976, when she was still in her early 40s. The Times‘ Donal Henahan said after that performance that her voice had fallen into ”serious disrepair a few seasons back” and has not recovered much.
She returned to the Met stage one more time to sing a duet of Sweethearts with Robert Merrill at the Met’s centennial gala on October 22 1983.
In a lengthy profile in the Times in 1977, she said she was pushed too fast in the early stages in her career and was taking time off to learn new roles and strengthen her technique.
”I was working much too hard and travelling much too much,” she said. ”I got mixed up in TV, films, things like that. Psychologically I was miserable, always away, always alone. But I don’t think I was singing that badly until I reached a point where I was just so tired.”
In 1974, she had married broadcast executive Robert Sarnoff, who headed the NBC television network in the late 1950s and early 1960s and later was CEO of parent RCA. Her previous marriage to Lanfranchi, her one-time manager, ended in divorce.
Sarnoff died in 1997 at age 78.
She was born in Wayne, Pennsylvania, on June 27 1932, according to Grove. Moffo studied at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music as well as in Italy on a Fulbright scholarship. — Sapa-AP