NEW YORK – Opera singer Anna Moffo, a soprano hailed for her glamorous looks as much as her singing, has died, the Metropolitan Opera said Friday. She was 73, according to the Grove Dictionary of Music.
Opera News Online, operated by the Metropolitan Opera Guild, said she died 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 U.S. and Europe starting in the late 1950s, but her career ended when she was 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 U.S. debut at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1957 as Mimi in Puccini’s “La Boheme,” then had her Met debut on Nov. 14, 1959, in the role of Violetta in Verdi’s “La Traviata.”
New York Times critic Harold 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.”
Several classical albums featuring Moffo were nominated for Grammy awards over the years. 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.”
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