Music: Diva Serena

Rudolf Bing, general manager of New York’s Metropolitan Opera Company, is not given to discussing his dreams, but it has been whispered that he is haunted by a recurring nightmare. In the dream he is Prince Paris, lost atop a papier-mâché Mount Ida on the Met’s stage. He is surrounded by three goddesses who insist that he choose the fairest of them by handing her an apple (Golden Delicious, supplied by Sherry’s Restaurant). The goddesses, of course, are the three reigning sopranos who, season after season, vie for favor at the Met—Zinka Milanov, Maria Meneghini Callas and Renata Tebaldi.

The choice is harrowing. In the dream, Bing hems and haws, but a decision must be made. The three divas’ pet dogs advance on him. Zinka’s spitz, Nickie, growls; Maria’s poodle, Toy, nips at his ankles; and Renata’s poodle, New, crouches to jump. “Choose, choose, choose!” sing the divas, to some nightmare melody that sounds like Alban Berg played backwards.

Bing wakes up, screaming.

Waking or sleeping, diplomatic Rudi Bing would rather stage the whole Ring Cycle with a company of midgets than publicize a preference among his three dazzling prima donnas. For sheer beauty of voice, the prize might go to Milanov, who at 52 still offers many a superb performance. For excitement, versatility and dramatic power, the apple would easily goto Maria Callas. But for sustained excellence of singing, it would goto Renata Tebaldi.

The three personalities are as different as their vocal specialties. If the award of Bing’s dream were ever to take place, Soprano Milanov, a buxom, outgoing, hearty woman, would probably take a bite out of the apple. Soprano Callas would coolly accept it as her due and have it mounted in diamonds. Soprano Tebaldi, if she followed form, would place it on her dressing table amid her collection of toy animals. On the surface, at least, Renata Tebaldi is that rarest of phenomena in the posturing, wigged-and-powdered world of grand opera—a soprano without apparent temper, temperament or obtrusive ego.

Angel Voice. Much has happened to bolster her ego in the twelve years since Toscanini boosted her to fame by making her part of the great, emotion-charged concert that marked the postwar reopening of La Scala. The Maestro conceded that she sang with “the voice of an angel.”

Legions of operagoers agree. In Italy her appearances regularly touch off frenzies of acclaim the like of which the country has not seen in 30 years, since the heyday of Claudia Muzio. Since she made her U.S. debut (in San Francisco) eight years ago, every house she has sung to has been sold out, and her Bohème at the Metropolitan two seasons ago drew surging, partisan crowds that choked traffic around the house until 2 a.m. Some 30 cities in this country are bidding for her services at a top price of $5,000 per recital. Her American recording royalties alone from the 23 titles released by London yield her $30,000 a year.

This week she received one of the few operatic honors not yet accorded her—the opportunity to open the Met season. In the title role of Tosca, opposite Mario Del Monaco as Cavaradossi and George London as Scarpia, she looked statuesquely handsome in velvet gown and jeweled tiara, was more than ever the creature of low-banked passion whom an Italian colleague calls a “diva serena.”

Champagne & Coke. Tebaldi’s eminence in the world of international opera is made the more striking by a shortage of competition. Only Callas, Milanov and Italy’s great mezzo, Giulietta Simionato, rank with her in the grand tradition. Below the leaders there is a substantial reservoir of fine veteran singers, all of them capable of turning in consistently competent and often inspired performances. They include Victoria de los Angeles, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Antonietta Stella, Eleanor Steber, Sena Jurinac, Lisa Delia Casa, Irmgard Seefried, Leonie Rysanek, Risë Stevens. Backing them up is a promising and fast-rising crop of newer stars: Lucine Amara, Anna Moffo, Gloria Davy, Leontyne Price, Birgit Nilsson, Anita Cerquetti, Aase Nordmo-Lovberg, Rosalind Elias, Irene Dalis.

Yet somehow, whatever the achievements of the oldtimers or the promise of the newcomers, opera fans invariably return to the bubbling controversy about just two singers—Tebaldi and “The Other One” (as Tebaldi partisans coldly dub Callas). Comparing them role by role, aria by aria is one of the more fascinating operatic pastimes. As far as The Other One is concerned, she considers all these comparisons idle. She and Tebaldi are simply not in the same league, Callas explained to a TIME reporter last week, because Tebaldi’s repertory is so much smaller. Said Callas:

“My admiration of her is of the fullest, and I am happy for her success. If I hear her sing well, I am the first to cheer her. But I live in another world. She is a vocalist of a certain repertoire. I consider myself a soprano—one who does what they used to do once upon a time. My repertoire, by God’s will and nature’s blessing, is complete. I have contributed to the history of music. I have taken music that has long been dead and buried and have brought it back to life again. If the time comes when my dear friend Renata Tebaldi will sing, among others, Norma or Lucia or Anna Bolena one night, then La Traviata or Gioconda or Medea the next—then, and only then, will we be rivals. Otherwise it is like comparing champagne with cognac. No—champagne with Coca-Cola.”

Opera in the Throat. There is no denying the greater variety of Callas’ fantastic repertory (although Tebaldi actually claims 36 operas in hers), or her immense superiority as an actress. But if Callas indeed has a champagne voice, it is also true that champagne can all too easily go sour—as many an operagoer can testify who has heard Callas on an off night. Tebaldi, perhaps because she attempts less, rarely sings an unpalatable note.

In Italy there is a saying, “The opera is in the throat”—meaning that a singer has it under perfect vocal control—and Tebaldi is believed by her fans to have her operas in her throat as has no other singer of her generation. She is a great piano singer, capable of purling out almost endless pianissimos of varying shades. Her Willow Song and Ave Maria from Otello are wonderfully pure yet warm—not crystals, but moonstones or pinkish opals. In Andrea Chenier, when the two lovers hail the dawn and go to the guillotine together, she is as radiant and fresh as the rising sun itself.

The splendor of Tebaldi’s voice lies not so much in its range as in the evenness with which she negotiates that range (she claims from the first C in the bass to high C). She has the unusual gift of moving from one register to another with no perceptible shift in the quality of her singing, which is almost always unerringly accurate and clear, rarely marred by the edginess or brassy reverberations that afflict some singers. Her special glory is the spun-out, floating high note—which Tebaldi achieves, seemingly without effort, by paying out huge breaths in small, even quantities.

Critic Olin Downes once noted that Tebaldi’s strapping Mimi bore little resemblance to the fragile figure Puccini and Murger conceived her to be; but he added that Tebaldi sang so movingly, with such tragic overtones, that her “enlarged portrait” emerged as more compelling than the original. The same thing might be said of most of her famous roles: in the end, a colleague notes, “they always come out Tebaldi.”

The Shy One. Unlike Callas, Tebaldi did not have to claw her way to the top: she was a success almost from the first time she opened her mouth professionally, and her career since has unfolded with a dreamlike simplicity. Her very serenity sometimes baffles colleagues who know the backstage thimblerigging that accompanies the rise to operatic fame. A shy woman who speaks almost no English and understands it imperfectly, Tebaldi rarely mixes with fellow artists. Nevertheless, she is almost universally liked and respected. One coworker, in a sincere but dubious compliment, insisted that she reminded him of “sheep and cows and beautiful animals in the country.”

No curtain hog, she has been known to refuse to take a solo curtain call after the third act of Manon Lescaut because “it is the tenor’s act.” Her patience with her fans is apparently limitless: she will sit hour after hour backstage after exhausting performances, dutifully signing autographs (“Poor things,” she murmurs, “poor things”). She still regards public figures outside opera with the awe of a country girl on her first trip to the city. Several years ago she heard about the “Night in Monte Carlo” ball at Manhattan’s Waldorf-Astoria, at which Prince Rainier was to celebrate his engagement to Grace Kelly. Without a thought that she could have been an honored guest at the ball, Tebaldi went over to the Waldorf lobby, settled herself in a chair and sat there wide-eyed, waiting to see Grace and the prince sweep in.

First Cries. But there is another side to the Tebaldi personality—a kind of native stubbornness that no amount of argument can shake. And occasionally, Tebaldi allows her well-reined temper to show. One opera manager who has worked with them both finds that he would rather face Callas’ furies than Tebaldi’s smile with its “dimples of iron.”

“I was nothing of a child prodigy,” Tebaldi once said, in a dimpled dig at the competition. “I was born with very normal cries—different from one of my celebrated colleagues, whose very first cries were musical and admirable.” Tebaldi’s first raucously normal cries sounded 36 years ago, in the fishing town of Pesaro on Italy’s Adriatic coast. Renata’s father, Teobaldo Tebaldi, was a theater-orchestra cellist of dashing good looks. His wife, Giuseppina, six years older than he and a former volunteer nurse, was an iron-willed woman. When Renata was only three months old, Teobaldo deserted his family, and Giuseppina returned with the baby to her family’s home in Langhirano, near Parma, where Grandfather was postmaster and owner of a general store. In the pale blue, two-story masonry house with the post office, a barbershop and ice-cream stand on the ground floor, Renata grew up, surrounded by a dozen relatives.

When she was 3½ years old, Renata contracted a case of polio that prevented her from walking until she was six (even today her right leg is still weak, which sometimes hampers her onstage). The polio attack and her father’s absence (he returned when she was ten, left again when she was 18) left Renata desperately dependent on her mother. One of the bitterest shocks of her childhood, she remembers, was going to see Giuseppina after a mastoid operation. A surgeon had sliced through a facial nerve, paralyzing one side of her mother’s face. “She went in a bella donna” says Renata. “She came out disfigured. I cursed the surgeon—I wanted to kill him.”

Arias for Dolls. A solemn, solitary child, Renata started playing the piano when she was eight. Grandfather occasionally took her over to the opera house in Parma, and Renata took to putting her dolls to bed at night while singing Parigi, O cara from La Traviata. By ten, her voice was so penetrating that the merchants downstairs complained.

At 17 she entered the Arrigo Boito Conservatory in Parma and began studying voice. In 1940, when she was 18 and on a Christmas visit to her aunt in Pesaro, she got her big break: an audition with famed Soprano Carmen Melis, venerated in Italy as one of the great Puccini singers of all time, and then a teacher at the Rossini Conservatory. Melis took on Tebaldi as a fulltime pupil, made her into the kind of singer she is today. Melis worked on voice placement, taught Tebaldi the piano singing to which her voice is naturally adapted. As models, Melis pointed to the sweetness and purity of Muzio, the powerful middle register of Maria Caniglia.

During the months just before and after the end of World War II, Tebaldi and her mother shuttled from one small town to another. During that period, Tebaldi made her operatic debut (as Helen of Troy in Boito’s Mefistofele) in Rovigo; on the way there, fighter planes strafed her train. After Toscanini hired her for the Scala opening in 1946, she smoothly embarked on the international operatic circuit. In her rise to the top she has experienced only one real failure—a performance of Traviata at La Scala in 1951 in which her voice broke twice on high notes. The audience of rabid Tebaldi fans “exclaimed in wonder and dismay,” as she puts it, and Renata took to her room for two months. But with characteristic stubbornness, she then accepted an invitation from the San Carlo Opera in Naples to sing nine successive performances of Traviata, and earned nine successive ovations.

War of Sopranos. Tebaldi’s rising star inevitably collided with the fiery trail of Maria Meneghini Callas. When they both embarked on South American tours in 1951, an ill-advised concert manager placed them on the same program in Rio, and Tebaldi slipped in several encores—in flagrant violation, Callas claimed, of a no-encore agreement. At a supper party, Callas charged Tebaldi with this and other sins, lectured her for her recent flop in Traviata. “We parted,” says Tebaldi, “with a certain coldness.”

What followed was the famed “War of the Sopranos,” with La Scala the battleground. While Callas bit off larger and larger chunks of the Scala repertory, Tebaldi withdrew completely. To a friend she said: “Two cocks are too many for one chicken coop.”

Nevertheless, it looks now as if Tebaldi and not Callas will eventually occupy Milan’s chicken coop. In a fit of fury at the accumulated grievances she felt she had suffered, Callas last spring fired off a statement that she and La Scala were through Tebaldi, operating on the somewhat confused principle that she did not want to “sing against anybody,” refused to move in to take Callas’ place. This season La Scala has neither one of them, but the betting is strong that Tebaldi will be back in Milan by next season. Recently, when Elsa Maxwell suggested a charity concert featuring both of them, Tebaldi said: “Not even God would approve such a benefit.”

For Tebaldi, life at the top of the operatic world has proved only slightly different from the life she knew on the way up. “Outside the theater,” says Renata, “I feel that nothing in me has changed since adolescence.” Although she has had several vague romantic attachments (including one to Bass Nicola Rossi-Lemeni), she has never seriously considered marriage. Says Callas, wife of wealthy Giovanni Battista Meneghini: “What I really wish for her is that she find some wonderful person to marry. Love completes a woman; her art would be even better.”

The Carabiniere. Until she died last winter, Renata Tebaldi’s mother accompanied her on all her tours, acted so effectively as a backstage buffer for her daughter that fellow singers affectionately nicknamed her “The Carabiniere.” She handled Renata’s mail (weeding out the occasional poison-pen letters from over-zealous Callas fans), took care of her clothes and costumes, stationed herself in the wings to minister to Renata with a Thermos jug of warm tea and an emergency flask of brandy when she came offstage. She was quick to resent any affronts to her daughter. Backstage lore has it that she once berated a tenor for holding the high B-flat in the love duet at the end of the second act of Andrea Chenier an instant longer than Renata did. Before every performance she used to join Renata in her dressing room for a few moments of prayer.

Recently, Tebaldi has allowed herself a few of the luxuries expected of a full-fledged diva. She has remodeled a ten-room apartment in Milan and crammed it with antiques she picked up all over the world. She travels now with a maid, a secretary and 30 pieces of luggage, into which she crams 70 pairs of shoes, 50 dresses and five mink coats. She indulges herself in jewelry—necklaces, fat rings, pearl and diamond earrings—and she plans to buy a big American car.

Neither success nor the passage of time has reconciled Tebaldi to her father, whom she resents almost as fiercely as she adored her mother, for having deserted his family. He has written Renata hundreds of letters but has never received a reply. Several years ago, when Renata was scheduled to sing in Reggio Emilia, where her father now lives, he wrote her how much he looked forward to seeing her again. Renata cabled the manager of the local theater that she would walk out if her father were in the house.

“It Must Be So.” With summer festivals extending opera into a year-round enterprise, and with operatic recordings gushing forth in unprecedented profusion, the life of a globetrotting soprano has taken on a frenetic quality that would have astounded the great voices of a more leisurely age. Tebaldi will sing 22 performances at the Met this season (Tosca, Cio-Cio-San, Mimi, Desdemona and Manon Lescaut), will then take a swing about the country on a recital tour, move on to Havana, Rome, Naples, then make her Paris Opera debut, go on to the Vienna Opera. July will be given over mostly to new recordings in Rome. Tebaldi’s pace would probably be even more furious if it were not for the fact that she finds it “a sufferance to get into a plane,” and consequently travels almost exclusively by train and boat.

Not even her staunchest supporters would claim that Tebaldi is a great or even a highly gifted actress. A tall (5 ft. 10 in.), ample woman with a handsome, highbrowed face, she generally moves through her roles with a kind of stolid and unvarying grace that sometimes reduces opera’s garish-hued passions to a decorator’s cool blues and whites.

In her occasional attempts to introduce visual fire to her performances, she inclines to what one critic called “the battering-ram approach.” This was noticeable again in her Chicago Butterfly, in which, after committing suicide, she flung the knife resoundingly to the floor and died somewhat grotesquely, crawling the width of the stage in response to Pinkerton’s thrice-called “Butterfly!” But her real failing, say her harshest critics, is not one of stagecraft but of emotional involvement. While some observers recall her on the verge of tears after a performance of Butterfly, others remember her picking herself up after the death scene in Traviata and strolling into the wings humming a pop tune.

Nevertheless, under the tutelage of various stage directors, including Roberto Rossellini (who directed her in Otello in Naples), Tebaldi’s acting has improved in recent years—most noticeably in her mastery of an imaginatively conceived and many-faceted Aïda. Now slimmed down from what she called her troppo robusta dimensions (“I lose 25 pounds in three years!”), she is better able to cope with bantam-sized tenors and the visual realities of such consumptive roles as Mimi and Violetta.

Above all, she has preserved the remarkable instrument of her voice in all its original power and glory. While other singers’ voices begin to fray, Tebaldi’s only grows more refulgent with the years. “A career,” says Tebaldi’s friend Licia Albanese, “should be slow, taken quietly. Renata is a quiet person. And she takes the singing quiet. She is right. It must be so.”