Music: The Girl from Radnor High

The most gifted female athlete in the history of Pennsylvania’s Radnor High School was a tall (5 ft. 7½ in.) brunette with a booming tennis serve and a fine basketball hook shot. After she left Radnor, the brunette became one of the best lyric-coloratura sopranos in the world. Last week a busload of teachers journeyed to Manhattan to cheer the school’s most famous alumna in a new kind of starring role. Young (24), shapely (36-24-36) Soprano Anna Moffo was making her debut at the Met in Verdi’s La Traviata.

For three years Soprano Moffo has been riding high on the European opera and concert circuit. To U.S. opera buffs, she is known as the star of several fine recordings, including Madame Butterfly (RCA Victor) and Capriccio (Angel). As Verdi’s consumptive heroine, she demonstrated last week that her acting is almost as good as her voice. Strikingly handsome in a hoopskirted, bare-shouldered, pink ball gown, she made the Violetta of Act I into a moving figure of feverishly hectic gaiety. As the opera progressed, the coquettish attitudes gave way gradually, until by the final act Violetta emerged as a woman of tragic stature. Throughout, the radiant, controlled voice lent a superb air of emotional conviction to the great arias.

And a Voice, Too. Soprano Moffo’s success at the Met caps a career that developed almost by accident. The daughter of an Italian-descended shoemaker, Anna grew up in Wayne. Pa., made her debut at seven, singing Mighty Lak’ a Rose in a school assembly program. After that she sang in choirs, school recitals, at weddings and funerals, without ever taking a lesson. When she left school, she turned down a Hollywood offer because she wanted to, become a nun. Later she decided that she lacked a true vocation, won a scholarship to Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute singing Butterfly’s Un bel di, the only operatic aria she knew. When she auditioned before Conductor Eugene Ormandy. he marveled: “It is impossible for anyone that beautiful to know how to sing, too.”

After she won a Fulbright scholarship to study in Italy, she got her big break in 1956 when she won the title role in an Italian TV production of Butterfly. Overnight Italy claimed her. “A voice of the sweetness and brilliance of our heavens!” wrote the Carriere della Sera critic. Voted one of Italy’s ten most beautiful women, Soprano Moffo was soon singing in major European opera houses, was signed by the Chicago Lyric Opera in 1957. She had turned down two previous offers from the Met on the ground that the proposed schedule demanded too much of her time. (This season she will appear also in the Met’s Faust and Marriage of Figaro.)

Uneasy Virtue. Now married to Italian Director-Producer Mario Lanfranchi (who originally signed her for Butterfly), Diva Moffo lives in an apartment in Milan, collects jazz records as an antidote to a steady opera diet. With her husband as lyricist, she writes pop songs, one of which, Citta, became an instant hit when she sang it on Italian TV (“Always, my city Your aroma is like a garden without flowers Like a tear in the sea”).

If anything bothers her about her career, it is the fact that directors so often cast her as a lady of uneasy virtue. In her first straight dramatic part—in the forthcoming movie Austerlitz, with Orson

Welles—she plays Napoleon’s mistress. In her next film, not yet titled, she will appear as a call girl. That news, says Soprano Moffo, she has not yet told to the old school crowd back in Wayne.