Tebaldi, 100 today

Andrew Knapp says:

Thank you for remembering La Sublima’s centennial. It is appalling, shameful, adisgrazia, that the current, February issue of Opera News, unlike its rivals, the British Opera Magazine and Opera Now, has not seen fit to offer any sort of tribute to Renata Tebaldi on the 100th anniversary of her birth, February 1, 1922. Yet the parent of Opera News, The Metropolitan Opera Guild, featured Tebaldi in many of their benefits and Tebaldi was the first performer to be honored by the Guild in another fund-raiser with a sold-out, evening-long tribute at Alice Tully Hall; this followed shortly after her death in 2004. Similarly, Sirius Radio, under the ægis of the Met itself, is failing to play any Tebaldi performance this week or, since its inception, failed to re-broadcast 8 of her 20 Met broadcasts. Those include neither of her two broadcasts of her signature and debut role of Desdemona; the far-better performance of her Manon and what Paul Jackson in his surveys of the Met radio Saturday matinée broadcasts calls possibly her best Met performance, that is herManon Lescautwith Tucker; neither of her most tremendously exciting performances ofAndrea Chénierwith Tucker in 1960 and Corelli in 1966; not to mention her legendaryFanciullafrom 1970. One would have thought that Sirius would have finally broadcast at least one of those this week. Not even her record company, Decca/London, for which she was its biggest seller in the ‘50s and ‘60s, is doing anything. But then consider that the label of Tebaldi, Sutherland, and Nilsson has now sunk so low that its biggest name is a certain blind, alleged “tenor.” And, as for the Met itself, in both the Opera Magazine and Opera Now articles referred to Mme. Tebaldi as “The Queen of the Met.” This ‘Queen’ returned to the Met in 1995, 22 years after she had last sung there and 19 years after she had sung her final recital in New York, for a book-signing held in the lobby of the Met … and 5,000 people showed up. I was one of them and the man behind me had flown up from South America just so he could meet Tebaldi. And even though Mr. Bing had called her “Miss Sold-Out,” the Met has done nothing to honor her for this momentous milestone of one of its most greatly beloved singers. ~Andy