Born February 24th, 1934
Died August 16th, 2023
One of the most popular and pre-eminent sopranos of the 1960s and 1970s, Renata Scotto, who has died aged 89, was a singer who relished the role of a diva both on and offstage. The title of her 1984 autobiography, More than a Diva (a sourcebook of her acerbic put-downs of colleagues), implicitly acknowledged the persona for which she was renowned.
In fact, she simply knew her own worth, and demanded that it be recognised. Early in her career she was perceived as a rival to that other great diva, Maria Callas.
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The chief source of Scotto’s appeal lay in her feeling for the inner meaning of the text, the dramatic intensity with which she invested her delivery, and her stage presence. Like Callas, her strength lay in the spine-tingling conviction with which she inhabited a role and the thrillingly charged tone generated to project the character’s emotional state.
Her perceived rivalry with Callas, it has to be said, was often perpetuated (even after Callas’s death) by over-zealous admirers on both sides, so there is some irony in the fact that it was Callas who helped to launch Scotto’s international career. Refusing to appear in a fifth performance of Bellini’s La Sonnambula – inserted by the management against her wishes – at the Edinburgh festival in September 1957, Callas proposed Scotto as her substitute. Her performance as Amina was a huge success, earning her a dozen or so curtain calls and enthusiastic approbation from Callas.
At barely 5ft tall, she was considered by some to be too short to play a male role
For all her accommodation to the lifestyle of a diva, Scotto was born into a deprived fishing community at Savona, on the Mediterranean coast near Genoa. Her father, Giuseppe, was a police officer, her mother, Santina – in a poignant echo of Mimì, one of her favourite roles – a seamstress (a parallel to which she liked to draw attention). At the age of 12 she was inspired, by the experience of hearing Tito Gobbi live in the title role of Rigoletto, to become an opera singer.
She made her operatic debut in the house at Savona at the age of 18, singing Violetta in La Traviata, appearing the next day in the same role at the Teatro Nuovo in Milan. Her La Scala debut in 1954 came in the trouser role of Walter in Catalani’s La Wally. At barely 5ft tall, she was considered by some to be too short to play a male role; she was also obliged to wear a false nose as her own was felt to be too small. She nevertheless received more curtain calls than her distinguished co-principals, Tebaldi and Mario Del Monaco, combined. With her 1957 Edinburgh success as Callas’s surrogate, her star was in the ascendant. She performed in major houses all over the world.
At the Met in New York in 1987 she became the first woman to direct an opera (Madama Butterfly) while also singing in it
It was to roles such as Lady Macbeth – and to other heavier ones such as Leonora (Il Trovatore), Amelia (Ballo in Maschera), Desdemona (Otello), Elisabeth de Valois (Don Carlos), Manon Lescaut, Adriana Lecouvreur and La Gioconda – that she gravitated in the middle part of her career, from the lighter bel canto roles. Later still she essayed even more challenging roles such as Kundry, Elle in Poulenc’s La Voix Humaine, Klytämnestra, the Marschallin and even the unnamed woman in Schoenberg’s Erwartung.
At the Met in New York in 1987 she became the first woman to direct an opera (Madama Butterfly) while also singing in it, and went on to direct, with a certain amount of success, such operas as La Traviata at New York City Opera, Norma at Finnish National Opera, Turandot in Athens and Un Ballo in Maschera in Chicago. Her final performance as a singer came in 2002, after a career lasting 50 years.
Her husband, Lorenzo Anselmi, was at the time of their marriage in 1960 a violinist in the La Scala orchestra. He abandoned his career to become her voice coach and business manager, and died in 2021. She is survived by their two children, Laura and Filippo.