On Thursday, December 13, 2012 at 5:40:38 PM UTC-8, Frank Forman wrote:
> Lisa Della Casa, Opera Singer, Dies at 93
> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/13/arts/music/lisa-della-casa-opera-singer-dies-at-93.html
>
> By JONATHAN KANDELL
>
> Lisa Della Casa, the Swiss soprano who combined an outstanding
> voice, stunning beauty and exceptional stage presence to become one
> of the foremost interpreters of Richard Strauss, died on Monday in
> Münsterlingen, Switzerland. She was 93.
>
> Her death was announced by the Vienna State Opera, where she
> frequently performed.
>
> Ms. Della Casa was one of a generation of sopranos to emerge from
> war-shattered Europe in the 1940s. In her Strauss roles, like the
> title character of "Arabella," which alternately calls for demure
> graciousness and soaring enthusiasm, Ms. Della Casa displayed "a
> wholly appealing kind of fragility, tender and unmannered," the
> musicologist J. B. Steane wrote in his book "The Grand Tradition: 70
> Years of Singing on Record." She was equally extolled for her roles
> in Mozart operas.
>
> By her own count she sang more than 200 performances each of
> Arabella, Donna Elvira (in Mozart's "Don Giovanni") and Countess
> Almaviva (in Mozart's "Marriage of Figaro"), and more than 100
> performances each of Ariadne (in Strauss's "Ariadne auf Naxos"),
> Fiordiligi (in Mozart's "Così Fan Tutte"), Pamina (in Mozart's
> "Magic Flute") and the Marschallin (in Strauss's "Rosenkavalier").
>
> In Europe, where Ms. Della Casa performed at the major opera houses,
> her beauty and charisma could seduce even a great conductor like
> Herbert von Karajan into pursuing her for roles that were out of her
> vocal range.
>
> "Karajan saw me as the Marschallin and, if you can believe it,
> immediately asked me to sing 'Tannhäuser' with him," even though the
> role, Venus, called for a dramatic soprano or a mezzo with an upper
> register and thus was not at all appropriate for her voice, she said
> in an interview in Lanfranco Rasponi's book "The Last Prima Donnas."
> "He told me I had just the right kind of sexiness to make a splendid
> goddess of love." She turned down the role.
>
> Her complaint was the opposite at the Metropolitan Opera, where, she
> said, the general manager Rudolf Bing typecast her. She sang four
> roles at the Met--Countess Almaviva, Donna Elvira, the Marschallin
> and Arabella--a total of 114 times in her 147 performances.
>
> "My 15 seasons at the Metropolitan were not happy ones," Ms. Della
> Casa told Mr. Rasponi. "Mr. Bing would not have it any other way,
> for he kept repeating that I was indispensable for the Mozart and
> Strauss operas, and that he had a surplus of sopranos for the
> Italian and French ones."
>
> Yet Ms. Della Casa rarely bickered or engaged in offstage dramatics.
> In an opera world notorious for outsize egos and histrionic
> rivalries, her colleagues openly admired her. The Romanian soprano
> Maria Cebotari, famous for her portrayal of Arabella in the 1940s,
> lobbied for the young Ms. Della Casa to sing alongside her in the
> role of Zdenka. "I'll put my hand in the fire for her," Ms. Cebotari
> told a Vienna opera manager who was skeptical of this relatively
> unknown soprano's talent.
>
> Ms. Della Casa was also admired for her glamorous good looks. The
> German soprano Anneliese Rothenberger compared her to Elizabeth
> Taylor.
>
> Still, at 55 and at the height of her career, she abruptly announced
> her retirement in 1974 after singing her last Arabella at the Vienna
> State Opera. She then retreated with her husband, Dragan Debeljevic,
> and their daughter, Vesna, who was often in poor health, to their
> castle near Lake Constance in Switzerland. She offered no public
> explanations, nor was she ever tempted into recitals or master
> classes.
>
> Lisa Della Casa was born on Feb. 2, 1919, in Burgdorf, near Bern, to
> an Italian-Swiss father, an ophthalmologist, and a Bavarian-born
> mother, who ran a restaurant. Her parents, both musically inclined,
> encouraged her to pursue an opera career. At 15 she began vocal
> studies at the Zurich Conservatory under Margarete Haeser, her only
> teacher, who instructed her in a mixture of bel canto and Strauss.
>
> Ms. Della Casa made her debut in 1941 in the title role of Puccini's
> "Madama Butterfly" at the Solothurn-Biel Municipal Theater in
> Switzerland. Only two years later she joined the ensemble of the
> Zurich Municipal Opera House, making her debut as Annina in "Der
> Rosenkavalier," a role written for a mezzo. At the Zurich Opera she
> went on to perform most notably as the Queen of the Night in "The
> Magic Flute" and Dorabella in "Così Fan Tutte."
>
> After World War II Ms. Della Casa moved on to the more prominent
> opera stages of Austria. She appeared first at the Salzburg Festival
> in 1947 as Zdenka in "Arabella"; after hearing her premiere
> performance, Richard Strauss himself asserted, "The little Della
> Casa will one day be Arabella!" In the fall of 1947 she made her
> debut as Gilda in Verdi's "Rigoletto" at the Vienna State Opera,
> where she remained an ensemble member for 27 years.
>
> After a brief first marriage that ended in divorce, Ms. Della Casa
> wed Mr. Debeljevic, a Yugoslav journalist and violinist, in 1949. He
> largely dedicated himself to managing her career and helping to care
> for Vesna, their only child. (Information on her survivors was not
> immediately available.)
>
> In 1953 Ms. Della Casa made her debut as the Countess Almaviva at
> the Metropolitan Opera, where she continued to perform until 1968.
> Her early Met performances as Donna Elvira and Madama Butterfly did
> not impress the New York critics. But she hit her stride with
> Arabella.
>
> "There was a youth in her movement and a beauty in her appearance
> that might well have driven Vienna's gay blades wild," Howard
> Taubman of The New York Times wrote in 1957. "And her singing was
> unfailingly lovely--accurate, well focused and sensitively
> phrased."
>
> In the late 1960s Ms. Della Casa began to cut back her performances,
> particularly after her daughter suffered a near-fatal aneurysm in
> 1970. But the opera world was stunned four years later when she
> decided to retire. She spent the rest of her life with her family
> between their castle and a villa on the Mediterranean coast of
> Spain.
>
> "The strange thing about a singer's destiny," she told Mr. Rasponi,
> "is that you have to renounce everything for its sake, and then it's
> all over in a flash."

https://groups.google.com/g/rec.music.opera/c/D3IbIFLfAdo/m/__YWyYtmCQAJ

On 10/1/21 12:15 AM, gggg gggg wrote:
> On Thursday, December 13, 2012 at 5:40:38 PM UTC-8, Frank Forman wrote:
>> Lisa Della Casa, Opera Singer, Dies at 93
>> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/13/arts/music/lisa-della-casa-opera-singer-dies-at-93.html
>>
>> By JONATHAN KANDELL
>>
>> Lisa Della Casa, the Swiss soprano who combined an outstanding
>> voice, stunning beauty and exceptional stage presence to become one
>> of the foremost interpreters of Richard Strauss, died on Monday in
>> Münsterlingen, Switzerland. She was 93.
>>
>> "The strange thing about a singer's destiny," she told Mr. Rasponi,
>> "is that you have to renounce everything for its sake, and then it's
>> all over in a flash."
>
> https://groups.google.com/g/rec.music.opera/c/D3IbIFLfAdo/m/__YWyYtmCQAJ
>

What!! She died?? AGAIN??!!

Just 8G dredging up the past again.

-Owen