Anna Moffo's unique appeal

When Anna Moffo sang the title role in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor at the Metropolitan Opera in January 1965, the New York Times critic Theodore Strongin wrote that “her Lucia is a gentle, willowy creature, quite defeated by the events that surround her.” What’s remarkable about that observation is that it needed to be uttered at all. Lucia is supposed to be gentle, willowy and defeated. Opera’s most famous heroines— Violetta in La Traviata, say, or Gilda in Rigoletto, Mimi in La Boheme, Cio-Cio-San in Madama Butterfly, Marguerite in Faust— are ostensibly frail, delicate, helpless and vulnerable. But who usually fills these roles? That's right: dynamos like Joan Sutherland, Leontyne Price, Marilyn Horne or Jessye Norman— women whose large dimensions, powerful voices, commanding stage presence and total confidence render it impossible to imagine them as tender flowers of young maidenhood.

In the 1980s I heard Bellini’s Norma sung at the Met by Rita Hunter, a 300-pound soprano with a strongvoice and a shape like a hot-air balloon. The story concerns a Druid high priestess who has broken her vows of chastity and secretly borne two sons with the Roman pro-consul Pollione, only to learn to her chagrin that Pollione has fallen in love with her lowly virgin servant girl, Adalgisa. It’s a good story with memorablemusic, but Hunter’s girth overshadowed everything else about that performance— as the intermission conversations readily attested:

“I’ve always had two questions about Norma,” I heard someone say in the men’s room. “First, how could Pollione prefer Adalgisa to Norma? And second, how could Norma bear two children without anybody noticing? Today, both my questions have been answered.”

I doubt that any audience ever experienced such a problem with Anna Moffo. No suspension of disbelief was necessary to watch her as Violetta or Gilda or Lucia or Mimi or Cio-Cio--San. In each role she was supposed to be beautiful, and she was; she was supposed to be vulnerable, and she was. Her voice often seemed a shade tentative, but that was its great appeal: Virtually alone among operatic sopranos, Moffo was the real thing. You could really imagine her dying of tuberculosis or sacrificing herself for a cad like the Duke of Mantua. After all, it's pretty much what she did with here own career.

Moffo made her Met debut in 1959, when she was 27; but by the time she was 40— an age when most great singers have barely shifted into cruising speed— Moffo’s voice was in irreversible decline, the result of being pushed too hard in its early stages. She had traveled too much, spent too much time in the fast lane, and expended too much energy on peripheral adventures (like roles in movies and TV ). Small wonder that she was such a natural as Violetta, for Moffo’s story was Violetta’s.

Let this be her epitaph: Unlike the flawless voices of her great contemporaries, Moffo in real life was as vulnerable as the characters she portrayed. And as a consequence she was able to take her audience, for two or three hours on a given night, to that eery no-man’s land between art and reality that few other divas have ventured.â—†


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