- Moffo, Anna
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▪ 2007American lyric soprano (b. June 27, 1932, Wayne, Pa.—d. March 10, 2006, New York, N.Y.), whose glamour, radiant beauty onstage, and warm voice made her a favourite operatic heroine in the 1960s, especially at New York City's Metropolitan Opera. She won a place at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music and later studied voice and the Italian language in Rome. She made her stage debut in 1955 at the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy, singing Norina in Gaetano Donizetti's Don Pasquale, and she first sang at Milan's La Scala two years later as Nannetta in Giuseppe Verdi's Falstaff. Her American debut took place in 1957 at the Chicago Lyric Opera as Mimi in Giacomo Puccini's La Bohème, with Jussi Björling, then at the end of his distinguished career, as Rodolfo. For her Met debut in 1959, she sang Violetta in Verdi's La traviata, perhaps the role for which she became best known. She sang in some 200 productions at the Met over the next decade. In addition, Moffo also had a brief career in Italian television and made several movies in Italy and the U.S. She was married twice, first to Mario Lanfranchi, a producer and director for Italian television, and later to Robert W. Sarnoff, the chairman of RCA Corp. Moffo was often cited as an example of a talent that was pushed too hard too early in her career. As a result, her voice deteriorated sharply in the mid-1970s, and, although she continued to appear on the stage, her career as a diva was essentially finished.
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Universalium. 2010.
