Puccini: la Bohème (highlights)

Highlights of the complete recording of La Bohème, to be released as the only soundtrack of the La Bohème movie filmed by director Robert Dornhelm and starring Anna Netrebko and Rolando Villazón This is the first opera movie in many years that has been created especially for theatrical screening Great actors on the opera stage, Netrebko and Villazón have already shown with the best-selling 2005 Salzburg La Traviata that their artistry comes across superbly on camera.

A sparkling performance of La Bohème was captured live at the Gasteig in Munich under perfect studio-like conditions. The special atmosphere of the recording will form an ideal foundation for this film version of Puccini’s tale of artisans in Paris. The movie will be produced in February and is scheduled for cinematic release in Europe late 2008.

Anna Moffo was born of Italian parents in Wayne, Pennsylvania, on 27 June 1932, although some sources give the year as 1930 and others as 1935. After studying with Eufemia Giannini-Gregory at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, she went as a Fulbright scholar to the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome, where her teachers were Luigi Ricci and Mercedes Llopart. She made her début at Spoleto in 1955 as Norina in Don Pasquale, and created a sensation at the Rome Opera the same year when she appeared there for the first time. She was immediately engaged by Italian television to play Cio-Cio-San in a production of Madama Butterfly, and subsequently appeared on Italian TV as Nannetta, Amina, Lucia di Lammermoor and Maria (La figlia del reggimento). In 1956 she sang Zerlina in Don Giovanni at the Aix-en-Provence Festival, and in 1957 she was chosen by Herbert von Karajan to sing Nannetta in Falstaff at the Salzburg Festival. It was also in 1957 that she made her American début in Chicago, appearing as Mimì in La bohème. On 14 November 1959 Moffo appeared for the first time at the Metropolitan as Violetta, a role she sang 80 times with the company. Her success was immediate and she appeared regularly in both the old and new houses throughout the 1960s and early 1970s in 18 major roles, including Pamina, Norina, Gilda, Luisa Miller, the four heroines of Les Contes d’Hoffmann, Juliette, Gounod’s Marguerite, Massenet’s Manon, Mélisande, Nedda, Adina, Liù and Lucia di Lammermoor. To many opera-lovers in the USA, she was quite simply the most beautiful diva of her era. She was certainly one of the most talented, possessing an appealing stage presence, a lyric soprano voice of full, radiant tone and an impeccable coloratura technique, which she used with excellent musical taste. After some 130 Met appearances in New York and a further 70 with the company on tour, her last opera performances in the house at Lincoln Center were in March 1976 as Violetta. She returned to the Met on 22 October 1983 to sing a duet with Robert Merrill in the Centennial Gala, which was televised world-wide.

Extract from the booklet note © Tony Locantro, 2000