Opera: Small Body, Big Voice

At midnight the day before tickets went on sale, fans began lining up outside Munich's Bayerische Staatsoper. Was Callas singing? Tebaldi? Sutherland? None of them, but a Canadian-Greek girl named Anastasia Strataki, known in the world of the opera as Teresa Stratas.

At 26, Teresa Stratas is not yet the most famous soprano around, but standing a flat 5 feet, she is surely the smallest. Performance by performance, review by review, she has been inching to stardom. As Cherubino in the Metropolitan Opera's Marriage of Figaro last December and as Liu in...

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