Europe's great lyric soprano is expanding her career—maybe
First there are the eyes, great brown pools that can reflect a doe's yearning or flash with Mediterranean fire.
The dark blond hair is pulled back, exposing a face still vulnerably cherubic at 46. The nose is a little broad, the lips full.
Vibrant and attractive, she could be a successful businesswoman or a television newscaster. But then Mirella Freni opens her mouth to sing. And suddenly there is only the voice—the voice of the world's foremost lyric soprano.
In an age when many singers stretch their repertories by taking on roles unsuited to their voices and thus hasten the end of their careers, the Italian-born Freni has remained close to her lyric roots. She comes from the world of the poor, consumptive Mimi in Puccini's La Bohème and the sparkling, scheming Susanna in Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro. Despite taking on some distinctly heavier parts, mostly Verdi heroines, in recent years—Aida, Desdemona in Otello and Elisabeth in Don Carlos—she is still rightly regarded as the finest Mimi and Susanna around. "The dramatic soprano voice is big, and for the coloratura you must have the high notes," says Freni. "But the lyric voice is about quality of expression. It must sing easily and softly in the high notes. I think I am really pure lyric."
Freni is familiar to American audiences from several excellent popular opera recordings—La Bohème and Madama Butterfly with Supertenor Luciano Pavarotti, Aida and Don Carlos with Tenor José Carreras, all conducted by Herbert von Karajan—as well as from films of Bohème and Butterfly shown here in 1965 and 1976. She captivated audiences at her U.S. debut as Mimi at the Metropolitan Opera in 1965 with her technical accomplishment and winsome vocal timbre. But Freni's talent still far outshines her American reputation. Her career has been primarily European: between 1968 and 1976 she did not sing in the U.S. at all. True, there were what she describes as "minor tax problems" with the Internal Revenue Service in 1966, but they were not what kept her away. The reason, she says, was motherhood.
"When my daughter was a little girl, I try to stay in Europa, to stay home with her," says the reluctant diva in her own Italo-English. Indeed, Freni temporarily quit the stage after the birth in 1956 of her daughter Micaela, born the year after Mirella's professional operatic debut and named for her role in Bizet's Carmen. It took two years of appeals by her husband, Pianist Leone Magiera, her coach and accompanist, to persuade her to resume her career. "Later, I am singing with La Scala, Covent Garden, Paris, Vienna, and it is difficult to come to America, I am so busy. Now I try, come si dice, to do a little slalom." She makes a wavy motion with one hand, skirting imaginary obstacles to illustrate the difficulty of fitting the U.S. into her European schedule. But she will: a Bohème in Houston and a Romeo et Juliette in Chicago later this year, Mascagni's obscure II Piccolo Marat at the Met in 1983.
One of her infrequent American appearances occurred earlier this month at the Tanglewood festival in Lenox, Mass.