Anna Moffo: A Soprano to Remember

The Pennsylvania-born singer had a fulfilling career from her stints in Italian TV to America’s opera houses.

Lyric soprano Anna Moffo, in 1962. Harry Pot/CC0

Initially, extraordinarily beautiful American lyric soprano Anna Moffo planned to be a concert pianist or a professional athlete. Her singing did not have an auspicious beginning.

In kindergarten, she was made to sit in a corner not because of bad behavior, but because her voice was so loud it annoyed the other children. No matter how quietly she tried to sing, it was too loud and the other kids got angry, so she stopped singing in class.

And yet, when she was 7, she made her singing debut in a school assembly singing the African-American spiritual, ”Mighty Like a Rose.” So began many community performances at school, weddings, funerals, and as a singer delivering telegrams. A stellar operatic career that included over 900 performances as Violetta in Giuseppe Verdi’s “La Traviata” wasn’t even on her radar.

Trophies in hockey, basketball and tennis made pro sports seem like a possibility according to a 1963 Musical America article by Carl Sigmon. Ten years of piano study and playing viola in her high school orchestra, however, laid a solid foundation for what followed.

From Wayne, Penn. to Rome

The introverted youngster born in 1932 to very protective parents in Wayne, Pennsylvania. She graduated from high school as valedictorian of her class. About that time, Hollywood had approached the lovely young talent, and was rejected. Instead, she entered the Immaculate Heart Convent, but the parish priest knew of her musical ability and talked her out of it.

Without ever having had voice lessons, she won a scholarship to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia by singing the only aria she knew, “Un bel di” from Giacomo Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly.” Moffo called it “her lucky piece.” It later helped launch her career literally overnight.

Anna Moffo (R) with art historian Janet Cox-Rearick Waldman (L), at a cafe in Rome in 1954, when both were Fulbright Fellows in Italy. Rinascimento/CC BY-SA 3.0

Moffo won a Fulbright scholarship to study in Italy and was offered a contract with Columbia Artists Management simultaneously just before graduating college. She left home for the first time even though her parents were hysterical about her leaving. She made her 1955 stage debut in Spoleto, Italy as Norina in Donizetti’s “Don Pasquale,” but the 23-year-old’s big break came the same year when she sang the role of Cio-Cio San in Giacomo Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly,” directed by Mario Lanfranchi, whom she later married.

It was to be a televised production. “When I walked [on to the set], they had to raise all the doors. … No one was expecting me to be quite this tall. … I’m 5 and 7 and three-quarters [inches tall]. … Everyone was expecting me to be about 5 feet 2,” Moffo recalled in a radio interview with Studs Terkel.

“That was my debut in Milan and ... the beginning of my … real Cinderella story. I went to bed that night after the performance, absolutely unknown, and, the next morning, I got up and my phone was ringing from La Scala, and conductor Herbert Von Karajan, and Angel Records and the Salzburg Festival, and it was really very exciting.” In Italy, she was dubbed “La Bellissima.”

Lanfranchi, a producer for RCA Victor and Radiotelevisione Italiana (the national public broadcasting company of Italy), could be partially credited with Moffo’s later eventual problems resulting from vocal fatigue. “Recalling this period in a 1977 interview, Ms. Moffo lamented that she sang an average of 12 new roles a year for the first four years of her career, all star parts,” said New York Times writer Anthony Tommasini in Moffo’s 2006 obituary. “I was working much too hard and traveling much too much,” she said. I got mixed up in TV, films, things like that. Psychologically I was miserable, always away, always alone,” Moffo remembered.

Anna Moffo, as featured in an Italian magazine in the 1960s. Public Domain

One of Lanfranchi’s projects was “The Anna Moffo Show,” which aired on Italian television from 1960 to 1973. One need not be fluent in Italian to get the gist of “uno spettocolo musicale di Enrico Roda e Mario Lanfranchi,” and “spettocolo” it was. Moffo was bedecked in a sparkling gown, white fur stole, and holding a foot-long cigarette holder accompanied by a half-dozen tux-clad gentlemen cascading down a staircase a la “Ziegfeld Follies.”

Back in America

The soprano’s 1957 American debut was with the Lyric Opera of Chicago in the role of Mimi in Puccini’s, “La Bohème.” The Lyric Opera’s website describes that with “her luscious voice, complemented by fabulous gifts as an actress, she was a natural for opera and operetta.” Her 1959 Metropolitan Opera debut, as Violetta in Verdi’s “La Traviata,” was described by New York Times critic Harold C. Schonenberg, “In at least one respect, she lived up to advance billing: She is one of the most beautiful women ever to grace the stage of an opera house.” He continued, “Miss Moffo has a lovely voice. … But at this stage of her career, her work still seems a shade tentative.”

In spite of this somewhat reserved assessment, Moffo “soon became a favorite at the Met, and remained so well into the 1960s,” Tommasini remembered. She sang around 200 performances there. Additionally, through most of that decade, Moffo sang in the major opera houses in Europe as a leading lyric-coloratura soprano. Audiences were drawn to her beauty as well as her singing, but her signature role as Violetta in “La Traviata” was especially popular. Additionally, she was a major recording artist on the RCA Victor label. After divorcing Lanfranchi in 1972, Moffo married RCA chairman, Robert Sarnoff in 1974.

Sadly, by 1974, oversinging eventually took a toll. “I lost heart. I had always loved to sing, but suddenly it became the most frightening experience, horrendous, like going out on a trapeze,” Moffo said. Her weekly Italian television appearances added to the strain that caused vocal injury from which she never totally recovered. Her vocal exhaustion kept her offstage for two years. Not one to quit, though, Moffo found voice teacher Beverley Johnson to guide her voice back to health. They focused on lyric rather than coloratura roles, and eventually included more dramatic roles, such as Leonora in Verdi’s “Il Trovatore” and, later, even Vincenzo Bellini’s “Norma.”

“Anna’s voice has been there all the time. It’s just that somebody along the way forgot to tell her that you can’t run a Rolls-Royce without gas in it,” Johnson said.

Moffo made numerous glorious albums, including one especially gorgeous recording with conductor Leopold Stokowski that includes Joseph Canteloube’s “Songs of the Auvergne” and Sergei Rachmaninoff’s “Vocalise.”

Cover of Moffo's recording with conductor Leopold Stokowski.

She died of a stroke in 2006 after a 10-year battle with breast cancer. Moffo is remembered as being “blessed with beauty, brains, and a shimmering radiant soprano—all natural ingredients of the stardom she won when barely out of school.”

What arts and culture topics would you like us to cover? Please email ideas or feedback to [email protected]