Magda Olivero, who died Monday in Milan at age 104, was a legendary soprano few of today's opera fans had a chance to hear live, especially in the U.S. She stopped singing several times during her long career, didn't visit overseas much, and was rarely active for the past three decades.
She appeared only in two productions with San Francisco Opera — as Tosca in 1978 and in Poulenc's La Voix humaine the next year — and yet she had legions of devoted opera fans here. One, OperaSuzy by email, had this memory of Olivero in San Francisco:
I took her to mass a couple of times at Sts Peter & Paul's. Very high mass once — sung. Imagine standing there with this elegant, pious and gentle woman — age 70(ish), and that "only Magda" voice softly right next to me ...I treasure that as her religion was immense in her life. There we were — she just another person at worship — obviously in her most happy place. Her lovely serenely joyful face said it all.
R.I.P. dear Magda. Heaven has a new soprano Angel.
Tom Huizenga writes in NPR's Deceptive Cadence:
I first heard Olivero almost three decades ago on one of her hard-to-get bootlegged live recordings, and I immediately fell for her unique sound.But don't take my word for it. Renée Fleming, one of today's reigning divas, is so crazy about Olivero that she made a pilgrimage to Milan to see her when the older soprano was a spry 94.
"She is such an inspiration," Fleming says, "beautiful, funny, a great raconteur. She gave me a breathing lesson. She had me feeling how she breathes, how she supports, and let me tell you, her abdominal wall is stronger than mine. Rude awakening."
That hard as a rock diaphragm, Fleming says, allowed Olivero to do things like floating dreamy, gossamer-thin tones up to the rafters.
"She does an unbelievable messa di voce on an aria from [Catalani's] Loreley on a high C that I could never hope to do," Fleming says. "It's just perfection."