Beautiful Opera Star Lisa Della Casa Signed/Autographed 8x10 (dec 2012)

Description: Signed 8 x 10 By Opera Star Lisa Della Casa I recently acquired a collection of high end Opera Singer autographs along with a very nice (mainly) Opera CD collection, The CD's are listed so if you are looking for some great Opera titles, please check out my individual listings (Including Signed Di Stefano Discs) as well as 3923 Classical Collection Opera Beethoven Di Stefano Bjorling Nothing over $3.00. From her NYT Obit Ms. Della Casa was one of a generation of sopranos to emerge from war-shattered Europe in the 1940s. In her Strauss roles, like the title character of “Arabella,” which alternately calls for demure graciousness and soaring enthusiasm, Ms. Della Casa displayed “a wholly appealing kind of fragility, tender and unmannered,” the musicologist J. B. Steane wrote in his book “The Grand Tradition: 70 Years of Singing on Record.” She was equally extolled for her roles in Mozart operas. By her own count she sang more than 200 performances each of Arabella, Donna Elvira (in Mozart’s “Don Giovanni”) and Countess Almaviva (in Mozart’s “Marriage of Figaro”), and more than 100 performances each of Ariadne (in Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos”), Fiordiligi (in Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte”), Pamina (in Mozart’s “Magic Flute”) and the Marschallin (in Strauss’s “Rosenkavalier”). In Europe, where Ms. Della Casa performed at the major opera houses, her beauty and charisma could seduce even a great conductor like Herbert von Karajan into pursuing her for roles that were out of her vocal range. “Karajan saw me as the Marschallin and, if you can believe it, immediately asked me to sing ‘Tannhäuser’ with him,” even though the role, Venus, called for a dramatic soprano or a mezzo with an upper register and thus was not at all appropriate for her voice, she said in an interview in Lanfranco Rasponi’s book “The Last Prima Donnas.” “He told me I had just the right kind of sexiness to make a splendid goddess of love.” She turned down the role. Her complaint was the opposite at the Metropolitan Opera, where, she said, the general manager Rudolf Bing typecast her. She sang four roles at the Met — Countess Almaviva, Donna Elvira, the Marschallin and Arabella — a total of 114 times in her 147 performances. “My 15 seasons at the Metropolitan were not happy ones,” Ms. Della Casa told Mr. Rasponi. “Mr. Bing would not have it any other way, for he kept repeating that I was indispensable for the Mozart and Strauss operas, and that he had a surplus of sopranos for the Italian and French ones.” Yet Ms. Della Casa rarely bickered or engaged in offstage dramatics. In an opera world notorious for outsize egos and histrionic rivalries, her colleagues openly admired her. The Romanian soprano Maria Cebotari, famous for her portrayal of Arabella in the 1940s, lobbied for the young Ms. Della Casa to sing alongside her in the role of Zdenka. “I’ll put my hand in the fire for her,” Ms. Cebotari told a Vienna opera manager who was skeptical of this relatively unknown soprano’s talent. Ms. Della Casa was also admired for her glamorous good looks. The German soprano Anneliese Rothenberger compared her to Elizabeth Taylor. Still, at 55 and at the height of her career, she abruptly announced her retirement in 1974 after singing her last Arabella at the Vienna State Opera. She then retreated with her husband, Dragan Debeljevic, and their daughter, Vesna, who was often in poor health, to their castle near Lake Constance in Switzerland. She offered no public explanations, nor was she ever tempted into recitals or master classes. Lisa Della Casa was born on Feb. 2, 1919, in Burgdorf, near Bern, to an Italian-Swiss father, an ophthalmologist, and a Bavarian-born mother, who ran a restaurant. Her parents, both musically inclined, encouraged her to pursue an opera career. At 15 she began vocal studies at the Zurich Conservatory under Margarete Haeser, her only teacher, who instructed her in a mixture of bel canto and Strauss. Ms. Della Casa made her debut in 1941 in the title role of Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” at the Solothurn-Biel Municipal Theater in Switzerland. Only two years later she joined the ensemble of the Zurich Municipal Opera House, making her debut as Annina in “Der Rosenkavalier,” a role written for a mezzo. At the Zurich Opera she went on to perform most notably as the Queen of the Night in “The Magic Flute” and Dorabella in “Così Fan Tutte.” After World War II Ms. Della Casa moved on to the more prominent opera stages of Austria. She appeared first at the Salzburg Festival in 1947 as Zdenka in “Arabella”; after hearing her premiere performance, Richard Strauss himself asserted, “The little Della Casa will one day be Arabella!” In the fall of 1947 she made her debut as Gilda in Verdi’s “Rigoletto” at the Vienna State Opera, where she remained an ensemble member for 27 years. After a brief first marriage that ended in divorce, Ms. Della Casa wed Mr. Debeljevic, a Yugoslav journalist and violinist, in 1949. He largely dedicated himself to managing her career and helping to care for Vesna, their only child. (Information on her survivors was not immediately available.) In 1953 Ms. Della Casa made her debut as the Countess Almaviva at the Metropolitan Opera, where she continued to perform until 1968. Her early Met performances as Donna Elvira and Madama Butterfly did not impress the New York critics. But she hit her stride with Arabella. “There was a youth in her movement and a beauty in her appearance that might well have driven Vienna’s gay blades wild,” Howard Taubman of The New York Times wrote in 1957. “And her singing was unfailingly lovely — accurate, well focused and sensitively phrased.” In the late 1960s Ms. Della Casa began to cut back her performances, particularly after her daughter suffered a near-fatal aneurysm in 1970. But the opera world was stunned four years later when she decided to retire. She spent the rest of her life with her family between their castle and a villa on the Mediterranean coast of Spain. “The strange thing about a singer’s destiny,” she told Mr. Rasponi, “is that you have to renounce everything for its sake, and then it’s all over in a flash.”

Price: 49.99 USD

Location: Saint Paul, Minnesota

End Time: 2024-02-29T03:25:20.000Z

Shipping Cost: 6 USD