Happy Birthday Madame Zeani

The great Romanian soprano Virginia Zeani celebrated her 80th birthday on October 21 and unfortunately, due to my preoccupation with moving into our new house and preparations for a visit from Wilma, I neglected to mark it.

Zeani was one of the great singing actresses of the 50s and 60s, whose career was pretty much ignored by the recording companies and limited primarily to Italy. Her signature roles was Violetta, which was recorded by the Romanian state label Electrorecord, and is also available as a live performances from several different venues (see if you can find the Naples recording with Gianni Raimondi which apart from a very audible prompter and generally bad sonics is a fabulous performance). Her Addio del passato rivals Muzio's as one of the most affecting that I've heard. Happily, there are many other live performances available, which are a testament to her great talent as a singing actress of the first order.

She was married to the basso Nicola Rossi-Lemeni and both were on the Indiana University faculty in the 80s when I was student, although I did not study with either of them. They were both, however exceedingly kind to me and I remember them both with great fondness.

Once I get all my boxes of CDs sorted out, I will put on the wonderful series of recitals that Bongiovanni has put out from live sources. There was a commercial Puccini disk for Decca, which was released by Belart (coupled oddly with a Graziella Sciutti recital), but I'm not sure if it is currently available.

Madame Zeani has recently retired but I hope that she had a great 80th birthday and that she continues for many more!