Maria Luisa Cioni - Donizetti: MARIA STUARDA, Final scene, Torino 1977, High D

THE SONGBIRD: Maria Luisa Cioni (1923 - 2016) was born in Florence and became one of the leading sopranos in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s, but one that most people have never even heard of. Her debut role was Oscar at the Verona Festival in 1947, the same year she debuted as Gilda in Paris. Regular appearances occurred all over Italy in provincial houses, often as Lucia which became one of her signature roles -- she sang it in Florence, Bologna, Genoa, Venice, Parma, Frankfurt, and as her debut at La Scala in 1968. Other roles in Milan included Gilda, Adina, Norma, Mimi, Linda, Maria di Rohan, Amalia in "Masnadieri," Elvira in "Puritani," and Marie in "Daughter of the Regiment." Outside of Italy, a sampling of Cioni's appearances include Vienna (Oscar in 1967), Barcelona (Micaela in 1969), Toulouse (Elvira in 1968), Cairo and Strasbourg (Violetta in 1963 and 1968), Johannesburg (Leonora in 1975), and Athens (Rosina in 1966). Her ability to crossover from florid roles to lirico-spinto roles (Aida, Amelia, Mimi, Butterfly) was emblematic of her career and a testament to her technique. When I hear her, I think it's sort of like if Montserrat Caballe had an upper extension. THE MUSIC: "Maria Stuarda" is the third of Donizetti's operas on English Tudor royalty. Based on Schiller's play from 1800, "Maria Stuarda" had a very rocky birth due to troubles with censors, singer rivalries, and illnesses in the cast. After its dress rehearsal in Naples in 1834 caused concern about disparaging a sovereign as well as a political distaste for Mary Queen of Scots, a rewrite was required with new characters and plot structure under the title of "Buondelmonte." It underwent more revisions and premiered, in the form we mostly know it as now, at La Scala at the end of 1835. It never caught on in Donizetti's era and went dormant until the 1960s when the work started to be re-evaluated. It was mounted for Leyla Gencer in Florence in 1967, for Joan Sutherland in San Francisco in 1971, for Beverly Sills in New York in 1972, and for Janet Baker in 1973. It is produced fairly regularly now (117 productions world-wide since 2004) I wager because the story of the great rival queens has entered the cultural consciousness with two star-studded films (1971 and 2018) and prominent theater productions of Schiller's play, plus the publication of a critical edition of the score in the late 1980s. The opera ends with an extended final scene in three sections as Maria prepares for her execution. The first section is a prayer (two versions posted separately on my channel), which is followed by the music presented here sung by Cioni in a performance from 1977.