She sang "Un Bel Die" from Madame Butterfly as an encore.īrazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos had an artistic partnership with the diva that lasted many years.
She performed to much acclaim for the University of Michigan May Festival in 1948 with Conductor Thor Johnson.
She also contributed to the Mozart revival at the Metropolitan Opera, becoming the pre-eminent Zerlina ( Don Giovanni) and Susanna ( The Marriage of Figaro) of her generation. The critics, including Olin Downes of the New York Times, raved about her performance and within a few weeks she was given the lead in La traviata, followed soon thereafter by Mimì in La bohème. She sang her first performance at the Metropolitan Opera as Manon on February 13, 1937, replacing the Spanish soprano Lucrezia Bori. Her performance was under the baton of Arturo Toscanini, who would become her greatest supporter and lifelong friend. Altogether more dignified was her performance a few months later with the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall singing La Damoiselle élue by Debussy.
operatic debut followed on January 21, 1936, when she and Danise sang in the penultimate production of the Washington National Opera, a semi-professional company not associated with its modern namesake the performance, of Léo Delibes's Lakmé, was marred by a fractious dispute in which the orchestra musicians declined to play without payment in cash, and ultimately the performance was accompanied by a portable organ, with some singers appearing in costume and some in street clothes owing to a similar demand by the stage hands and costume man. debut in a recital at Town Hall in New York City on December 30, 1935. Her repertoire included Lucia di Lammermoor, Amina in La sonnambula, Elvira in I puritani, Zerbinetta in Ariadne auf Naxos and Cecilia in Il Guarany, among other roles.īidu Sayão made her U.S. She soon became one of the leading lyric coloratura sopranos in Europe, especially in Italy and France. In the same year, she gained a great success with her debut at the Opéra Comique as Lakmé. In 1930, she debuted at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, and in the next year she sang a successful Juliette, in Gounod's Roméo et Juliette, at the Paris Opera. However, it did not last and in 1935 Sayão married Italian baritone Giuseppe Danise (1883–1963). After his wife, soprano Emma Carelli, died in 1928, the two became romantically involved and were married. While at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome, she met impresario Walter Mocchi (1870–1955). During the mid-1920s and early 1930s, she performed in Rome, Buenos Aires, Paris, as well as in her native Brazil. Her acclaimed performance led to an opportunity to study with the famous Elena Teodorini, first in Brazil, then in Romania and then to study with the renowned Polish tenor and tutor, Jean de Reszke, in Nice. At just eighteen, the gifted Bidu Sayão made her major opera debut in Rio de Janeiro. Her father died when she was five years old and her mother struggled to support her daughter's costly pursuit of a singing career. One of Brazil's most famous musicians, Sayão was a leading artist of the Metropolitan Opera in New York City from 1937 to 1952.īidu Sayão was born to a cultured family, from Portuguese, French and Swiss heritage, in Botafogo, Rio de Janeiro.
(c.1953)īalduína "Bidu" de Oliveira Sayão (pronounced bee-DOO sigh-OWN) (– March 13, 1999) was a Brazilian opera soprano. Bidu Sayão during a visit to the University of Michigan.