Soprano: Model 1944

Every middle-aged opera fan knows that U.S. singers are not what they used to be in the days of Melba and Caruso. Every younger opera fan can prove it to himself by listening to old phonograph records. There are probably fewer great voices in the world today than at any time in operatic history.

Many reasons have been advanced to explain this dearth. There is less incentive for fine voices than there used to be. Opera singing is outshone and outpaid by movie and radio singing, and no longer attracts the number of aspirants or the hard study it once did. The microphone, which can make Frank Sinatra's voice sound as big as Ezio Pinza's, puts no premium on volume. Dieting diminishes the female figure --and often vocal power with it.

The opera star, Model 1944, is usually slim, young, fetching--and with a somewhat slim voice. Perhaps the finest example of Model 1944 is a pert, pint-sized, Brazilian named Bidu Sayao (pronounced Beedoo Sigh-ow), popular soprano of Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera.

Small, but. . . . Sayao's voice is small, but she does the trills and roulades of the lyric and light-coloratura repertory with precision and grace. She has glinting quality. She has versatility. She is the Met's finest Manon, its best Mimi, one of its two finest Violettas (the other: Licia Albanese). Last week, in Mozart's exquisite Marriage of Figaro, she convinced Manhattan's toughest critics (and a 10,000,000 radio audience) that she was also the Met's best Susanna.

Baldwina de Oliveira Sayao ("Bidu") is a nickname) was born 36 years ago in Rio de Janeiro. Her father, who died when she was four, was a wealthy lawyer, and she was brought up on an island banana plantation ringed by a four-mile beach. She had a promising European career, became a fabulous collector of diamonds, was married for a time to the Italian impresario Walter Mocchi, who once headed both the Colon Opera of Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro's Teatro Municipal. She arrived in the U.S. in 1935, got her first Met contract in 1937.

Successful, but. . . . Sayao lives with her mother in a small suite in Manhattan's Ansonia Hotel. A once-famous, now bald and aging baritone named Giuseppe Danise, advises her on her vocal problems, coaches her in her roles, talks over all her contracts. She has few friends, rarely appears in society. Practically all her spare time is spent on needlepoint embroidery.

At the opera house, Bidu Sayao is a director's delight. She takes criticism easily, accepts extra rehearsals with imperturbable good nature. Bright-eyed and glancing as a sparrow, an instinctive democrat, she treats the Met's scrubwomen with the same serious friendliness she shows to wards its most important conductors.

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