Debut at the Met

The witch Azucena in Verdi's Il Trovatore is a dusky Aragonese crone with a nasty habit of throwing children into bonfires and a gift (as the opera is usually performed) for upstaging tenors. Last week, as the Metropolitan Opera opened its 75th season, the part was sung in dazzling style by the Met's newest star, Mezzo-Soprano Giulietta Simionato.

Florid Warmth. First seen in Act II when she stood stage center with a bevy of gypsies belting out the Anvil Chorus, Mezzo Simionato, who is a controlled actress, never once tried to upstage Tenor Carlo Bergonzi; but she clearly dominated the show. In general, the Met's first new production of Trovatore in 19 years proved to be handsome, painstaking and a little dull. The sets by Motley, occasionally too cluttered, consisted mostly of a murky complex of interiors, giving way through gothic vistas to brilliant, upthrusting mountain slopes. The costumes, presumably of 15th century Spain, were handsome but with a tendency to fussiness. Conductor Fausto Cleva whipped his orchestra through at an elastic dramatic pace, kept the uniformly good principals--Antonietta Stella. Leonard Warren, Bergonzi--working in" easy tandem with the pit. And whenever things began to lag, there was always Simionato.

A small, compact woman (5 ft. 2 in., 120 lbs.), she managed, with wildly flowing hair and grease-etched face, to convey a sense of massively deranged malevolence while avoiding the comic-strip air of absurdity that clouds most of the roles in Verdi's preposterous but enduringly popular opera. As for her voice, already familiar to U.S. audiences from records and concerts, it emerged at the Met as a splendid dramatic instrument, with accuracy and brilliant sheen in the upper register, a florid warmth in the lower one, and the ability to negotiate the distances between them in a seamless tracery of sound. Moreover, Simionato showed that she could respond to the plot by pausing, turning on a note, flooding her voice with a whole palette of delicately shaded colors. At week's end she appeared on the Met stage again as Santuzza in Mascagni's Cavallena Rusticana, a role usually reserved for sopranos, and scored a second ringing triumph.

For the Madonna. The making of a great mezzo, in Simionato's case, did not begin until she was 16. The daughter of a prison director of Forli in northern Italy, she was stopped by her mother from taking vocal lessons, enrolled instead in a convent school in Sardinia, where she used to sing "for the Madonna." When she was 18. Simionato fried for and won a bel canto prize in Florence. Two years later she was singing minor roles at La Scala, and when she failed to get a major part in four years, she walked out: "I learned a bitter lesson--never again to enter a major theater by the service entrance."

In 1947 La Scala invited her back through the front door and since then Simionato has sung in every major opera house in the world (she signed with the Met in 1954, but canceled because of illness). Her repertory includes 58 roles, many of them demanding coloratura agility and hence treacherous for mezzos, e.g., Elvira in L'ltaliana in Algeri. Rosina in The Barber of Seville. At 41 a brisk, untemperamental diva, Simionato tours almost constantly, occasionally retires for a breather to her villa in Rome, where she lives alone with her Afghan "Tommy" (she was separated from her husband ten years ago).

To her sorrow, Giulietta Simionato thinks that the art in which she excels may be gradually dying out. The young do not respond to the classic repertory, and modern operatic composers are writing little worth singing. What is lacking? Melody. "The dissonance," she says, "makes me very nervous."

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