Piccolo Collos

When the small, dark-haired woman walked into Milan's La Piccola Scala, a stagehand took one look at her flushed, distracted face and called for the doctor. Her maid, hovering worriedly in the background, suggested a psychiatrist. Her husband was blunt: "Now I know what it's like to live with a madwoman." But three hours later, Soprano Graziella Sciutti, 29, was out before the curtain receiving one of the biggest ovations of her career. The part she had played to perfection: the title role in a rarely performed opera by Giovanni Paisiello (1740-1816), Nina, ossia la Pazza per Amore (Nina, or the Girl Driven Mad by Love).

Soprano Sciutti (pronounced SHOOTee) is often referred to as "the Callas of La Piccola Scala" chiefly because of her flaring emotions (both on and off stage) and her incendiary dramatic power. Her voice is not exceptional: lighter than most, it does not have a particularly beautiful finish. But, as she demonstrated again last week in Nina, she outdistances most other singers in the way she throws herself into a role. Sciutti so identified herself with Paisiello's heroine that "I started to think I was going completely mad." With every movement of her curvy body and every inflection of her fresh voice, she threw into startling relief the flickering mind of a girl gone mad with grief. "An almost perfect execution!" glowed Milan's Corriere d'Informazione. Added a visiting London Times critic: "When Paisiello wrote this opera, he must have dreamed about her."

In her black, redlined cloak, black stockings and stiletto heels, Graziella Sciutti is now a familiar figure in Milan and an accepted operatic star all over Europe, but her career developed slowly. As a youngster in Turin, she studied singing, was later told that her voice was too frail for opera, and decided to become a concert singer. After her concert debut in 1950, she won a few operatic parts (Lucy in The Telephone, Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro), did not really get launched until Herbert von Karajan cast her in the role of Frasquita in a 1955 production of Carmen at La Scala. After that, Sciutti opened every season at La Piccola Scala (La Scala's intimate, 700-seat annex, specializing in rarely done or light operas). Elsewhere, she has shown her great versatility by singing everything from Mozart's Requiem (under Bruno Walter), to a TV performance of The Merry Widow, to Polly Peachum in Weill's Threepenny Opera. Soprano Sciutti is married to a former operatic bass from Seattle named Bob Wahoski, who long ago abandoned music to form his own European Travel Service, which ferries U.S. tourists through Europe in Cadillacs. If the tours sometimes seem eccentric, there is a reason: they often follow the operatic trail of Graziella Sciutti.

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