Virginia Zeani, Commendatore OMRI is a Romanian-born opera singer who sang leading soprano roles in the opera houses of Europe and North America. As a singer, she was known for her dramatic intensity and the beauty, wide range, and suppleness of her voice which allowed her to sing a repertoire of 69 roles ranging from the heroines in belcanto operas by Rossini and Donizetti to those of Wagner, Puccini and Verdi. She also created roles in several 20th-century operas, including Blanche in Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites. Zeani made her professional debut in 1948 as Violetta in La traviata, which would become one of her signature roles; she has since sung the opera over 640 times. After her retirement from the stage in 1982, she became a well-known voice teacher. She was married to the Italian bass Nicola Rossi-Lemeni from 1957 until his death in 1991. A Distinguished Professor Emerita at Indiana University's Jacobs School of Music where she taught for many years, Zeani lives in Palm Beach County, Florida and has continued to teach singing privately.
Early life and education
Zeani was born on 21 October 1925 in Solovăstru, a central Transylvania village located in Romania. She has described to interviewers a childhood where despite bronchial troubles, she was always singing, even when she was fetching water from the river for cooking. She said that music had "entered her soul" after hearing a band of gypsies one of whom was playing a hora on the violin, and at the age of nine she became determined to be an opera singer after hearing a performance of Madame Butterfly. When she was 13 a benefactor in the village paid for her to study singing in Bucharest, first with Lucia Anghel, and then with Lydia Lipkowska. Zeani sought out Lipkowska when she had begun to doubt Anghel's assessment of her voice as a mezzo-soprano. Lipkowska agreed that her voice was that of a soprano and trained her in that repertoire. After World War II ended she emigrated to Italy and continued her vocal studies in Milan. By then she knew the leading soprano roles in four operas by heart—the title role in Manon, Marguerite in Faust, Violetta in La traviata and Mimì in La bohème. In Milan she had extensive coaching with the conductor Antonio Narducci. She also sought out the tenor Aureliano Pertile who had long been one of her idols for the beauty of his phrasing and diction. She called at his house and according to Zeani, when he opened the door she burst into tears and was unable to speak. Pertile's wife ushered her inside and after talking to her Pertile accepted her as a student on a non-paying basis, giving her private lessons and allowing her to attend his master-classes. She repaid him by running errands and helping his wife with household chores.
Operatic career
Zeani made her professional debut as Violetta in La traviata at the Teatro Duse in Bologna in 1948 as a last-minute replacement for Margherita Carosio. It was to become her signature role—she sang it 648 times during the course of her career. She initially sang in Italian regional opera houses but also began appearing abroad. In 1950 and 1951 she sang in Egypt in private concerts for King Farouk as well as in a series of operas in Cairo and Alexandria. She also sang Violetta in Geneva in 1952 and at London's Stoll Theatre in 1953. She had made her Florence debut as Elvira in I puritani in 1952, replacing Maria Callas who had withdrawn from the production after two performances. It was during the Puritani performances that she first met her future husband, the Italian bass Nicola Rossi-Lemeni. They met again in 1956 when she made her La Scala debut as Cleopatra in Handel's Giulio Cesare. Rossi-Lemeni was her Giulio Cesare. He soon proposed and the couple married in 1957. A year later their son Alessandro was born. Zeani and Rossi-Lemeni made their home in Rome and would appear together in thirteen more operas. At the start of her career Zeani had specialised in coloratura roles including Lucia in Lucia di Lammermoor, Elvira in I puritani, Gilda in Rigoletto, and Adèle in Le comte Ory. However, in a 1960 production at the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma she sang all three heroines in The Tales of Hoffmann — Olympia, Antonia, and Giulietta. Rossi-Lemeni appeared in the same production playing all four villains — Lindorf, Coppelius, Dr. Miracole, and Dappertutto. From 1970 she increasingly assayed the heavier dramatic soprano roles with great success, notably the title roles in Aida, Tosca, Manon Lescaut, and Fedora. She also sang Elsa in Wagner's Lohengrin and Senta in his Flying Dutchman. Zeani sang 69 roles in the course of her career in a wide-ranging repertoire. She sang in important revivals of Verdi's early and now rarely performed opera Alzira and belcanto operas such as Donizetti's Maria di Rohan and Rossini's Otello, but she also sang in the world premieres and early performances of several 20th-century operas. She created the roles of Giannina in Jacopo Napoli's Un curioso accidente, Blanche in Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites, Alissa in Raffaello de Banfield's Alissa and Irene in Renzo Rossellini's L'avventuriero. She also sang Mary Vetsera in the first staging of Barbara Giuranna's dodecaphonic opera Mayerling, a role written expressly for her. Her other roles in 20th-century works include Magda Sorel in The Consul and Eunomia in Adriano Lualdi's Il diavolo nel campanile and multiple performances of La voix humaine in the 1970s. By the time she had begun her career as a voice teacher in 1980, Zeani had basically retired from the stage, but she returned in 1982 for her last opera performance, Mother Marie in Dialogues of the Carmelites at San Francisco Opera.
Zeani's recorded legacy largely rests on the approximately 60 "pirate" and "off-air" recordings of full-length operas made in the course of her career. She made very few studio recordings—Tosca, La traviata and a Verdi–Puccini recital released on LP by the Romanian Electrecord label, and a two-LP set of Donizetti, Bellini, Verdi, and Puccini arias on the Decca label, recorded when Zeani was in her early 30s. In 2014, Decca reissued the LPs on compact disk in their "Most Wanted Recitals!" series.
