Mirella Freni

Mirella Freni was born in Modena in February 1935, in the same building and a few months apart from Luciano Pavarotti — the two children were nursed by the same wet-nurse, a coincidence of which both later made comic capital. She studied with Ettore Campogalliani in Mantua, won the international Concorso Voci Verdiane in 1958, and made her professional début that year at Modena as Micaëla in *Carmen*.

Her international career took shape rapidly. Her La Scala début as Nannetta in *Falstaff* in 1962 was followed by Glyndebourne (where her Susanna and Zerlina became reference performances), the Salzburg Festival (where Karajan engaged her for many of the productions of his late period), the Metropolitan Opera (from 1965), Covent Garden, the Vienna State Opera and the Paris Opéra. Her central roles across forty years were Mimì in *La bohème* (which she sang over 200 times, including in the famous Karajan/Pavarotti studio recording), Susanna and Zerlina in the Mozart operas, Micaëla, the title roles in *Manon Lescaut* and *Madama Butterfly*, Tatiana in *Eugene Onegin*, Liù in *Turandot*, and (in her later career) Elisabeth in *Don Carlo* and the title role in Tchaikovsky’s *Iolanta*. She was twice married to the bass Nicolai Ghiaurov.

Freni gave her farewell to staged opera in 2005. She died in Modena in February 2020. Music Preserved’s archive includes a substantial range of her Italian operatic work from the 1960s through the 1990s.