Graziella Sciutti

Graziella Sciutti was born in Turin in April 1927 and studied at the Santa Cecilia Conservatory in Rome with Elisabetta Barbato. She made her début at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in 1951 as Lucy in Menotti’s *The Telephone* and through the early 1950s built her career across the Italian and French operatic houses as a soubrette and lyric coloratura soprano.

Her central repertoire was the Mozart soubrette and bel canto comic roles — Susanna, Despina, Zerlina, Norina in *Don Pasquale*, Rosina in *Il barbiere di Siviglia*, Adina in *L’elisir d’amore*, Marie in *La fille du régiment*, and the title roles in Pergolesi’s *La serva padrona* and Cimarosa’s *Il matrimonio segreto*. She was particularly admired at the Glyndebourne Festival, Aix-en-Provence, La Scala, the Vienna State Opera and the Salzburg Festival in the lighter Mozart parts and the Italian opera buffa. Her recordings under Vittorio Gui and Carlo Maria Giulini remained reference performances of the soubrette repertoire of the period. She later moved into stage direction and produced opera at Glyndebourne and elsewhere.

Sciutti died in Geneva in April 2001. Music Preserved’s archive includes a range of her Mozart and opera buffa work from the 1950s and 1960s.