Now available from Amadeus Press...

384 pp, 16 b/w photos, 6 x 9", hardcover

ISBN: 0-931340-87-X

$39.95, plus shipping and handling

Publication Date: May 1995

Available from Amadeus Press, LLC, 512 Newark Pompton Turnpike, Pompton Plains, NJ 07444 Telephone: (973) 835-6375, (800) 321-3408. http://www.amadeuspress.com/ and email at publicity@amadeuspress.com

This is the first biography of Luisa Tetrazzini, the diva whom Adelina Patti named as her successor. Her long career made her a celebrity on three continents; her temperament and personality were the stuff of which legends are made.

The “Florentine Nightingale” triumphed in Naples, St. Petersburg, and South America. She began her American career in San Francisco, and her historic open-air concert there on Christmas Eve in 1910 remains one of most important events in the city’s musical history. She went on to sing at the Met, and after initial refusals by Covent Garden to let her sing, she was eventually allowed to appear out of season in Melba’s absence; her debut there was sensational, she was heralded as “the voice of the century.”

Tetrazzini was among the first of the great singers to exploit the new medium, radio, to further extend her fame. The recent re-issue of some of Tetrazzini’s old recordings on CD has aroused new interest in a singer once described as “the most brilliant and lively of the coloraturas.”

In this book, the result of many years’ research in Europe, America, and Russia, Charles Neilson Gattey reveals the extraordinary facts of her life for the first time, including critical assessments of Tetrazzini’s talents by her contemporaries. Also included are a chronology of Tetrazzini’s appearances, a list of her operatic repertoire and a comprehensive discography.