The well-tempered prima donna: on May 15, a Met gala celebrates the fortieth anniversary of Mirella Freni's debut. Patrick Giles pays tribute to one of opera's true class acts.

She appeared before the gold curtain, pale, disoriented, wet-eyed, and so exhausted that Luciano Pavarotti did not so much seem to be accompanying her to acknowledge the audience's wild applause as trying to hold her up. It was January 22, 1988--a revival of La Boheme at the Metropolitan Opera. Carlos Kleiber was making his company debut that night, and while his conducting was universally hailed, it wasn't until seconds before Mirella Freni, the evening's Mimi, was due to take her curtain call that the house shifted from appreciation to hysteria.

Freni's shaken appearance caused some to stop shouting and clapping. She seemed to have survived Mimi's death, but just barely. Her head nodded and turned back and forth almost mechanically, her eyes were lowered, she didn't smile or curtsy or wave or blow kisses; she made the absent-minded responses of someone who hadn't quite recovered from what she had just done, which was to sing and act the greatest Mimi many of us had ever seen.

This month, the Metropolitan Opera celebrates the fortieth anniversary of the Modena-born soprano's company debut. It took place on September 29, 1965 (in the final season of the Old Met). She was just thirty years old, and she played Mimi. There followed 133 appearances with the company, in morn than a dozen roles, plus seven concerts. Because of tax problems, she was absent from the house from 1968 to 1983. During those years, the singer's bright soprano was put to good use at venues such as La Scala, under conductors such as Claudio Abbado and Herbert von Karajan, who helped her take on greater dramatic challenges with roles ranging from Desdemona to Amelia in Simon Boccanegra.

The Freni who returned to the Met as Elisabetta in Don Carlo in February 1983 was not quite the light-lyric sparkler who had sung Gounod's Juliette, Adina in L'Elisir d'Amore and perhaps the definitive Figaro Susanna. She was not only older but greater in stature and achievement. One of those Don Carlos was videotaped (Pioneer DVD). The voice and manner are recognizably Freni's, but there is a volume, a Romantic presence that is more emotionally complicated and charged. The young soprano had become (in the best sense of the word) a prima donna.

Every Freni appearance at the Met thereafter became an event. It is amazing that this singer whose stage manner and voice, even at their most dramatic, were suffused with such tenderness, should have driven audiences to ecstasy, I think it was because she showed such faith in opera. Freni grew up in the presence of inspiring performers, especially sopranos. (Maria Callas, Renata Tebaldi, Magda Olivero, Leyla Gencer are just the top-of-the-list names in Italian opera during the 1950s.) Opera's future was not yet in doubt--one reason, perhaps, that it was easier for its denizens to aspire to performances that would be remembered for ages. After Freni's Met return, audiences came to welcome such certainty: in her presence, it was no longer possible to worry, as James Levine once famously did, that we would be the generation that saw opera die.

Freni came to embody the tradition of the Italian prima donna. By the late 1970s, there were really only two left--Freni and her great colleague Renata Scotto. Each embodied different aspects of that tradition. ...