These are strictly my choices, made because I think they support what the poet and composer were trying to make us feel about the fate of Adrienne and other particularly sensitized women of the stage, a fate that is foreshadowed here in the heroine’s ruling awareness of her life’s precariousness, and in that light they seem stronger than perfectly defensible alternatives. (For instance, “Ecco, respiro appena” could easily read “Look, I just breathe,” in the “I’m just human” sense. But no—listening, not looking, is what she’s asking them—and us—to do, and “I scarcely” breathe . . . my voice is but a breath” leads us directly on to Act IV). This emphasis also accords with what we’ll find as we look back through some interpretations, and at how they correspond to the changes in vocality.

Of course, there is no gainsaying the beauty and presence of Tebaldi’s voice. That will make its statement to anyone hearing her recording of the role, and in the big moments (the ones Netrebko and Beczala couldn’t quite ring the bell on), she commands the music like no one since the prime years of Caniglia, Cigna, or (if only) Ponselle. And while her singing was freer and warmer a few years before the recording (that final A-flat on “morrà” has turned granitic), she is still able to incorporate her patented floating mezza-voce into the rich texture of her full-voiced line, and to weave her path in and out of graded chest blends in the important lower phrases. So her singing of the aria is certainly effective. The character impression it creates is of a mature, regal person, the Adriana of the grand side of her classical roles. The scaled-down phrases, while lovely and even intimate (and we must not forget that the creation of intimacy in a huge theatre was one of Tebaldi’s most cherishable gifts), are those of a strong woman turning intimate, not those of a fragile woman hanging on.

Cilèa’s own favorite interpreter of Adriana was Magda Olivero.  He coaxed her out of her ten-year retirement in 1951 specifically for the purpose of taking up the role again. ^(I)Among Olivero’s many “second-career” appearances in the part was in the Naples revival of 1959 under Mario Rossi, with Simionato, Corelli, and Bastianini among her colleagues. It is fortunately preserved “live” in quite decent sound—decent enough, surely, to transmit the essential quality Cilèa must have been after, which is exactly that of “a fragile woman hanging on.”^(II) Olivero was among the last singers of major soprano roles (I am trying to think of another as recent—the light lyric Graziella Sciutti, the Jugendlich Heldensopran Walburga Wegner?) to be accepted despite a pronounced  vibrato pattern that persisted throughout her range, at all dynamics. That alone creates some impression of fragility, especially when sustained at a pianissimo level. Olivero’s pianissimi  are more frequent and extended than, and different in quality from, Tebaldi’s—they are true fil di voce tones, whose quiver suggests a barely withheld line of tension that could snap at any moment. It is not “relaxed;” it does not caress. Behind it are not the warm, roomy vowels of Tebaldi, but open, bright ones of narrower span. Olivero builds her interpretation of the arias, and much of the role, out of this fil di voce, timing her delicate tenuti  to just the point where emotional release will have its greatest effect. She has more vocal calibre to work with than Netrebko (she kept singing Tosca into her mid-sixties), but when she lets it out toward the top, the vibrato is apt to turn skittery. Her Adriana has the overall quality of a hypersensitive woman whose feet are never quite firmly on the ground.