© 2001 by Oxford University Press
Zinka Milanov at Forty-Five: Verdi "Exquisitely Close to the Infinity"
AUTHOR'S NOTE: As we mark the hundredth anniversary of the death of Giuseppe Verdi, attention naturally turns as well to those special artists who made inspiring and indelible statements while singing his roles, the people who literally made us love him. Prominent among these is Zinka Milanov, one of the greatest exponents the composer's music has ever known and one of the most beloved. A half century ago, when Verdi had only been gone fifty years, Milanov, in the third decade of an illustrious career that had begun as Leonora in Il trovatore, was at the height of her prime.1 For the purposes of the Quarterly's 2001 Verdi observance, this adapted and enhanced excerpt from my biography of Milanov encompasses only the 1951–52 opera season and covers just those of her professional activities then that involved Verdi. Detailed emphasis is placed on the Metropolitan Opera's historic opening-night new production of Aida, the company's first fresh investiture of the opera since 1923. In keeping with the journal's traditional scope and purview, all but some prefatory reference to the soprano's exceptionally volatile personal life has been eliminated.