Katia Ricciarelli entered her artistic maturity with a luminous lyric soprano distinguished by its singular sweetness of tone and an engaging theatrical grace that enhanced her vocal qualities. Yet she soon illustrated the familiar pattern of a voice driven past its natural boundaries, a course that eventually eroded its original freshness. In her strongest period she brought uncommon poignancy to Giulietta in I Capuleti e i Montecchi, to Desdemona, and to Anna Bolena, while displaying a particular rapport with Rossini that shone in Bianca from Bianca e Falliero, Elena from La donna del lago, and Amenaide from Tancredi.
Raised in straitened circumstances, she took employment after completing her schooling so that she could finance lessons at Venice’s Benedetto Marcello Conservatory, studying chiefly under the noted lyric soprano Iris Adami Corradetti. Following her diploma she made her stage bow as Mimì in Puccini’s La bohème at Mantua. The subsequent year her appearance in Cherubini’s Anacréon at Siena aroused noticeable interest, and this was eclipsed when she captured first prize in the Parma Verdi competition, then repeated her success by winning the 1971 Voce Verdiane contest. These victories quickly led to her 1972 debuts at the Lyric Opera of Chicago as Lucrezia in Verdi’s I due Foscari and at the Rome Opera as Giovanna d’Arco. Two years later she sang Mimì for her Covent Garden introduction, appeared at the Metropolitan Opera in the same Puccini role in 1975, and made her La Scala entrance in 1976 as Suor Angelica in Il trittico.
As her instrument gained amplitude with time, she ventured into such parts as Verdi’s Desdemona and Luisa Miller. Encouraged by this expansion and by Herbert von Karajan’s propensity for assigning weighty roles to voices of essentially lyric character, she began in the early 1980s to undertake parts that exceeded her resources—Tosca and Aida among them, and even Turandot, albeit only on disc. By the 1990s her singing, though still possessing residual beauty, had lost its former transparency; both upper and middle registers trembled, and intonation grew unreliable. Venues that had once acclaimed her, La Scala included, now met her appearances with marked disapproval.
Among her preserved performances, a 1979–1980 recital of arias issued by Ermitage finds her voice largely intact, though tension surfaces in the heavier selections. Her complete recording of La donna del lago for Sony ranks among her finest achievements. She also portrayed Desdemona in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1986 film of Otello.
