TO MANY Italians, Tebaldi was la nostra Renata, our Renata. Many of her greatest successes were in America, both North and South, but she remained the most Italian of singers. She refused to sing in any language but her own, even if the opera happened to be by Wagner or Gounod. She preferred to speak in Italian and had only a smattering of English when she conquered the Metropolitan Opera House in the mid-1950s. Chefs were asked to prepare her Italian food when she was abroad and her holidays were almost invariably spent back home in Rimini. After her American farewell concert at the Carnegie Hall in 1976 she closed her New York apartment and retired to Milan.

But the phrase had another implication. It divided Tebaldi from her great rival Maria Callas, who was born in New York of Greek parents. There was only one calendar year between the two sopranos. Tebaldi was the older and her career lasted longer, but for much of their professional lives there was jealousy between them as the world’s leading opera houses switched from favouring them to avoiding them. When Callas was “in” at La Scala, then Tebaldi was out. And vice versa. It was a situation exploited mercilessly by a news-hungry press, anxious to seize on any possible scandal involving the one or the other but preferably both.

The two sopranos first met during the 1947 Verona Festival, when Tebaldi was appearing in La Traviata and Callas was singing Isolde. No rivalry. Three years later Callas took over some performances of Aida for La Scala shortly after Tebaldi had sung the role there for the first time. But matters came to a head in 1951 when both were with an Italian company touring South America. Perhaps unwisely, the two of them were engaged to appear in the same concert. Afterwards Callas accused Tebaldi of breaking a no-encore agreement, when she delivered not one but two extra arias. The squabble continued when Callas criticised over dinner Tebaldi’s interpretation of Violetta in Traviata and suggested that she give up the role. The in-fighting continued during the rest of an acrimonious tour.

Relations reached a nadir in 1956 when Time magazine published a cover story on Callas in which she was quoted as saying that equating the two was like comparing champagne with Coca-Cola. Tebaldi’s riposte was that champagne easily turns sour.

Round about that time Tebaldi left La Scala, where she had been reigning soprano for most of the early 1950s, feeling that her position had been usurped by Callas. Her earthy remark giving the reason why she did not return there for four years was that one chicken coop could not hold two roosters. Ghiringhelli, the general administrator of La Scala, was certainly guilty of playing off diva against diva, as was Rudolf Bing, who held the same position at The Met. Ghiringhelli even suggested that the pair should appear together in Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda in which Mary, Queen of Scots, and Queen Elizabeth have a vituperative meeting in mid-opera. He even mischievously suggested that they could switch roles on alternate performances. Tebaldi rightly declined the offer.

In the end there was a reconciliation. After Tebaldi had inaugurated the 1968 Met season with Cilèa’s Adriana Lecouvreur, Callas, who by that time had given her last opera performance, went backstage to congratulate Tebaldi. It was the last time the two sopranos were to meet.

In reality their voices were very different. Tebaldi’s soprano was rich and creamy, totally secure in technique and breath control. When she was on stage there was no feeling of apprehension. Nothing was going to go wrong. Part of the reason was that she chose her roles with great care. There were early forays into Wagner and even Handel, but thereafter she stuck to the Italian repertory both on stage and on the many recordings she made for Decca. Unlike Callas, she was not interested in pushing out the boundaries of opera and only twice did she appear in a contemporary work. Verdi and Puccini were her favoured composers, coupled with the verismo pieces of Cilèa and Giordano, and they showed off the seamless quality of her voice to best advantage.

Renata Tebaldi was born in the same town as Rossini, Pesaro on Italy’s Adriatic coast. She was brought up mainly in Parma by her mother and only went back to Pesaro to study with Carmen Melis. Her father was an indifferent cellist and an even worse husband. He left the family home when Renata was an infant and returned but briefly. Contact between father and daughter was only re-established very late in his life.

Mamma Tebaldi saw Renata through the ugly war years and remained as a major influence — and companion — until her death in 1957. The young Tebaldi’s first success was at the Pesaro Conservatory with an aria from Catalani’s La Wally, an opera she was later to make famous. Her stage debut was in 1944 as Elena, a subsidiary role in Boito’s Mefistofele, at Rovigo. The journey had to be made partly by horse and cart and on the way back the train on which Tebaldi was travelling came under machine-gun attack. When early the next year she sang her first Mimi in Parma the baritone engaged for Marcello in Bohème was killed by a bomb on his way to the theatre. It took strong nerves to be a singer in those days.

When the war was over Tebaldi’s success in provincial houses had come to the ears of Toscanini. He was in charge of the opening concert for the rebuilt La Scala and allocated her two arias after a promising audition. Elsewhere in Milan Tebaldi had a less happy engagement with another company which went bankrupt before paying her. More experienced singers generally demanded their money at the end of Act I. Tebaldi was less demanding.

By 1949 Tebaldi was firmly entrenched at La Scala, already singing some of the roles that were to become associated with her over the next 20 years: Desdemona, Maddalena (Andrea Chenier) and, in 1950, Aida, which Toscanini had picked out for her after their first meeting. That same year she came with La Scala to the Edinburgh Festival and on to Covent Garden, where she sang in Otello and the Verdi Requiem, both conducted by Victor de Sabata. Alas, she appeared in only one role with the Royal Opera. That was Tosca in 1955, with Ferruccio Tagliavini and Tito Gobbi making up a distinguished cast. But Covent Garden under its general administrator, Sir David Webster, was a “Callas house” and Tebaldi kept away.

Her American debut was also made in 1950, as Aida in San Francisco. Rudolf Bing immediately offered the same role at The Met in the middle of the season. But Tebaldi, by this time a bit more worldly wise, held out for a more glamorous debut. This eventually came in 1955 with Otello, Del Monaco taking the title role. Tebaldi’s New York success arrived at exactly the right moment. Things had already turned sour at La Scala, where Callas was flavour of the year, and henceforth her main Italian platform was to be Florence’s Maggio Musicale. The rivalry had reached its high point with Tebaldi singing Violetta in Florence and Callas doing the same in Milan.

In New York Tebaldi became known as “Miss Sold Out”. She opened the 1958 season with Tosca and this was the role in which she eventually made her return to La Scala in 1959, an occasion which marked her 200th appearance in the house. Some would claim that she also inaugurated the new Metropolitan Opera House when it moved to the Lincoln Centre in 1966. The actual first performance there was of Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra, which was indifferently received. The real applause was reserved for the second night, which had Tebaldi and Franco Corelli together in Ponchielli’s La Gioconda.

This became one of her most notable performances and it was followed two years later by Cilèa’s Adriana Lecouvreur, which she eventually persuaded Rudolf Bing to mount for her after much argument. Corelli sang a couple of performances before a virtually unknown tenor called Plácido Domingo took over. In 1970 Tebaldi added to her repertory her final new role, Minnie in Puccini’s La fanciulla del West, one of the heaviest parts of all. That was also at the Met. Her farewell stage performance was in the same house in January 1973, as Desdemona, which she had first sung almost 30 years before in Trieste.

For the next three years Tebaldi contented herself with recitals, quite often with Corelli as her partner. These took her all over the world, including a spell in Russia in 1975. Her final goodbye was, appropriately enough, at La Scala in May 1976. She was 54.

Tebaldi never married. Early in her career she had an affair with the bass Nicola Rossi-Lemeni, who decided to wed instead the daughter of the conductor, Tullio Serafin. Later there was a liaison with another conductor, Arturo Basile, but he was already married and Tebaldi, a firm Roman Catholic, broke off the relationship.

In her retirement, spent mainly between Milan and San Marino, she coached the occasional pupil but tended to avoid the limelight. She was much decorated and her awards included France’s Légion d‘Honneur.

Renata Tebaldi, Italian soprano, was born on February 1, 1922. She died on December 19, 2004, aged 82.