The Luck of the draw

In 1950 Graziella Sciutti had just graduated from Rome's music conservatoire when one of her professors telephoned. His brother, he told her, was the Vatican correspondent of French television and had been asked to find an Italian soprano for a gala performance. "He said `They want a French-speaking Italian girl who looks OK. Do you want to go?' And I said yes."

A diminutive figure barely five feet tall, Graziella Sciutti (pronounced Shooti) is now 67. Yet as she gesticulates with curled, arthritic hands, recounting the story of how her career began, the figure in front of me is that of an 18 year-old girl. Because Scuitti is that rarest of opera phenomena, a natural actress. It was her love of theatre, fostered by her French mother, that drew her to the opera, because musically, she says, "oratorio was really my passion".

The story of Graziella Scuitti's life is as full of coincidence and twists and turns as any opera. In the audience at the TV gala happened to be the director of the Aix-enProvence music festival. "He came back to this chaotic backstage and said he would like me to sing for him. So I sang for him The Marriage of Figaro. I told him I don't have many opera arias, just the few I had to learn to get my degree. He said, `I would like you to come because I see you are an actress'. And he put on specially for me The Telephone by Menotti, which is a very strong opera. It is a girl that is receiving a visit of a young man and he tries to tell her that he loves her and would like to marry her. But she keeps receiving telephone calls. It is very, very funny but you really have to act."

She made her operatic debut at Aix at the age of only 19 and was immediately re-engaged for the following year for The Marriage of Figaro and Cosi Fan Tutte. A radio broadcast of Figaro was heard by the French actor/writer Sacha Guitry, who had written a play about Mozart 25 years before for his wife, Yvonne Printemps.

"He was taken by the sound of the voice and he phoned immediately the director of the festival and said `How does she look?' And he said, `She is very young, very thin and very small.' `Ideal, I put on again my play.' "As Scutti rattles along, ripples of Italian laughter punctuate the helter-skelter English of the story.

Mozart ran for several months at the Theatre Marigny in Paris. It was seen by a scout for MGM and, after a film test at Pinewood in London, Sciutti was offered a seven-year contract. "So I had to make the decision. I was not very attracted, I must confess, but it was very exciting. At the same time, which was more interesting for me, the Comedie Francaise offered for me to study. Then Glyndebourne asked me to sing The Barber of Seville. "So I had these three things: Hollywood, Paris or Glyndebourne. But Glyndebourne meant not only Glyndebourne, it meant to continue the singing career. And I chose that. And I'm very glad I did. And I was really lucky, I see now from my students, they have to audition and go and search for managers and I was spared all that. Because of being so exposed people saw and heard me and engaged me, I didn't have to audition."

Graziella Sciutti was born in Turin in 1932. Her father, a pianist and organist, was also a composer of film scores and Turin was then the centre of the Italian film industry. In 1940 it shifted to the newly-built Cinecitta outside Rome and the Sciuttis moved with it.

During the war, life continued much as usual in Rome until 1943 and the German occupation. "That winter there was a curfew. But friends came to the house and we made music, sang and played. My father played the piano - for a month or two he played Chopin and we did analysis and studying, and then two months Beethoven. Then we took Wagner. So that was my education."

The result was that by the time Sciutti enrolled at the Accademia di S. Cecilia, her musical education was far more advanced that that of her contemporaries. As she explains disarmingly, "the years got a little bit squashed". Five years were reduced to three.

"Also my voice was quite well already, it just needed good guidance and the first thing my teacher told my parents was: `I'm not going to do anything special with the voice of Graziella, I'm just guiding and making her aware of what she does naturally.' " For Sciutti, who teaches young singers at La Scala, Milan and at the Royal Academy of Music in London, this is still the best way. "It takes a little longer sometimes, particularly if you don't have a very strong musical background and culture, but it doesn't ruin the voice."

Graziella Sciutti became one of the outstanding interpreters of 18th and early 19th century opera of the post-war years. In 1955 she sang Carolina in Cimarosa's Il Matrimonio Segreto at the opening of the Piccolo Scala in Milan. Her Covent Garden debut was in Verdi's Un Ballo In Maschera in 1956. And it was to sing Donnizetti's The Daughter of Regiment that Sciutti came to Wexford later that year. "I landed in Shannon because I was coming from New York and I had the most beautiful vision of Ireland, I was taken across country, a little more green when I arrived and completely golden when I left. I had the most wonderful time in Wexford. Very, very extraordinary, the humanity and the fun.

"But we worked also very hard, The Daughter Of the Regiment is something you have to sing." This autumn she returns to Wexford, not to sing but to talk, "about what happened what happened to me after Wexford, the life of a singer, of a woman who is a singer. It is quite something to be a woman as a singer."

Although her marriage and her relationships were always outside the world of music, opera was where she made the great friendships of her life, with Teresa Berganza, Elisabeth Schwartzkopf, Christa Ludwig, Geraint Evans, Luigi Alva. "In repertoire, you have a big number of operas that you know, but you are asked to do certain roles more often so you meet more or less the same people, in Vienna, in Dallas. The best ones in those roles. For me it was Mozart and Rossini but also modern composers."

It was Francis Poulenc who was to provide the transition to the next stage of her career. She had just finished working on Donizetti's L'Elisir d'Amore at Covent Garden where the director had asked her to help him direct. "He told me: `One day you will become a director, because you see operas theatrically complete, not only your own part.' And I did it and I felt quite comfortable doing it." Then came the offer from Glyndebourne to do Poulenc's La Voix Humaine, another telephone call, but this time on stage alone. They had no director lined up, so Sciutti suggested she do it herself. Then followed the by now familiar run of Sciutti serendipities. The director of the Canadian Opera saw it. " `If you have done it by yourself, then,' he said, `you can direct anybody, you come and do Figaro for me in Toronto.' From Toronto, the Chicago asked me to do Cosi. The Met saw it and they asked me to do it."

Directing Mozart at the New York Metropolitan Opera remains one of the highpoints of her life. She is concerned, however at where opera is going: "Opera is a connection of theatre and music - Melos - music in Greek and drama. It is the unity of those two great energies in one, and that is what makes opera so extraordinary but it is going into the hands of people who don't know much about music. It is a painful criticism. I'm all for having a new approach. If not, the opera will not survive. But they keep forgetting about the music."

At an age when most people are drawing their pensions, Grazielle Sciutti shows no sign of slowing down. Her energy is phenomenal ("When I direct they have to stop me, and they look at their watches.") Next May she is doing Don Giovanni in San Francisco "with a very starry cast". Is it hard not being on stage any more? No, she says. Just different. "I am completely removed. An interpreter creates the role with the rehearsals, it is a crescendo till the performance is there. For the director too it is a crescendo, in that things are accumulating.

"But then at the first night, you don't exist. At the beginning it was difficult not to be able to do something. Not the not-singing, just the feeling as a singer, even if something is not right, that you are in control. But as a director all you can do is this." And she puts her hands across her face, peers through her fingers and laughs.