Graziella Sciutti

• Name — Graziella Sciutti • Occupation — opera soprano singer

Sciutti was born in Turin, Italy. Her parents were musical, her father being an organist; her mother was French. She studied privately with Ginevra Marinuzzi, then in Rome at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia under Rachele Margliano-Mori with the intention of making a career on the concert platform. From 1948 she participated in broadcasts on Italian Radio, her first being L'oca del Cairo. Sciutti's concert debut was in 1949 in Venice, with 18th-century Italian songs. Her stage debut at Aix-en-Provence in 1951 singing Elisetta in Il matrimonio segreto and the woman in The Telephone and realized that she "was a person who could do opera". She appeared as Rosina in Rossini's The Barber of Seville in 1954. Later she appeared in London at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden (debut 1956 as Oscar in Un ballo in maschera), at Salzburg, Vienna and in San Francisco. Referred to as "The Callas of the Piccola Scala" Sciutti was renowned for her interpretation of Mozart's "soubrette" characters, Susanna, Despina, and perhaps especially for her singing in the role of Zerlina in the 1959 recording of Mozart's Don Giovanni, with the Philharmonia Orchestra under the direction of Carlo Maria Giulini. She created the title role in Sauguet’s Les caprices de Marianne in 1954. In later years she turned her attention to teaching and operatic production. She produced Poulenc's La voix humaine at Glyndebourne in 1977, and Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden and San Francisco, and in 1985 Mozart's The Magic Flute at Koblenz. She taught at London's Royal College of Music, where her pupils included Anna Maria Panzarella. She died in Geneva.

• She can be seen on black-and-white video as Susanna in Le nozze di Figaro, in a live performance with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Geraint Evans, Hilde Gueden, and Evelyn Lear, conducted by Lorin Maazel, from the Salzburg Festival, 1963. The DVD is published by Video Artists International, Inc. Catalog number DVD 4519.