Cecilia Fusco

Cecilia Fusco (born 10 June 1933) is an Italian operatic soprano and voice teacher. In a long career, she appeared regularly at La Scala in Milan, and leading opera houses in Italy and abroad. Her broad repertoire includes works from early Italian opera to premieres of contemporary opera.

Fusco was born in Rome and grew up there in a musical family. Her father Giovanni Fusco was a composer of film soundtracks, whose music is linked to films by Michelangelo Antonioni and Jean-Luc Godard, among others. Her mother Adriana Dante, pianist and pupil of Alfredo Casella, was a music agent for Artists' Mass.

Fusco studied at the Conservatorio Santa Cecilia in Rome and won the Puccini competition of the RAI. She made her debut in 1958 at the Teatro Margherita in Genoa as Gilda in Verdi's Rigoletto. In 1960, she appeared at la Scala in Milan for the first time, as Barbarina in Mozart's Le nozze di Figao, conducted by Herbert von Karajan. She also appeared there as Lisa in Bellini's La Sonnambula, Musetta in Puccini's La Bohéme, and as Katja in the world premiere of Guido Turchi's Il buono soldato Svejk on 5 February 1962. Other operas at the house included Donizetti's Don Pasquale, Ariadne auf Naxos by Richard Strauss, Rossini's La scala di seta, Jacopo Napoli's Miseria e nobiltà and Handel's Serse.

In a career to the end of the 1970s, she appeared at many Italian and foreign opera houses, including La Fenice in Venice, the Teatro Comunale di Bologna, the Teatro Lirico Giuseppe Verdi, the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples, the Teatro Massimo Vittorio Emanuele of Palerme, the Teatro Massimo Bellini of Catania, the Teatro Regio di Parma, the Teatro della Pergola of Florence, the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma, the Teatro Petruzzelli in Bari. Outside of Italy, she performed at the Liceu in Barcelone, la Monnaie of Brussels and the Cairo Opera House, among others.

She collaborated for a long time with the ensemble I Virtuosi dell'opera di Roma directed by Renato Fasano, specialized in opera and chamber repertoire of the Italian 16th and 17th-centuries with which she sang at the Expo 1970 in Osaka.

She collaborated with conductors such as Igor Stravinski, Paul Hindemith, Francesco Molinari-Pradelli, Arturo Basile, Bruno Bartoletti, Franco Capuana, Piero Bellugi, Alberto Zedda, Oliviero De Fabritiis, Franco Ferrara, Nino Sanzogno, Peter Maag, Gianandrea Gavazzeni and Claudio Abbado.

In concert, she performed at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia and the Accademia Filarmonica Romana in Rome, at the Sagra musicale umbra [it], the Salle Pleyel in Paris, Carnegie Hall in New York and the Royal Albert Hall in London.

From the 1990s, she began teach voice, at Italian conservatories including Giuseppe Tartini of Trieste, and in masterclasses in various locations of Friuli Venezia Giulia, Abruzzo, Tuscany and Sicily.

• L'ajo nell'imbarazzo, Donizetti, directed by Vasco Ugo Finni
• Rita, Rossini, directed by Filippo Crivelli