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Magda Olivero, 104; soprano inspired frenzy

Magda Olivero performing as Francesco Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur in Italy.La Scala Theater

NEW YORK — Magda Olivero, an Italian soprano who for decades whipped audiences around the world into a frenzy of adulation that was operatic even by operatic standards — despite the fact that by her own admission she did not possess an especially lovely voice — died Monday in Milan at 104.

Her death was confirmed by Stefan Zucker, president of the Bel Canto Society, a group devoted to the history of opera.

Ms. Olivero began her career in Italy in the 1930s and had largely retired by 1941. Coaxed back to the stage 10 years later, she enjoyed renewed stardom in Europe and the United States. Her long second act — she made her Metropolitan Opera debut at 65 and sang elsewhere for decades — was driven in no small part by the ardor of her fans. "Magdamaniacs," The New York Times called them in 1979, and the coinage entailed little hyperbole.

For decades, bootleg recordings of Ms. Olivero's voice, tenderly husbanded, were passed from hand to covert hand among her legions of acolytes. At performances, she took the stage to screams of ecstasy and left it to thundering ovations.

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Singing the title role in Puccini's "Manon Lescaut" in Verona, Italy, in 1970, opposite a young tenor named Plácido Domingo, Ms. Olivero required police protection from the hundreds of audience members who tried to swarm the stage.

Nevertheless, some concertgoers, and many critics, found her singing untenable.

Writing in the Times in 1969, Peter G. Davis reviewed Ms. Olivero in her most famous role, the title part in Francesco Cilea's "Adriana Lecouvreur," with the Connecticut Opera Association in Hartford.

"Her voice is not a beautiful one by conventional standards," he said. "The tight vibrato, hollow chest tone, and occasionally piercing upper register are qualities that one must adjust to."

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In spite of these limitations, or perhaps because of them, Ms. Olivero distilled her voice and stage manner into a potent combination that many listeners found bewitching.

She was often called the last of the verismo sopranos, hewing to the end of her life to an operatic tradition — grandiose, stylized, hyper-realistic, and melodramatic — that had its heyday at the turn of the 20th century in works by Leoncavallo, Mascagni, and Puccini.

"She reigns supreme, singing with an abandon and fervor that will leave you exhausted," American Record Guide noted approvingly in 1997, reviewing a set of arias Ms. Olivero recorded in the 1960s and '70s.

Her signature roles included the title parts in Puccini's "Tosca," Umberto Giordano's "Fedora," and Luigi Cherubini's "Medea," as well as Liù in Puccini's "Turandot."

Where many opera stars of Ms. Olivero's day gave little heed to acting, she inhabited her characters with impassioned fervor, possessed of an onstage carriage and an array of grand gestures that could make her arias seem declaimed as much as sung.

Though the instrument with which nature endowed her was not Olympian, her arduous training gave her such immense technical facility — crystalline diction, superb breath control, exquisite mastery of tone and dynamics — that she could imbue her work with a level of interpretive nuance that can elude even great singers. On Ms. Olivero's lips, as her admirers often observed, song sounded almost as natural as speech.

The net effect, at once titanic and intimate, was the experience of opera in amber, for Ms. Olivero was almost certainly the last avatar of the grand histrionics, and genuinely grand singing, that typified a shimmering era in which opera was pitched to the last balcony.

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