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In honour of the first performance of La Traviata on march 6, 1853, here is an exceptional rendering of Violetta's first act aria performed by Magda Olivero. The film was recorded in 1964 in Naples in the usual manner of the time: it was synchronized with an already existing audio recording. In this case, a studio recording of Violetta's aria was used, it was recorded on August 7, 1940 in Torino with the Orchestra Sinfonica dell' EIAR, the tenor was Muzio Giovagnoli and the conductor Ugo Tansini. In the sixties The Italian music magazine Discoteca made a contest for all the existing recordings of È strano!...Ah, fors'è libera“ from Tetrazzini, Zeani, Callas, Tebaldi, Scotto, Sutherland, Caballe…to all other sopranos who's names would be too long to enumerate, to summarize: everyone who ever sang and recorded the aria had a chance. To the surprise of many, Magda Olivero won the coveted prize of the best interpretation of the aria before all her sopran
