Jeanette Scovotti

Jeanette Scovotti, born December 5, 1936, in New York City, is an American coloratura soprano whose career has spanned Broadway, opera, and concert performance across the United States and Europe.

Scovotti's single Broadway credit came in 1956, when she appeared in the ensemble of the original cast of Li'l Abner, a production that also yielded a cast recording on the Sony label. Three years later, in 1959, she won the New York Singing Teachers' Association contest and gave a solo recital at Town Hall. That same year she made her debut at the New York City Opera, singing Monica in Gian Carlo Menotti's The Medium.

Her operatic career expanded rapidly in the early 1960s. In 1960 she debuted with the Lyric Opera of Chicago as Olga Sukarev in Umberto Giordano's Fedora. In 1962 she made her San Francisco Opera debut as Blonde in Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail and her Metropolitan Opera debut as Adele in Johann Strauss II's Die Fledermaus. Between 1962 and 1966 she became a regular presence at the Met, accumulating 86 performances. Her roles there included Zerbinetta and Echo in Ariadne auf Naxos, Gilda in Rigoletto, Rosina in The Barber of Seville, Oscar in Un ballo in maschera, Olympia in The Tales of Hoffmann, Papagena in The Magic Flute, Nannetta in Falstaff, Zerlina in Don Giovanni, Lisa in La sonnambula, Xenia in Boris Godunov, Poussette in Manon, Fiakermilli in Arabella, and Adina in L'elisir d'amore.

Also in 1962, Scovotti and her husband, Fred Patrick, founded the Lake George Opera company. In July 1963 she made her concert debut with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at the Tanglewood Festival. The following year she performed the role of Tuptim in a concert version of The King and I with the Cleveland Pops Orchestra under conductor Lehman Engel, a production subsequently recorded in the studio with Barbara Cook as Anna and Theodore Bikel as the King, released on the Columbia label. In 1966 she sang the title role in Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor with Giuseppe Bamboschek and the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra at Symphony Hall in Newark.

In 1967 Scovotti joined the San Francisco Opera roster for one season, appearing as the Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute, Musetta in La bohème, and Miss Hampton in the U.S. premiere of Gunther Schuller's The Visitation. She then relocated to Germany and spent the following decade performing at major European opera houses, including the Hamburg State Opera, Vienna State Opera, Teatro Colón, and La Scala. In 1977 she returned to the United States to sing Ludmilla in Glinka's Ruslan and Ludmilla with Opera Boston.

Scovotti's discography is extensive. Her solo recordings include Mozart Concert Arias with Herbert Blomstedt conducting the Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden, released on the Berlin Classics label in 1979, and a Coloratura Arias album on Scope Records in 1966, featuring music from Lucia di Lammermoor, Die Zauberflöte, Il Turco in Italia, Rigoletto, and Lakmé, with the Orchestra Sinfonica di Roma conducted by Nicolas Flagello. Among her opera recordings are Handel's Rinaldo with Jean-Claude Malgoire and La Grande Écurie et la Chambre du Roy, in which she sang Armida alongside Carolyn Watkinson and Ileana Cotrubas; Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots on the Opera D'Oro label in 1971, with Nicolai Gedda and Rita Shane under Ernst Märzendorfer; Rameau's Castor et Pollux with Nikolaus Harnoncourt and the Concentus musicus Wien on Telefunken in 1972; a 1963 RCA recording of Die Fledermaus with the Vienna State Opera under Oskar Danon, featuring Anna Moffo, Sergio Franchi, Rise Stevens, Richard Lewis, and George London; Richard Strauss's Arabella on Opera D'Oro in 1973 with Montserrat Caballé in the title role; Richard Strauss's Die schweigsame Frau with the Staatskapelle Dresden under Marek Janowski on the Angel label; and Verdi's Falstaff with the Teatro Colón under Fernando Previtali, with Geraint Evans in the title role. Scovotti subsequently pursued a career in teaching singing in Germany.