Galli-Curci

She was the last in a line of Italian sopranos whose very entrance prompted ovations, a link to singers from the golden era and earlier such as Renata Tebaldi, Licia Albanese, Magda Olivero, Maria Caniglia, Amelita Galli-Curci and Luisa Tetrazzini.

More than 30 million people heard such singers as Galli-Curci and John McCormack, such politicians as Al Smith, Senator Bob La Follette and Socialist Eugene Debs.

Galli-Curci will probably make her much-heralded Manhattan debut in Dinorah, in which the Shadow Song can be depended upon to raise the audience from their seats.

Luigi Curci, painter, 39, onetime husband of Amelita Galli-Curci, who divorced him in 1920; at Rome.

As a seven-year-old named Belle Silverman in Brooklyn, she learned to imitate all her mother's records of the legendary diva Amelita Galli-Curci, and by nine she was singing arias like Caro nome and The Bell Song in a Manhattan radio studio on the Major Bowes Capitol Family Hour.