An Angel from Paradise

It was just like the story books. Before a concert in Carnegie Hall one night last week, almost nobody in Manhattan had ever heard of 13-year-old Soprano Anna Maria Alberghetti. When it was over, the audience stood up and cheered, famous singers stepped forward to congratulate her, and surprised music critics for the Manhattan press dashed off to write enthusiastic pieces for the morning papers.

On Carnegie's big stage, Anna Maria had gone through a program that might have taxed many an older, more experienced singer. She had sailed confidently and surely through the coloratura flights of Rigoletto's Caro Nome and Una Voce Poco Fa from The Barber of Seville, had expertly sung the difficult death aria from La Traviata. In her pink silk party dress, hands clasped in front of her, she sang her songs in a clear sweet voice that made one listener stand up and shout in rapturous Italian: "Un' angelo dal paradiso."

Tenor Embrace. Standing between her mother & father after the encores, Anna Maria was embraced by Tenor Giovanni Martinelli and heard Baritone Giuseppe de Luca call her voice "a divine instrument." Said the New York Times next day: "Some of the purest, loveliest sounds that have been heard all season."

Although Anna Maria was news to most Americans, her singing had been pleasing listeners in Italy and elsewhere on the Continent for a good while. In 1943 her father, now a cellist with Bologna's Teatro Comunale, then director of a music conservatory on the beleaguered island of Rhodes, wanted very much to get his family back to Italy; six-year-old Anna cinched the airplane priority by piping Caro Nome for the island's military governor. At war's end she got showers of caramels from American G.I.s by warbling Gounod's Ave Maria.

Eighteen months ago, she graduated from the caramel stage with a concert debut in her home town of Pesaro, began touring Italy, Scandinavia and Spain. This winter, Ettore Verna, a friend of her father's conservatory days, now teaching singing in Manhattan, arranged for Anna's first trip to the U.S.

Bananas & Beefsteak. As the cheers died away in Manhattan at the week's end, Anna's parents, who have been her only teachers, said they were determined to protect her youthful voice, carefully ration her performances despite the movie, recording and personal-appearance offers that 'were sure to roll in.

None of the brouhaha seemed to have much effect on Anna Maria. A typical teenager, she was taking in the Manhattan sights in a bobby-sox outfit, filling up on her favorite food (bananas and beefsteak) and looking for a possible tennis partner of her own age.

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