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Buyer Reviews
Average Buyer Rating:
-
Zucker is an embarassment
This film could have been a real treasure - had the interviewer been someone other than the intensely dislikable and (as an interviewer) utterly incompetent Stefan Zucker. The opportunity to interview these great divas was a rare one and, in most cases, Zucker just blew it, especially with Marcella Pobb?. Zucker asks the dumbest questions - like, "What was the highest note you ever sang?" He has some bizarre obsession with chest voice and asks most of the divas if they used it. Pobb? quite rightly throws him out of her apartment after he is foolish and impertinent enough to ask why she left the Met. (There was some unhappy love affair and obviously she wasn't going to discuss that, so why ask?)
Fedora Barbieri camps it up for the camera in an embarassing manner, making a fool of herself and Zucker at the same time. Zucker asks her a question about having sex with women in her dressing room before going on stage. But Barbieri is too thrilled with all the attention to slap him and chuck him out like Pobb? did. One wonders who has the bigger ego and who is more excited to be on camera.
The entire enterprise is an ego trip for Zucker. The title, "Stefan and the Divas," is misleading; this is mostly about Stefan, and a more unappealing subject it is difficult to imagine.
Still, there are wonderful moments with Anita Cerquetti, Giulietta Simionato, Leyla Gencer and Carla Gavazzi, when Zucker shuts up and we get a glimpse of these great singers. The segment with the ancient Gina Cigna is a disappointment just because she is so old and feeble and can hardly string two words together. One of the best moments is when Zucker tells Gencer that Barbieri and Simionato deny ever using chest voice. She looks incredulous, rolls her eyes and asks, "Questo di LORO?" ("This from THEM?") For these, and for the clips of the great Magda Olivero, the video is worth having - if you can stomach Zucker's prissy falsetto, foolish posturing, dumb questions, and irritating manner. Like Pobb?, one wants to chuck him out.
What a waste.
Customer Rating: 
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Opera Fanatic: Stefan And The Divas
"What are the various aspects of expressive singing?" is one of the questions Stefan Zucker puts to the divas. They discuss and demonstrate their interpretations, singing brief excerpts from Norma, Butterfly, Travatore, Traviata, Fanciulla, and Adriana (Olivero, age 86, performs the Monologo). The film includes footage from 40 years ago -- some of which is not otherwise on video.
Shot in 1996 on location in Italy (including La Scala) on a big budget, the film is illuminating, poignant, and brimming with personality.
Stefan Zucker: "Cerquetti, Adami Corradetti, Barbieri, Simionato, Pobbe and Olivero are all opposed to the use of chest resonance."
Carla Gavazzi: "Chest resonance is indispensable. They are ignorant!"
Giulietta Simionato: "If I had to do all over again, I wouldn't become a singer. I suffered too much."
Marcella Pobbe: "All I did was right. I didn't make mistakes."
Forgotten by many but worshipped by some: ten stars from when the prima donna was still a goddess. And Stefan Zucker, the "World's Highest Tenor," a New York intellectual just as brilliant as he is risque, full of eloquence and grand entrances. The quintessence of the omniscient hardcore opera fanatic, a figure from another age.
A film within a film: a framework, shot in morbid, Visconi-like colors, surrounds Stefan Zucker on his journey. The visits are filmed with two cameras: an electronic one documents the interview, the Super-16 films the situation: the interview as part of Stefan's journey. Nothing is off the record. An obsessive film: extreme people, extreme feelings, extreme opinions. An anti-world full of pathos, sometimes earthy and theatrical. Spectators must leave the film having experienced a world so consistent with itself that they cannot orient themselves afterwards: can it be true that our world really is so banal?
Customer Rating: -
5 star divas - no star Zucker
What a wasted opportunity - There was so much that these immortal artists could have been asked - but instead we get Barbieri being grilled about the sexual apetite of mezzos - Leyla Gencer being called erotic ! embarrasing. The narrative sound is hard to understand but the diva footage is excellent. It is such a shame.
Customer Rating: 
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This guy continues the most horrible stereotype
As I watched this video, I become more and more disgusted at the behavior of this creature known as Stefan Zucker. He is a petty, affected fop who kept asking each of these talented women about whether or not they used "chest voice." These are women who have sung the greatest roles in opera. Of all the possibilities of WHAT to ask them, he's on some personal mission to validate whatever freudian motivation he has for proving the validity of his own mother's voice (or lack of it). So, he's a terrible interviewer. I've heard better enunciated Italian by first year language students. He's a creature with a HUGE ego, who thinks he actually has something to say about the gifted women he has interviewed. The best part of the video is the reaction of each of the singers as they have that "deer in the headlights" look, as if to say, "Can this THING be real." He is an embarassment to all men who love opera and have to fight the stereotyping that comes with that. That being said, the entertainment value of the tape is high--this tape is an excercise in the display of an ego which most small screens cannot contain.
