Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli in Argentina

Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli in Argentina, July/August 1949.

I recently sat in the great Teatro Colón, an opera house I'd long wanted to visit, a few weeks ago (September 2025): this was for a concert performance of Bellini's "I Puritani". I couldn't get the final cabaletta [“Ah! sento al mio bell’angelo”] of Elvira out of my head and have been listening to the fabulous Dame Joan Sutherland singing it ever since. (The opera premiere took place on 24 January 1835 in Paris.) The music of that final cabaletta - a later addition - was considered for many years too difficult until Sutherland and her husband revived in the late 1950s.

LINK to six different performances!

ABM made his début in the Colón in the same year as Maria Callas. On 20 May 1949, Maria Meneghini Callas made her Buenos Aires debut in the Teatro Colón as Puccini’s Turandot, in performances conducted by Tullio Serafin. In addition to the four performances of Turandot and four of Norma in May and June 1949, she sang a single Aida on 2 July and appeared in a gala performance celebrating the Argentine Oath of Independence one week later. It was Callas’ only operatic season in Argentina and I also learn that Joan Sutherland had only one season there, too)

As I sat in the auditorium, I couldn't help but think of a far less welcome visitor in 1949 : Josef Mengele,  who - under the false name Helmut Gregor - sailed from Genoa to Argentina in July with a passport issued by the International Committee of the Red Cross.  He was to live in Buenos Aires for several years and actually received an Argentine ID card under his real name.  Facing extradition by West German authorities in 1960, he fled to Paraguay and evaded capture until his death in 1979.

Silly to speculate, I know, but did he hear Michelangeli that summer (winter in the southern hemisphere)?