Iris Adami Corradetti

Iris Adami Corradetti (March 19, 1904 – June 26, 1998) was an Italian opera soprano, and latterly a singing teacher.

Adami Corradetti was born in Milan in 1904. Her father, Ferruccio Corradetti , was a noted baritone singer at La Scala and other European venues, and a music critic. Her mother was Bice Adami, a soprano singer. Her younger half sister, Fiora Contino, became a conductor and music teacher.

A soprano singer, Corradetti studied piano and taught herself singing. She debuted in 1926 at the Teatro Dal Verme in Milan, playing the part of Coralità in the opera Anima Allegra by Franco Vittadini. In 1928, she was the protagonist at La Scala in Milan, playing Rosalina in Sly by Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari. In the same season she sang her first Mozart part, that of Barbarina in The Marriage of Figaro.

Corradetti had a vast repertoire that included eighty works, of which thirty-five were first performances of a piece, and about a hundred roles, mostly by composers of early Romanticism, such as Mozart and Cimarosa, as well as Verdi, Puccini, and Mascagni. She also performed works by contemporary composers such as Alberto Franchetti, Giuseppe Mulè and Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari. The parts that were most noted in her career were those of Francesca, in Francesca da Rimini by Riccardo Zandonai and the Madama Butterfly by Puccini.

In the 1930s, she recorded of some works for Italian radio. Corradetti officially retired from performing on January 28, 1946, during a Martini & Rossi concert; although on March 18, 1957, invited to a concert, she gave a final farewell to her career. After her retirement, Corradetti dedicated herself to teaching singing, initially in the Conservatorio di Musica Benedetto Marcello di Venezia in Venice, and latterly in Padua. Among her most famous students were Katia Ricciarelli, Mara Zampieri, Lucia Valentini Terrani, and Wladimiro Ganzarolli. She participated as a judge on the panels of many singing competitions, held conferences and master classes, in Italy and abroad, and for her expertise was assigned artistic direction positions at various institutions.