remarked in Tom Hulce's portrait of Mozart in the film Amadeus. Her playful, aristocratic interpretation of the adolescent page, informed by her observations of seven teenaged male cousins, was greeted by the eminent record producer Walter LeggeElisabeth Schwarzkopf's husbandas revelatory: "The joy of the evening is Frederica von Stade, an actress of seemingly unlimited resources. I've never seen or heard a better Cherubino." Certainly no role figured in her engagement diary more often. Her early appearances as the farfallone amoroso were followed by others in Houston (1973), Paris (1974, 1980), Salzburg (house debut 1974, 1975, 1976, 1987), Vienna (house debut 1977), Chicago (1987, 1991) and San Francisco (1991), and she incarnated him forty-eight times at the Met between 1972 and 1992. Mozart's other da Ponte operas were less important in her career. She sang Zerlina with the Met in its spring tour in 1974, and Despina in Così fan tutte in San Francisco (2004) and at the Ravinia Festival (2010). (She admits to not being especially fond of her earlier Così role, Dorabella.) But she was often heard in trouser roles in Mozart's opera serie. Her Sesto in San Francisco's 1971 La clemenza di Tito was followed by further performances at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires (1980), Munich (1981), San Francisco (1993) and Dallas (1999), and she recorded the opera's secondary role of Annio for Colin Davis (1976). In 1982, she returned to the Met after a hiatus of six years to star as Idamante in the house's televised company premiere of Idomeneo. a staging that partnered her with Luciano Pavarotti (one of the singers who she most adores). She revisited the piece with other tenors at the Met (1983, 1986, 1989) and, in concert, at Tanglewood (1991). The seldom performed operas of the 18th century's other great master, Joseph Haydn, were works in which she was never heard theatrically, but she did contribute to the pioneering series of recordings of them conducted by Antal Doráti. She was an uncharacteristically furious Amaranta in La fedeltà premiata (1975), and Lisetta in the astronomical comedy Il mondo della luna (1977). 19th-century Italian opera Von Stade has often spoken of her special devotion to the Italian operas of the early 1800s. "I love bel canto; it's the core of what singing is about." "I really believe so much in bel canto, and particularly Rossini's music. It does everything that can be accomplished