23, 1972, singing the role of Preziosilla in, aptly, Verdi's La forza del destino. In the summer of that year, she returned to Santa Fe for her first Zerlina in Mozart's Don Giovanni and her first portrayal of the traumatized heroine of Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande ("At the point where Pelléas was coming toward me singing 'Je t'aime, je t'aime', I was trying to decide whether to go to a certain pizza parlor after the show"). After recording her first LP in February 1973Joseph Haydn's Harmoniemesse, conducted by Leonard Bernstein she crossed the Atlantic to begin preparations for her Paris Figaro. Both the production and her contribution to it were widely acclaimeda French critic wrote that she had the voice of an angeland she was soon receiving offers from many of the world's greatest opera houses. She made her British theatrical debut on July 1 at Glyndebourne under John Pritchard in another staging of Figaro, singing with her modesty intact despite the wish of her producer, Peter Hall, that she should perform part of the boudoir scene topless. In the autumn, she returned to San Francisco as Dorabella in Mozart's Così fan tutte; and at Christmas, she came back to the Met eighteen months after leaving it, debuting her Rosina in Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia as an acknowledged international star. Meeting Marcia Baldwin in later years, she joked that her colleague's night of illness back in 1970 had been singularly serendipitous. "Without you, honey, I would not have had a career." Baroque opera Von Stade's first season at Glyndebourne gave her the opportunity to become acquainted with Peter Hall's staging of Monteverdi's Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria. She attended each of that summer's seventeen performances of the work. She was enthralled by how he had crafted it"I don't think I've ever had an experience before or since that compared to it"and also by Janet Baker's Penelope: "If I could project her quiet dignity and devotion in just one of my performances, I'd rejoice for the rest of my life." She was also delighted by Raymond Leppard's extravagant realization of the piece. While acknowledging that his way with baroque scores had been slighted by some musicologists as anachronistic, she relished the appealing vivacity of the results: "I think he brought them alive and gave them a life that made them intensely popular." It was in Leppard's version of Ulisse that