achieved the opera's goal of making you "feel like your whole inside is smiling".Rossini, Gioachino: La Cenerentola, with Francisco Araiza, Claudio Desderi, Margherita Guglielmi, Paolo Montarsolo, Paul Plishka, von Stade, Laura Zannini and the Chorus and Orchestra of La Scala, Milan, conducted by Claudio Abbado and produced by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, Deutsche Grammophon DVD, B0005769-09, 2005 Comic operas were not the only bel canto works in which she performed. In 1978, she joined José Carreras to record Rossini's little known Otello under Jesús López Cobos. The vocal historian J. B. Steane regarded her interpretation of Desdemona as the "most lovely and suitable of her Rossini singing". "The character's tenderness and the music's lyricism asked for just what she had to give." She was also Elena in Rossini's La donna del lago in the opera's first 20th-century American production in Houston (1981), reprising the role in concert at Carnegie Hall (1982) and theatrically at Covent Garden (1985). In Bellini's operas she was heard only rarely, despite her high estimation of them: "If I were a soprano, I would sing nothing but Bellini. I think Bellini comes closest to everything I believe about the greatness of singing." Her Adalgisa in a Met Norma (1975) had the misfortune to be paired with an incongruously cast Wagnerian in the opera's title role. Damning the production as "a travesty of Bellini's work both musically and dramatically", Donal Henahan of The New York Times wrote that Rita Hunter's "monumental proportions and virtual immobility as an actress" were not mitigated by her shrill top notes, her effortful coloratura in "Casta diva" and her being apparently often out of breath. Von Stade's hopes of revisiting the opera with Shirley Verrett came to nothing,Blyth, Alan: Frederica von Stade; Gramophone, February 1977, p. 1263 but she did get to sing Amina in La Sonnambula in San Francisco (1984) and Dallas (1986), performing in a partly transposed version of the score based on that tailored for Maria Malibran. 19th-century French opera Von Stade became skilled in French while still at school in Noroton, prescribed fifty or sixty pages of Voltaire or Saint-Exupéry a night by a teacher who banned English speech from her classroom. She finds French music more comfortable to sing than Italian, and she has a high regard for French musical sensibilities: "French music is luscious. … The French have a sense about proportion, and they know what works." In