through the voice." "Sometimes what you want to get across is: 'This is hard, but I am fantastic because I can do this.' ... That's what Rossini is". She is identified with Rosina in Il barbiere di Siviglia almost as closely as with Cherubino, although she has confessed to loving the Rossini role much less than the Mozart one. "I used to be uncomfortable doing Rosina. … She's usually played as the pert soubrette, with sort of a sharp turn. But I found I can do it within my own terms. Rosina can be wilful one moment, but she can be tender the next." She sang the role twenty-two times at the Met between 1973 and 1992, and also at Covent Garden (house debut 1975) and at La Scala (1976, 1984), in San Francisco (1976, 1992), in Hamburg (1979), in Vienna (1987, 1988), and in Chicago (1989,1994). Her first La Scala staging was nearly aborted when its producer, Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, insisted that she sing the cavatina "Una voce poco fà" unembellished. He relented only when the conductor Thomas Schippers called in the musicologists Philip Gossett and Alberto Zedda to persuade him to allow his weeping prima donna the ornaments and cadenza that she had prepared for him. She finds Rossini's La Cenerentola a more sympathetic work, enjoying his treatment of Cinderella for more than its "vocal fireworks and slapstick comedy". "Warmth is the message here. As the subtitle says, it's 'la bontà in trionfo', the triumph of goodnessnot goody-goody bontà, but bontà in the spiritual sense, … the sense that we can be everything to each other. I do feel it as a religious message. My joy is to have the privilege of expressing it. Cenerentola has a certain quality that all the women I play have, a softness. I guess that's what my definition of femininity isthe Cinderella softness." Her Angelina (Cinderella) was heard in San Francisco (1974), in a televised production in Paris (1977) and in Dallas (1979), and also with the company of La Scala when they visited the United States to celebrate the republic's bicentenary (1976). (The Opéra de Paris invited her to participate in their contribution to the US's bicentennial festivities too, performing as Cherubino; she was the only American so honoured by both institutions.) Her interpretation of the role is preserved in a 1981 film of a production by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle which, she thought,