She sang more at the Met and far less elsewhere. She developed a special rapport with the Met audiences and became known as "Miss Sold Out", as her name on the marquee was considered a performance that could hardly be matched. She sang there some 270 times in La bohème, Madama Butterfly, Tosca, Manon Lescaut, La fanciulla del West, Otello, La forza del destino, Simon Boccanegra, Falstaff, Andrea Chénier, Adriana Lecouvreur, La Gioconda, and as Violetta in a production of La Traviata created specially for her. Puccini's Tosca was her most regular role there, with 45 performances. She was the Leonora in La forza del destino on the night in 1960 when Leonard Warren suddenly died mid-performance; and she was Adriana Lecouvreur on the night Placido Domingo made his Met debut in 1968. She made her last appearance there on 8 January 1973 as Desdemona in Otello; it was the role in which she made her Met debut 18 years earlier, and which had become one of her signature roles.[citation needed]
British musicologist Alan Blyth posited that in posterity, Tebaldi holds a position of being one of the last and best spinto sopranos of the last 50 years, due to Tebaldi's successors in the fach not having the right vocal equipment for her parts. Blyth attributed this in part to Tebaldi's recordings, and her live performances onstage. Tebaldi's voice added a frisson of urgency when she sang in an opera house. This was noted in two of her performances as Leonora in Verdi's La forza del destino, evident in a recording done at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino in 1953, where conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos urged her to great heights of vocal and dramatic achievement, and a live video recording in Naples.[39]
In 1991, he was invited to stage La Fanciulla del West at the Metropolitan Opera. This was followed by Stiffelio, Madama Butterfly, Simon Boccanegra and La Forza del destino (for which he was honored by the American Institute of Verdi Studies). All of these Met productions were filmed and internationally broadcast (three of them are available as home video and laser-disc).
Il regista di Il destino di un cavaliere, Brian Helgeland, ha rivelato che la canzone di David Bowie usata nella memorabile scena di ballo era stata scelta da Heath Ledger. Oltre a Ledger, il cast del film comprendeva Alan Tudyk, Shannyn Sossamon, Mark Addy, Rufus Sewell e Paul Bettany.