Although primarily associated with Italian-language comic roles, Corbelli’s résumé shows his wide-ranging interests and versatility, including French and German roles (Sulpice in Donizetti's La fille du regiment, Papageno in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte), Baroque opera (Seneca in Monteverdi’s L'incoronazione di Poppea) and a twentieth-century English-language opera (Nick Shadow in Stravinsky’s The Rake's Progress).
Her vast repertory eventually grew to encompass Princess Eboli in Don Carlo which she sang at La Scala in Milan, in Salzburg and in Vienna, the title-role in Carmen, Ulrica (Un ballo in maschera), Monteverdi's Octavia (L'incoronazione di Poppea), Dido (Les Troyens), Kundry (Parsifal), Klytemnestra (Elektra) and contemporary roles by von Einem and Orff.
In 1952 he conducted the first recording of L'incoronazione di Poppea, conducting the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich in a live stage performance.
He now mainly dedicates himself to teaching singing and giving master classes in Italy, Germany and Japan, but he has latterly founded an ensemble for recording Monteverdi operas, which has released recordings of L'incoronazione di Poppea and L'Orfeo.
She has recorded extensively, for example as Dido in Purcell's Dido and Aeneas (with Christopher Hogwood and the Academy of Ancient Music in 1994), with the choir of King's College, Cambridge conducted by Stephen Cleobury in Bach's St. John Passion, as Venus in John Blow’s Venus and Adonis with Philip Pickett, and in Monteverdi's L'Incoronazione di Poppea with Sir John Eliot Gardiner.
During the last years of his life, when he was often ill, he composed his two last masterpieces: Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria (The Return of Ulysses, 1641), and the historic opera L'incoronazione di Poppea (The Coronation of Poppea, 1642), based on the life of the Roman emperor Nero.
His libretto for Gli amori d'Apollo e di Dafne (Francesco Cavalli, 1640) is heavily based on Giovanni Battista Guarini's Il pastor fido, while L'incoronazione di Poppea (1642), set by Monteverdi, is noted among early libretti for the strength and vividness with which the individual characters are sketched.
Emperor Claudius became another Roman emperor, Otho (Ottone), who had already appeared as a protagonist in Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea (1642) and in Handel's Agrippina (1709).
Her repertory included Mozart's Donna Elvira from Don Giovanni, and First Lady from The Magic Flute; Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea and Rameau's Aricia; Jean-Baptiste Lully's Climène from Phaëton, Leclair's Circé in Scylla et Glaucus; Arthur Honegger's Diane from Les aventures du roi Pausole and Francis Poulenc's Madame Lidoine from Dialogues of the Carmelites.