Maria Malibran
María de la Felicidad Malibran , née García (born March 24, 1808 in Paris , France , † September 23, 1836 in Manchester , England ), was a French opera singer ( mezzo-soprano , soprano sfogato ). She was celebrated as La Malibran and is considered to be the first diva in opera history, who shone above all in stage works by Vincenzo Bellini , Gaetano Donizetti and Gioachino Rossini .
Life and artistic work
María García grew up in a family of musicians with Spanish roots. Her father was the Seville-born tenor and singing teacher Manuel del Pópulo Vicente García , her sister the well-known mezzo-soprano Pauline Viardot-Garcia and her brother the baritone and singing teacher Manuel Patricio Rodríguez García , who is known to this day for his basic singing school.
María and Pauline García first learned singing from their father. At the age of five she sang a child role in Ferdinando Paërs Agnese in Naples. She made her debut in London in 1825 at the King's Theater as Rosina in The Barber of Seville . She jumped in for Giuditta Pasta at very short notice . At the end of the season, she went to New York with her father and two siblings to perform Italian operas with them . The Garcias will also be staging Mozart's Don Giovanni as an American premiere , with María as Zerlina.
In New York, María met the 27-year-old banker François Eugène Malibran, whom she married stante pede. Only a few months after their wedding, her husband went bankrupt, and María Malibran had to support him financially with the fee for her performances. After a year she separated from her husband and went back to Europe. In Paris, she became a swarmed star. In between she made guest appearances in England and Belgium. In 1832 she went to Italy. There she conquered the great opera stages of Rome, Naples, Milan, Venice and Bologna, but also sang in numerous smaller cities.
María Malibran fell in love with the Belgian violinist and composer Charles-Auguste de Bériot (1802-1870) and lived with him for six years in a "wild marriage" before she married him in 1836 in Paris. In 1833 a son emerged from their connection (the later pianist and teacher of Maurice Ravel , Charles-Wilfrid de Bériot , 1833-1914).
At the end of April 1836, María Malibran fell from her horse in London's Hyde Park and was injured so badly that she did not recover from it. However, she refused to have her injuries treated by a doctor. Instead, she continued to sing Amina in Bellini's La sonnambula before returning to Brussels. In the summer she gave concerts with her husband in Liège and Aachen before traveling to the Manchester Festival in September, where she sang in a duo with Rosalbina Carradori . She passed out the next day and died five months after her accident in Manchester.
María Malibran was not just an exceptional singer. She composed, played the piano and harp excellently, painted, drew, embroidered and sometimes made her own costumes. She was also a master of the nimble pen. Your letters are (literary) works of art, which are characterized by a very original way of expression, esprit and a sharp mind.
When she was buried, 50,000 people lined the streets of Manchester. She found her final resting place in Brussels in the Laken cemetery next to the Notre-Dame de Laeken church . On the marble slab of her grave it says: "Beauty, genius and love were the names of this woman."
reception
The German filmmaker Werner Schroeter made a television film about her life in 1971 entitled The Death of María Malibran (with Christine Kaufmann ). The mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli has dedicated a CD to this great singer, her role model . also their compositional works sung for the first time: Maria (Decca 2007). A traveling exhibition with exhibits from and about La Malibran in a modern articulated lorry accompanied their tour in eight European countries in 2007 and 2008.
Compositions
- Spread Thy Light Wings (song)
- Rataplan (song)
literature
- Howard Bushnell: Maria Malibran. A biography of the singer. Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park PA 1979, ISBN 0-271-00222-0 .
- Anke Charton: Article “Maria Malibran” . In: MUGI. Music education and gender research: Lexicon and multimedia presentations , ed. by Beatrix Borchard and Nina Noeske, University of Music and Theater Hamburg, 2003ff. As of June 12, 2015.
- April Fitzlyon: Maria Malibran. Diva of the Romantic Age. Souvenir Press, London 1987, ISBN 0-285-65030-0 .
- Rebecca Grotjahn : “'The most popular woman in the world.' The diva and the beginnings of the star being in the 19th century ”. In: Rebecca Grotjahn, Dörte Schmidt , Thomas Seedorf (eds.): Diva - The Staging of the Superhuman Woman: Interdisciplinary Investigations into a Cultural Phenomenon of the 19th and 20th Century Edition Argus, 2011 ISBN 978-3931264574 , pp. 74–97 , especially p. 81f.
- Isaac Nathan: Madame Malibran. Biographical sketch. Based on the English by Albert von Treskow. Basse, Quedlinburg et al. 1837 ( digitized version ).
- Arthur Pougin: Marie Malibran. Histoire d'une cantatrice. Plon-Nourrit, Paris 1911.
Movies
- The death of Maria Malibran. TV feature film, Federal Republic of Germany, 104 min., 1971, script and director: Werner Schroeter , production: ZDF , first broadcast: March 2, 1972, among others. with Magdalena Montezuma as Maria Malibran, Christine Kaufmann , Ingrid Caven , ( The death of Maria Malibran in the Internet Movie Database )
- Cecilia Bartoli - Maria Malibran. Story of a passion. Documentary, Germany, 2008, 53 min., Script and director: Michael Sturminger, production: WDR , first broadcast: December 22, 2008 on arte . (Accompanied by C. Bartoli, the viewer gets an insight into the life and work of the Malibran.)
sources
- ↑ Catherine Clément : The woman in the opera. Defeated, betrayed and sold. Translated from the French by Annette Holoch. Preface by Silke Leopold . Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich 1994, p. 61
- ↑ Rolling Maria Malibran Museum ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Italienportal.eu
- ^ Traveling exhibition on María Malibran
Web links
- Sheet music and audio files by Maria Malibran in the International Music Score Library Project
- Maria Malibran. In: FemBio. Women's biography research (with references and citations).
- Traveling exhibition on María Malibran by the Cecilia Bartoli Music Foundation
- “Cecilia Bartoli on Belcanto, Bellini and her relatives from the 19th century, the diva Maria Malibran.” Der Tagesspiegel , September 14, 2007, interview
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Malibran, Maria |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Malibran, María de la Felicidad (full name); La Malibran (nickname) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French opera singer (mezzo-soprano) |
| BIRTH DATE | March 24, 1808 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Paris |
| DATE OF DEATH | September 23, 1836 |
| PLACE OF DEATH | Manchester |