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Maria Felicia Malibran (; 24 March 1808 – 23 September 1836) was a Spanish singer who commonly sang both contralto and soprano parts, and was one of the best-known opera singers of the 19th century. Malibran was known for her stormy personality and dramatic intensity, becoming a legendary figure after her death in Manchester, England, at age 28. Contemporary accounts of her voice describe its range, power and flexibility as extraordinary.
When the season closed, García immediately took his operatic troupe to New York. The troupe consisted primarily of the members of his family: Maria, her brother, Manuel, and their mother, Joaquina Sitches, also called "la Briones". Maria's younger sister, Pauline Viardot, who would later become a famous singer in her own right under the name of Pauline Viardot, was then only four years old.
This was the first time that Italian opera was performed in New York City. Over a period of nine months, Maria sang the lead roles in eight operas, two of which were written by her father. In New York, she met and hastily married a banker, Francois Eugene Malibran, who was 28 years her senior. It is thought that her father forced Maria to marry him in return for the banker's promise to give Manuel García 100,000 francs. However, according to other accounts, she married simply to escape her tyrannical father. A few months after the wedding, her husband declared bankruptcy, and Maria was forced to support him through her performances. After a year, she left Malibran and returned to Europe.
In Europe, Malibran sang the title role at the premiere of Donizetti's Maria Stuarda. The opera was based on Schiller's play Mary Stuart, and as it portrayed Mary, Queen of Scots in a sympathetic light, censors demanded textual amendments, which Malibran often ignored. The Library of the Royal Conservatory of Brussels conserves a series of interesting coloured costume projectsMaria Malibran, La Réforme du Théâtre, (Library of the Royal Conservatory of Brussels, B-Bc, Maria Malibran fund, FC-2-MM-073). for this play, created by Malibran, revealing her unsuspected drawing talent.
Malibran became romantically involved with the Belgian violinist Charles Auguste de Bériot. The pair lived together as a common-law couple for six years and a child was born to them in 1833 (the piano pedagogue Charles-Wilfrid de Bériot), before Maria obtained an annulment of her marriage to Malibran. Felix Mendelssohn wrote an aria accompanied by a solo violin especially for the couple. Malibran sang at the Paris Opera among other major opera houses. In Paris, she met and performed with Michael Balfe.
Ah! That wonderful creature! With her disconcerting musical genius she surpassed all who sought to emulate her, and with her superior mind, her breadth of knowledge and unimaginable fieriness of temperament she outshone all other women I have known....Giachino Rossini, in Bartoli 2007, p. 8
Among other operas, she sang the title role in his Tancredi and in Otello, in which it appears that she sang both the roles of Desdemona and of Otello.Letter from Carlo Severini to Éduard Robert (Co-Director of the Théâtre-Italien), 1829: "She will do three jobs for us...", in Bartoli, Maria, p. 10 Other appearances included those in Il turco in Italia, La Cenerentola, and Semiramide (both Arsace and the title role).
She also sang in Meyerbeer's Il crociato in Egitto in Paris in September 1825, an opera which Rossini, as director of the Théâtre-Italien, introduced to the French capital and "which launched Meyerbeer's European reputation".Servadio 2003, () Malibran enjoyed great success in Bellini's operas Norma, La sonnambula and I Capuleti e i Montecchi (as Romeo). She also sang the Romeo role in two other then-famous operas: Giulietta e Romeo by Niccolò Antonio Zingarelli and Giulietta e Romeo by Vaccai. Bellini wrote a new version of his I puritani to adapt it to her mezzo-soprano voice and even promised to write a new opera especially for her, but he died before he was able to do so.
Malibran's tessitura (comfortable vocal range) was remarkably wide, from E♭ below middle C to high C and D,Merlin, Memoires and Letters of Mme Malibran, Philadelphia, Carey and Hart, 1840 which allowed her easily to sing roles for contralto as well as high soprano. Her contemporaries admired Malibran's emotional intensity on stage. Rossini, Donizetti, Chopin, Mendelssohn and Franz Liszt were among her fans. The painter Eugène Delacroix however, accused her of lacking refinement and class and of trying to "appeal to the masses who have no artistic taste." Describing her voice and technique, French critic Castil-Blaze wrote, "Malibran's voice was vibrant, full of brightness and vigor. Without ever losing her flattering timbre, this velvet tone that has given her so much seduction in tender and passionate arias. ... Vivacity, accuracy, ascending chromatics runs, , vocal lines dazzling with strength, grace or coquetry, she possessed all that the art can acquire."Saint Bris
Notable roles:
The mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli dedicated her 2007 album Maria to the music composed for Malibran and her most famous roles, as well as an extensive tour and DVD concert dedicated to La Malibran. In 2008 Decca released a recording Bellini's La Sonnambula with Cecilia Bartoli in the lead role using many cadenzas that la Malibran herself used and which restored the tessitura of the role to the high mezzo-soprano range (as Giuditta Pasta and Maria Malibran had sung it). In 2013 Decca did it again with Bellini's Norma, casting Bartoli as the title role and Sumi Jo as Adalgisa.
Letitia Elizabeth Landon includes a poetic tribute, in miniature, in The English Bijou Almanack, 1837.
She appears as a character in a poem by William McGonagall.
Mark Twain's daughter Susy Clemens, dying of spinal meningitis, wrote a final delirious prose poem addressed to Malibran, whom she regarded as a kind of patron saint: "Tell her to say God bless the shadows as I bless the light."Ron Powers, Mark Twain. Simon and Schuster, 2005.
Cited sources
Other sources
Legacy
Teatro Malibran
She is the patroness of Teatro Malibran in Venice, where her cameo hangs above the stage.
Maria Malibran fund
The Library of the Royal Conservatory of Brussels possesses an important collection of scores, documents and objects from the diva, assembled in the Maria Malibran fund.
Film
Several films depict the life of Maria Malibran:
In other media
In 1982, soprano Joan Sutherland did a recital tour called "Malibran" in order to revive Malibran's memory, singing pages from the singer's favourites in Venice.
Genealogy
Notes
External links
Categories: 1808 Births, 1836 Deaths, 19th-century French Women Opera Singers, Spanish Mezzo-sopranos, 19th-century Spanish Opera Singers, Deaths By Horse-riding Accident In England, Burials At Laeken Cemetery, 19th-century Spanish Classical Composers, 19th-century Spanish Women Composers, 19th-century Women Composers
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