Maria Malibranaus romantic

María Felicia Sitches, known as María Malibrán (* 24 March 1808 in Paris, France; † 23 September 1836 in Manchester, England), was a French opera singer and composer.

Life

María Felicia wuchs in einer Musikerfamilie mit spanischen Wurzeln auf. Sie war die Tochter des spanischen Tenors, Belcanto-Lehrers und Komponisten Manuel del Pópulo Vicente García und der Sopranistin Joaquina Sitches (La Briones). She was the sister of the influential music teacher Manuel Patricio Rodríguez García and the singer and composer Pauline Viardot-García, who was thirteen years younger.
María Felicia first learnt to sing with her father. At the age of five, she sang a child’s role in Ferdinando Paër’s Agnese in Naples. She made her debut in London in 1825 at the King’s Theatre as Rosina in The Barber of Seville. She stood in for Giuditta Pasta at very short notice. At the end of the season, her family went to New York to perform Italian operas together. The Garcías gave the first American performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni with María as Zerlina.

In New York, María met François Eugène Malibran, a banker 27 years her senior, whom she married immediately. Only a few months after their wedding, her husband went bankrupt and María Malibran had to support him financially with the fees for her performances. After a year, she separated from her husband and returned to Europe. In Paris, she became an idolised star. In between, she made repeated 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 marrying him in Paris in 1836. In 1833, they had a son, Charles-Wilfrid de Bériot (1833-1914), who later became a pianist and teacher of Maurice Ravel.

At the end of April 1836, María Malibran fell from her horse in London’s Hyde Park and injured herself so badly that she never recovered. However, she refused to have her injuries treated by a doctor. 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 travelling to the Manchester Festival in September, where she sang in a duo with Rosalbina Carradori. She lost consciousness the next day and died in Manchester five months after her accident.

María Malibran was not only an exceptional singer. She composed, played the piano and harp excellently, painted, drew, embroidered and sometimes tailored her own costumes. Her letters are regarded as (literary) works of art, characterised by a highly original style of expression, wit and a sharp mind.

When she was laid to rest, 50,000 people lined the streets of Manchester. She was laid to rest in Brussels in the Laken cemetery next to the Notre-Dame de Laeken church. The marble slab on her grave reads: ‘Beauty, genius and love were the names of this woman.’

Source Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Malibran