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Marietta Alboni (March 6, 1826 – June 23, 1894) was a contralto opera singer and pupil of Antonio Bagioli of Cesena Romagna, and later of Gioachino Rossini. She was born at Città di Castello, in the Umbria, and made her début at the age of 15 at Bologna as Orsini in Lucrezia Borgia, and her success led to an engagement at La Scala, Milan. In 1846-47 she sang in all the principal cities of Europe; in London, at Covent Garden, in rivalry with Jenny Lind, who was at Her Majesty's Theatre. She toured the United States in 1852–53, appearing there with Camilla Urso. With the exception of Malibran, she was the greatest contralto of the nineteenth century.[1] Her voice, a fine contralto with a compass of two and one-half octaves, ranging as high as mezzo-soprano, possessed at once power, sweetness, fullness, and extraordinary flexibility. In passages requiring elevation and semi-religious calmness she had no peers, owing to the moving quality of her voice. She possessed vivacity, grace, and charm as an actress of the comédienne type, but her attempt at a strongly dramatic part, like Norma, turned out a failure. She married Count Carlo Pepoli, of the Papal States, but kept her maiden name on the stage, appearing in opera at Munich as late as 1872. Her husband died in 1866, and in 1877 she married M. Zieger, a French officer. She died at Ville d'Avray, near Paris.
[edit] Publications
- F. M. Colby and T. Williams (Eds.) (1917-1926), New International Encyclopedia (2nd Edition). Dodd, Mead & Co., The University Press, Cambridge Massachusetts.
- G. T. Ferris, Great Singers (New York, 1893)
- A. Pougin, Marietta Alboni (Paris, 1912)
- Arthur Pougin, Marietta Alboni (Cesena, 2001) (traduzione di Michele Massarelli con aggiunte al testo originale)
- Henry Fothergill Chorley (1862), Thirty Years' Musical Recollections. Hurst & Blackett, London, Volume II, The Year 1847, 8-13.[1]
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