Opera singer.
Born: July 22, 1909; Died: August 15, 2014.
Licia Albanese, who has died aged 105, was one of those great Italian sopranos - Magda Olivero, who died on September 8, was another - destined to become operatic centenarians.
Her most famous role, that of Puccini's Madama Butterfly, was one that she studied under the distinguished Gieseppina Baldassarre-Tedeschi, the most adept Madama Butterfly of her day. The young novice's first appearance in the part came about by chance at the Milan Lyric Theatre in 1934, when she replaced an ailing soprano, for whom she had been acting as understudy, halfway through the performance.
Her sudden success guaranteed her future as a singer. Her official debut, in the same opera, took place in Parma in the same year. It was also the work in which she first appeared at the New York Metropolitan in 1940.
By then she had made her Covent Garden debut singing the forlorn slave-girl Liu to the great Eva Turner's Turandot in 1937.
But Puccini was far from being her only operatic composer. In the course of her spectacular career, she appeared in 48 different operas on as many as a thousand occasions, many of them at the Met.
Active in the campaign to save the old Met building, she refused to appear in the new one at Lincoln Centre, though she perhaps recognised by then that her voice had begun its decline and that her teaching career lay ahead.
America remained very much her stamping ground - she took US nationality - and it was in Arturo Toscanini's NBC broadcasts that she made her most cherished appearances as Violetta in La Traviata and Mimi in La Boheme.
Yet Mozart was by no means beyond her. She was reputedly an exquisite Zerlina and, more predictably, a penetrating big-house Donna Anna in Don Giovanni. She was a notable Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro, an outstanding Micaela in Carmen, a moving Manon in Massenet's opera and a superlative Marguerite in Gounod's Faust.
Though most of us today know of her qualities principally through hearsay, her Toscanini recordings remain collectors' items. She was clearly one of the stars of her time, even if the war years, during which she reached her peak, kept her away from Europe.
It remains tantalising that anyone who wanted to hear her sing Butterfly at the Edinburgh Festival was forced to wait in vain. Her preference, in any case, was for grand American settings rather than the intimacy of the King's Theatre, which, though she was small in stature, would have cramped her style.
From 1945 she was married to Joseph Gimma, a stockbroker from her native Bari. She is survived by her son Joseph, two grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
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