Magda Olivero
Encyclopedia
Magda Olivero is a soprano
Soprano
A soprano is a voice type with a vocal range from approximately middle C to "high A" in choral music, or to "soprano C" or higher in operatic music. In four-part chorale style harmony, the soprano takes the highest part, which usually encompasses the melody...

 of the verismo
Verismo
Verismo was an Italian literary movement which peaked between approximately 1875 and the early 1900s....

-school of singing. She was born in Saluzzo
Saluzzo
Saluzzo is a town and former principality in the province of Cuneo, Piedmont region, Italy.The city of Saluzzo is built on a hill overlooking a vast, well-cultivated plain. Iron, lead, silver, marble, slate etc...

, Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

. Olivero made her operatic debut in 1932 on Turin
Turin
Turin is a city and major business and cultural centre in northern Italy, capital of the Piedmont region, located mainly on the left bank of the Po River and surrounded by the Alpine arch. The population of the city proper is 909,193 while the population of the urban area is estimated by Eurostat...

 radio in Cattozzo’s oratorio I misteri dolorosi. She performed widely and increasingly successfully until 1941, when she married and retired from performing. She returned to the stage ten years later, at the request of Francesco Cilèa
Francesco Cilea
Francesco Cilea was an Italian composer. Today he is particularly known for his operas L'arlesiana and Adriana Lecouvreur.-Biography:...

, who asked her to sing the title role in his opera Adriana Lecouvreur
Adriana Lecouvreur
Adriana Lecouvreur is an opera in four acts by Francesco Cilea to an Italian libretto by Arturo Colautti, based on the play by Eugène Scribe and Ernest Legouvé...

.

From 1951 until her final retirement, Olivero sang in opera houses around the world. Among her most renowned interpretations were the leading parts in Adriana Lecouvreur, Iris
Iris (opera)
Iris is an opera in three acts by Pietro Mascagni to an original Italian libretto by Luigi Illica. Its first performance was at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome on 22 November 1898.The opera is through-composed and set in Japan during legendary times...

, Fedora
Fedora (Giordano)
Fedora is an opera in three acts by Umberto Giordano to an Italian libretto by Arturo Colautti, based on the play Fédora by Victorien Sardou. Along with Andrea Chénier and Siberia, it is one of the most notable works of Giordano...

, La bohème
La bohème
La bohème is an opera in four acts,Puccini called the divisions quadro, a tableau or "image", rather than atto . by Giacomo Puccini to an Italian libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, based on Scènes de la vie de bohème by Henri Murger...

, La fanciulla del West
La fanciulla del West
La fanciulla del West is an opera in three acts by Giacomo Puccini to an Italian libretto by Guelfo Civinini and Carlo Zangarini, based on the play The Girl of the Golden West by the American author David Belasco. Its highly-publicised premiere occurred in New York City in 1910...

, La traviata
La traviata
La traviata is an opera in three acts by Giuseppe Verdi set to an Italian libretto by Francesco Maria Piave. It is based on La dame aux Camélias , a play adapted from the novel by Alexandre Dumas, fils. The title La traviata means literally The Fallen Woman, or perhaps more figuratively, The Woman...

, La Wally
La Wally
La Wally is a four-act opera by Alfredo Catalani, composed on a libretto by Luigi Illica, and first performed at La Scala, Milan on 20 January 1892....

, Madama Butterfly
Madama Butterfly
Madama Butterfly is an opera in three acts by Giacomo Puccini, with an Italian libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa. Puccini based his opera in part on the short story "Madame Butterfly" by John Luther Long, which was dramatized by David Belasco...

, Manon Lescaut
Manon Lescaut (Puccini)
Manon Lescaut is an opera in four acts by Giacomo Puccini. The story is based on the 1731 novel L’histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut by the Abbé Prévost....

, Mefistofele
Mefistofele
Mefistofele is an opera in a prologue, four acts and an epilogue, the only completed opera by the Italian composer-librettist Arrigo Boito.-Composition history:...

, and Turandot
Turandot
Turandot is an opera in three acts by Giacomo Puccini, set to a libretto in Italian by Giuseppe Adami and Renato Simoni.Though Puccini's first interest in the subject was based on his reading of Friedrich Schiller's adaptation of the play, his work is most nearly based on the earlier text Turandot...

(as Liù.)

She sang in Cherubini's Medea
Medea
Medea is a woman in Greek mythology. She was the daughter of King Aeëtes of Colchis, niece of Circe, granddaughter of the sun god Helios, and later wife to the hero Jason, with whom she had two children, Mermeros and Pheres. In Euripides's play Medea, Jason leaves Medea when Creon, king of...

in Dallas in 1967 and in Kansas City in 1968. In 1975, already an international star for four decades, she made her début at the Metropolitan Opera House
Metropolitan Opera House (Lincoln Center)
The Metropolitan Opera House is an opera house located on Broadway at Lincoln Square in the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City. Part of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the theater opened in 1966. It replaced the former Metropolitan Opera House at Broadway and 39th St...

 in Tosca
Tosca
Tosca is an opera in three acts by Giacomo Puccini to an Italian libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa. It premiered at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome on 14 January 1900...

. Her last performances on stage were in March 1981 in the one-woman opera, La voix humaine
La voix humaine
La voix humaine is a one-act opera for one character, with music by Francis Poulenc to a libretto by Jean Cocteau, based on his 1930 play. La voix humaine was first performed at the Opéra-Comique, Salle Favart in Paris on 6 February 1959...

by Poulenc
Francis Poulenc
Francis Jean Marcel Poulenc was a French composer and a member of the French group Les six. He composed solo piano music, chamber music, oratorio, choral music, opera, ballet music, and orchestral music...

. Thus, her stage career ended at age 71 and spanned nearly 50 years. She continued to sing church music locally and, well into her eighties, made a recording of several arias. Recordings exist of many of her great performances of both full operas and arias and scenes.

Among her studio recordings are Turandot (as Liù, with Gina Cigna
Gina Cigna
Gina Cigna was a French-Italian opera singer, one of the leading dramatic soprano of the inter-war period.- Biography :...

, for Cetra, 1938), Fedora (with Mario del Monaco
Mario del Monaco
Mario Del Monaco was an Italian tenor who is regarded by his admirers as being one of the greatest dramatic tenors of the 20th century....

 and Tito Gobbi
Tito Gobbi
Tito Gobbi was an Italian operatic baritone with an international reputation.-Biography:Tito Gobbi was born in Bassano del Grappa and studied law at the University of Padua before he trained as a singer. Giulio Crimi, a well-known Italian tenor of a previous generation, was Gobbi's teacher in Rome...

, conducted by Lamberto Gardelli
Lamberto Gardelli
Lamberto Gardelli was an Italian conductor, particularly associated with the Italian opera repertory, especially the works of Giuseppe Verdi....

, for Decca, 1969) and highlights from Francesca da Rimini (with del Monaco, conducted by Nicola Rescigno
Nicola Rescigno
Nicola Rescigno was an Italian-American conductor, particularly associated with the Italian opera repertory. Opera News said that "Rescigno was a seminal figure in the history of opera in America, a maestro and mentor who shaped the destiny and reputation of two major U.S...

, for Decca, 1969). In 1993, she recorded, with piano accompaniment, Adriana Lecouvreur (with Marta Moretto
Marta Moretto
Marta Moretto is an Italian operatic mezzo-soprano, who was born in Padua.A graduate of the Conservatorio "Cesare Pollini," in her native city, Moretto made her formal debut in 1990, as Maddalena in Rigoletto, in Mexico City...

 as the Princesse de Bouillon); excerpts from this recorded were published on the Bongiovanni label. At the age of 86, she still managed to perform Adriana's monologue in Jan Schmidt-Garre
Jan Schmidt-Garre
-Biography:Jan Schmidt-Garre studied philosophy at the Hochschule für Philosophie der Jesuiten in Munich from 1982 to 1986...

's film Opera Fanatic, and into her nineties was still making occasional singing appearances. Olivero celebrated her 100th birthday on 25 March 2010.

Further reading

  • Konrad Dryden. From Another World: The Art of Magda Olivero, The Opera Quarterly, vol. 20 number 3, Summer 2004
  • Konrad Dryden. Franco Alfano, Transcending Turandot (Scarecrow Press Inc., 2009) Foreword by Magda Olivero.

External links

  • Jean-Pierre Mouchon, ed. Hommage à Magda Olivero pour ses cent ans ("Étude" n°47, May–June-July–August 2010, 64 p., ill.Journal published by Association internationale de chant lyrique "Titta Ruffo", Marseilles, France, with contributions by Andrea Lanzola, Vincenzo Quattrocchi, Salvatore Aiello, Serenella Gragnani, Riccardo Ristori).
  • Magda Olivero in an excerpt from Tosca (1960).
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