Magda Olivero (née Maria Maddalena Olivero) (25 March 1910 – 8 September 2014), was an Italian operatic soprano. Her career started in 1932 when she was 22, and spanned five decades, establishing her "as an important link between the era of the verismo composers and the modern opera stage". She has been regarded as "one of the greatest singers of the twentieth century".
Life and career
Born as Maria Maddalena Olivero in Saluzzo, Italy, she followed complete musical studies (piano, harmony and composition), graduating in piano at the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory in Turin. She later studied singing outside the Conservatory and made her singing debut in 1932 on radio performing Nino Cattozzo's (1886–1961) oratorio, I Misteri Dolorosi.
Olivero performed widely and increasingly successfully until 1941, when she married the industrialist Aldo Busch and retired from the stage, only taking part in sporadic charity events for almost a decade. Not having had children as she would have liked to, however, she resumed her career in 1951, at the request of Francesco Cilea, who asked her to sing the title role again in his opera Adriana Lecouvreur. She performed this role at the Teatro Grande in Brescia on 3 February of that year, but Cilea did not see his wish come true as he had died less than three months earlier.
From 1951 until her final retirement, Olivero appeared in opera houses throughout Italy and, mainly in the 1960s and 1970s, all around the world (Europe, Egypt, the U.S., Latin America), but never in such premier venues as the Royal Opera House or the Paris Opera. Olivero performed just once at the Vienna State Opera, and exceedingly rarely at La Scala. Among her most renowned interpretations were those of the leading roles in Adriana Lecouvreur, Iris, Fedora, Tosca, La Bohème, La Fanciulla del West, La Traviata, La Wally, Madama Butterfly, Manon Lescaut, Mefistofele, Turandot (as Liù) and La Voix Humaine, the Italian version of which she premiered in Trieste in 1968.
She debuted successfully in the United States in 1967 as Medea in the Italian version of Cherubini's Médée, at the Dallas Opera, where she subsequently appeared in 1969 as Fedora, in 1970 as Giorgetta in Il Tabarro and in a gala concert featuring Poulenc's La Voix Humaine, sung for the first time in French; and finally as Tosca in 1974. The role of Medea, belonging to an eighteenth-century repertoire that was quite alien to her ordinary interests, was again taken at the Music Hall Theater in Kansas City in 1968, as well as, three years later, at Amsterdam's Concertgebouw, in concert, and eventually at Mantua's Teatro Sociale.
In 1975, at the age of 65, Olivero made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in Tosca, "as a late replacement for [Birgit] Nilsson." Her only three performances caused a furore, being met with wild applause from audiences, and were later referred to as "legendary". Her farewell to the Met's public is narrated in these words in a recent history of the New York theatre:
Her last performances on stage were in March 1981, in the one-woman opera, La Voix Humaine, in Verona; her stage career ending at age 71, after spanning nearly 50 years. She continued to sing sacred music locally and made occasional singing appearances well into her nineties.
Olivero died at the Istituto Auxologico di Milano aged 104. Olivero attributed her longevity to her vegetarian diet and practicing yoga.
She is buried in the Famedio (famous people memorial chapel) of the Monumental Cemetery of Milan.
Recordings and appraisal
Despite having a large cult following, Magda Olivero was never at the centre of the operatic star system, being largely restricted to Italian provincial theatres, and she was almost completely ignored by the official record industry. There exist only two studio recordings of complete operas featuring Olivero: Turandot (as Liù, with Gina Cigna, for Cetra Records, 1938) and Fedora (with Mario Del Monaco and Tito Gobbi, conducted by Lamberto Gardelli, for Decca, 1969). There exists a film, too, drawn from a 1960 RAI-television broadcast of Tosca.