Maria Caniglia playlist

Maria Caniglia

Maria Caniglia (Naples, May 5, 1905 - Rome, April 16, 1979) was one of the most important sopranos of the 1930s and 1940s, tackling the Verdi and Puccini repertoires with excellent results, but also leaving room for lesser known works. She made her debut in 1930 at the Teatro Regio in Turin, at just twenty-five years of age, in Elektra by Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hoffmannsthal, after completing her studies at the Conservatory of San Pietro a Majella in Naples. That same year she made her first appearance at La Scala in Milan with Lo straniero by Ildebrando Pizzetti, and over the years returned to sing in the Milanese theatre several times. International success took her to perform in Paris, Brussels, Salzburg, Berlin and London, and the two main metropolises of South America as well, Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro. But the theatre that she loved the most was the Metropolitan in New York, with the classics of her repertoire, Otello, Falstaff, Aida and Tosca. She often found himself working with Beniamino Gigli and Gino Bechi, and the playlist you are about to hear presents some of her most famous arias. It closes with some brief segments within the aria E lucevan le stelle from Tosca by Puccini, with Gigli, and a scene performed with Gigli, Giuseppe Taddei, Adelio Zagonara and Giulietta Simionato, in a lively rendition of the aria Signor Chenier from Andrea Chenier by Giordano. In homage to her family’s Abruzzo origins, the municipality of Sulmona named its municipal theatre after her in 2001.