The Nightingale: A Novel about Maria Malibran

Maria Félicia García took to opera like a nightingale to song. The daughter of world-famous tenor Manuel del Popolo Vicente Garcia, who was also a control freak, she made her début in opera at the ripe old age of seventeen on two days' notice in June 1825. Engaged to sing the leading role of Rosina in Rossini's Barber of Seville at the King's Theatre in London, she was an overnight sensation. Garcia discovered that she was having a fling with a young man and whisked her away to America. The García Opera Troupe set sail for New York on a packet ship and thus brought opera sung in Italian to the New World. Maria's success at the Park Theatre in New York was equally phenomenal. Newspapers described her as 'the magnet who attracted all eyes and won all hearts" and rhapsodized over 'the silver tones of the Signorina." One of the men who fell under the spell was a ship owner named Eugene Malibran. They were married on the day before her eighteenth birthday, and soon she became well known as Maria Malibran. In addition to singing, Maria was a composer of songs, something else she probably learned at her father's knee. Garcia is said to have written 90 operas and operettas as well as many songs. Around fifty songs came from Maria's pen. The Malibran Society, a nonprofit corporation founded by Carol Russell Law, has republished twenty of them thus far. The Nightingale also contains music - the vocal lines and lyrics of nine songs and arias that play a part in the dramatic story of Maria Malibran, who was said by many to have been the first superstar of opera.