My grandmother was a grade school teacher by profession born in a small backwater of a town called Terni, nowadays only 90 minutes north ofRome by car. These days there’s a plaque on a wall to mark her birth place as after a century of obscurity she has been rediscovered and rated as among the most famous of Terni’s citizens.
She was a teacher by trade but in 1914 at age 23 she went to Rome and learned to be an opera singer. Many many years ago in Milan I was at the most famous opera house in the country at La Scala where I was going to see L’Africaine by Giacomo Meyerbeer a fantasy about the explorer Vasco da Gama and an African woman with whom he fell in love. Hot stuff indeed but flipping through the program before the curtain went up I discovered to my amazement a reproduction of the program of premier of the opera at LaScala and my grandmother listed in the title role. I had known she sang but I never had any idea she was a star, a diva.
There was a story circulated in my family how our grandmother had toured South America singing with the greatest tenor of the era, Enrico Caruso and how she had crossed the Andes by mule in 1917. Having crossed the Andes by van I am better placed now to appreciate her feat.
She sang at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires and I wanted to track her down.
The Teatro Colón is a vast building said to be among the most beautiful and acoustically perfect opera houses in the world and it sure looks the part.
We took a tour of course and saw the magnificence briefly for ourselves. The English language tour:
Original seats from 1908 when the theater opened. They are for show only and not for sitting.
Busts of composers of course line the walls.
Rossini above and Verdi below.
And a fierce Ferenc Liszt whose home we saw in Sopron Hungary when we drove around Eastern Europe in about 1995 as I recall.
The theater was built seat 2500 people but somehow, Argentine style they’ve managed to squeeze 4,000 people in for one performance.
The tour guide directed me to one particular room, the library to access the archives which are open to the public.
There they record every artist who has performed at the Teatro Colón since its founding.
It took them two minutes to find Nera Marmora’s performances, which I found pretty amazing.
The Elixir of Love- Nera Marmora -three performances.
I Pagliacci ( which is also being performed this season incidentally) Nera Marmora sang Nedda.
The official programs are perfectly preserved.
Enrico Caruso was the Luciano Pavarotti of his day. He is known now because he made recordings. My grandmother who died in 1924 giving birth to my mother never did record.
The archivists were great and shared my excitement at finding these documents.
