Marietta Piccolomini
(1834-1899)

[The pages for sittings 100 to 300 are missing from Volume 1 of the Silvy daybooks, but this is either sitting number 210 or 211, according to the index to all 13 volumes.]

Maria Teresa Violante Piccolomini Clementini (stage name: Marietta Piccolomini) was one of the greatest singers of all time. She was born in Siena on 5 March 1834.

Marietta Piccolomini’s aristocratic parents were initially opposed to their daughter pursuing an operatic career, but eventually relented. Her debut was at Rome (1852) in Poliuto and Don Bucefalo. Later in the same year she sang Lucrezia Borgia by Donizetti at the Teatro della Pergola in Florence, which is sometimes wrongly given as her debut. Barely eighteen, the Florentine audience disparaged the idea of such a young performer singing such a role. She was the first Violetta in the English premiere of La Traviata, a role which she repeated to great acclaim throughout Italy (apparently she once sang Violetta on thirty-five successive nights in her home town of Siena).

On 20 September 1858 she made her first appearance in America, once again in La Traviata. Wherever she appeared, crowds would surround her carriages and hotels. She frequently gave the proceeds from her performances to the poor. She retired from the stage in 1860 when she married the Marchese Gaetani della Fargia, but returned one last time the following year for a benefit concert in aid of the victims of an earthquake in central Italy.

A contemporary description: 'She was agreeable, sprightly, petite, with a vivacious grace of manner perfectly bewitching. Her figure is slender and extremely elegant; her features are bright, and capable of expressing the rapid transitions of varying emotion. [Her voice was] a high soprano, fresh and youthful, but in range perhaps a little more than two octaves, crisp and flexible, pretty fluent, and rather sweet than powerful.'

Marietta Piccolomini died at Poggio Imperiale (Florence) on 20 December 1899.