Rosa Melba (Ponzillo) Ponselle (1897 - 1981)

Born 22 Jan 1897 in Meriden, Connecticut, USA

Ancestors

Died 25 May 1981 at age 84 in Baltimore, Maryland, USA

Biography

Rosa (Ponzillo) Ponselle is Notable.

Rosa (Ponzillo) Ponselle has Italian Roots.

Rosa Ponselle was an American operatic soprano with a large, opulent voice. She sang mainly at the New York Metropolitan Opera and is generally considered by music critics to have been one of the greatest sopranos of the past 100 years.

She was born Rosa Melba Ponzillo on January 22, 1897, in Meriden, Connecticut, the youngest of three children. The family lived on the city's west side in a neighborhood chiefly populated by immigrants from the south of Italy. Her parents were Italian immigrants from Caiazzo, near Caserta.

She was the first American-born and -trained opera star, and she made her debut with the Metropolitan Opera in New York on November 15, 1918. Ponselle and her sister started out in vaudeville, but they wanted to break into opera. In 1918, they were taking lessons from a prominent theater manager and agent who persuaded opera superstar Enrico Caruso to listen to them sing. Afterward, Caruso walked over to Rosa and said: “You’ll sing with me. Maybe in a year or two, maybe later, but you’ll sing with me at the Metropolitan.” Caruso convinced his friend Giulio Gatti-Casazza, general manager of the Met, to take a chance on her.

Ponselle’s first starring role was Verdi’s La Forza del Destino, The Force of Destiny. A New York Times critic wrote: “What a promising debut! Added to her personal attractiveness, she possesses a voice of natural beauty that may prove a gold mine. It is vocal gold, anyhow, with its luscious lower and middle tones, dark, rich and ductile, brilliant in the upper register.”

Ponselle sang with the Met for 19 seasons and, true to Gatti’s words, she helped open the door to generations of American opera singers.

After she retired in the 1930s, she moved to Baltimore, where her new husband Carle Jackson was from. She supported the Lyric Opera Company and served as the artistic director to the Baltimore Civic Opera ^[1].

In the 1940s, Ms. Ponselle built an estate, Villa Pace, in the Greenspring Valley area where she spent the remainder of her life. She devoted time and energy coaching young opera singers, and established a charitable foundation to support young sisters in her will. ^[2].

In 1996, she was posthumously inducted into the Maryland Women's Hall of Fame. In 1997, the U.S. Postal Service released a stamp honoring her as part of a series on leading ladies of the opera ^[3].

Sources

1. ↑ https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rosa-Ponselle
2. ↑ Maryland Women's Hall of Fame, 1996. https://msa.maryland.gov/msa/educ/exhibits/womenshallfame/html/ponselle.html
3. ↑ Smithsonian Postal Museum https://postalmuseum.si.edu/exhibition/women-on-stamps-part-4-prominent-female-singers-leading-ladies-of-the-opera/rosa-ponselle

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Ponselle
• http://writersalmanac.org/
• Memorial: Find a Grave (has image)
  Find A Grave: Memorial #826 (accessed 19 October 2023)
  Memorial page for Rosa Ponselle (22 Jan 1897-25 May 1981), citing Druid Ridge Cemetery, Pikesville, Baltimore County, Maryland, USA.