Fedora Barbieri

Fedora Barbieri was born in Trieste in June 1920 and studied singing at the Florence Conservatory under Giulia Tess. She made her début at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino in 1940 as Fidalma in Cimarosa’s *Il matrimonio segreto*, and through the early 1940s established herself in Florence and at the Teatro Comunale di Genova in the central Italian mezzo-soprano repertoire — Carmen, Mignon, Azucena, Eboli.

Her international career took off after the war. She joined La Scala in 1946 — the period of Toscanini’s post-war return — and remained a fixture of the house for nearly four decades. She made her Metropolitan Opera début in 1950 as Eboli in Verdi’s *Don Carlo* opposite Jussi Björling, and held a regular international guest position through the 1950s and 1960s at Covent Garden, the Salzburg Festival, the San Francisco Opera and the Vienna State Opera. She was particularly associated with the Verdi mezzo repertoire — Eboli, Azucena, Amneris, Ulrica — and with the Italian verismo tradition. Her partnership with Maria Callas, with whom she recorded *Il trovatore*, *Aida* and *Cavalleria rusticana*, defined some of the most distinguished operatic recordings of the 1950s.

Barbieri continued to perform into her eighties — taking character roles in productions of *Gianni Schicchi* and others — and died in Florence in March 2003. Music Preserved’s archive includes a range of her Italian operatic work from the 1950s and 1960s, particularly the Verdi mezzo repertoire.