ORR232_ Book.qxd

García created the roles of Norfolk in Rossini’s Elisabetta, regina
d’Inghilterra, and later that of Almaviva in Il barbiere di Siviglia. Renowned
in Italy, France and England, García was considered the greatest interpreter
of Rossini’s Otello. In 1826 García, his family and a small company went to
America where they gave the first performances of Italian opera in New York.
With his son as Figaro, and his daughter Maria as Rosina, García sang
Almaviva once more. Lorenzo Da Ponte, then teaching at Columbia
University, urged them to put on Don Giovanni, and thus Mozart’s opera was
given its US premiere, with the librettist in attendance.
When Maria left her parents to marry her first husband, Eugène Malibran,
the family, without their leading prima-donna, embarked on a tour of
Mexico. One of Pauline’s most vivid childhood recollections was of an
ambush, in which the travellers were attacked by bandits, and lost all their
money and possessions. On their return to Europe, García began to teach,
his voice having all but given out. His pupils included such famous names as
Adolphe Nourrit, Henriette Méric-Lalande (Donizetti’s first Lucrezia Borgia)
and eventually Pauline herself. She was only 11, though, when her father
died, and in 1836, after the untimely death of Maria Malibran, it was
decided by Mme García that Pauline, who wanted to be a pianist, and had
studied for a while with Liszt, should instead devote her studies to singing.
She made her debut as Desdemona in Rossini’s Otello, the work that had
been so closely associated with both her father and her sister; she was an
immediate success. At the age of 19, having rejected the poet Alfred de
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