Death and Legacy
On 24 November 1936, Galli-Curci, aged 54, made an ill-advised return to opera, appearing as Mimi in La bohème in Chicago. It was painfully clear that her singing days were over and after a few more recitals she went into complete retirement, living in California. She began teaching singing privately until shortly before her death from emphysema on 26 November 1963, at the age of 81. Among her students was soprano Jean Fenn.
Galli-Curci's voice can still be heard on 78-rpm recordings and their LP and CD reissues. Based on her recorded legacy and contemporary assessments of Galli-Curci's performances in England and America, the opera commentator Michael Scott, writing in Volume Two of The Record of Singing (Duckworth, London, 1979), compares her unfavourably as a vocal technician with coloratura sopranos of an earlier generation, such as Nellie Melba and Luisa Tetrazzini, but he acknowledges the beauty of her voice and the ongoing lyrical appeal of her charming singing.
Her country estate near Fleischmanns, New York, where she resided from 1922 to 1937, known as Sul Monte, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2010.
Read more about this topic: Amelita Galli-Curci
Famous quotes containing the words death and/or legacy:
“The Reverend Samuel Peters ... exaggerated the Blue Laws, but they did include “Capital Lawes” providing a death penalty for any child over sixteen who was found guilty of cursing or striking his natural parents; a death penalty for an incorrigible son; a law forbidding smoking except in a room in a private house; another law declaring smoking illegal except on a journey five miles away from home,...”
—Administration for the State of Con, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“What is popularly called fame is nothing but an empty name and a legacy from paganism.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)