Maria Malibran. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
In 1836 Maria Malibran was the most famous singer in the world, and she had won that world inch by inch: daughter of the tenor and teacher Manuel García, who had trained her with legendary severity, she had debuted as a teenager, conquered London, New York, Paris, Naples and Milan, and turned her own name into an adjective. A contralto who climbed up into soprano territory, an actress before singers were expected to act, a horsewoman, a pianist, a composer of songs: the first modern diva, with fees, fans and newspapers in tow.
In April, in London, pregnant and happily remarried to the violinist Charles de Bériot, she fell from her horse on an outing: dragged with her foot caught in the stirrup, she suffered serious head injuries. She did what an invincible twenty-eight-year-old does: she hid them. No real doctors, no rest, the season went on and she went on with the season, amid fainting spells and headaches that worsened week by week. In September she was in Manchester, at the great music festival, singing several times a day. On 14 September, after a duet received with such delirium that the audience demanded an encore, and she granted it, she collapsed. She died nine days later, on 23 September 1836, at twenty-eight and a half, in a hotel room in Manchester.
The mourning was continental and the sanctification immediate: the woman who died for her singing, killed by her own fire. Alfred de Musset dedicated famous verses to her, theatres went into mourning, and her younger sister, Pauline Viardot, thirteen at the time of the death, would carry the dynasty forward and become one of the great musical minds of the century. But Romantic rhetoric covers the point that two centuries on deserves to be looked in the face: Malibran was not killed by sacred fire, but by a system, partly internalised, in which stopping was unthinkable, for the contracts, for the public, for her sense of who she was. It is a story the world of entertainment, and not only that world, keeps rewriting with new names: the body sending signals and the machine asking for an encore, as in Rome with Callas in 1958. The Manchester audience was applauding a dying woman and did not know it. She did, probably. And that, more than any aria, is what we should remember of her.