Pisaroni, Benedetta (Rosmunda)

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Pisaroni, Benedetta (Rosmunda)

Pisaroni, Benedetta (Rosmunda), Italian soprano, later contralto; b. Piacenza, May 16, 1793; d. there, Aug. 6, 1872. After training in Milan, she made her operatic debut in Mayr’s La rosa biana e la rosa rossa in Bergamo in Aug. 1813. Upon the advice of Rossini, she turned to contralto roles and sang in Padua (1814), Bologna (1815), and Venice (1816). After singing in the premiere of Meyerbeer’s Romilda e Costanza (Padua, July 19, 1817), she was called to Naples to create the roles of Zomira in Riccardo e Zoraide (Dec. 13, 1818), Andromache in Ermione (March 27, 1819), and Malcolm in La donna del lago (Sept. 24, 1819), all by Rossini. She appeared as Malcolm in Rome in 1823 and at Milan’s La Scala in 1824, and then made her Paris debut as Arsace at the Théâtre-Italien in 1827. In 1829 she sang at the King’s Theatre in London. Following further engagements at La Scala in 1831, she retired from the operat-icstage.

—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire