Olivia Bonelli

Olivia Bonelli - soprano, 1920-1990. Her career covered a span of almost 30 years, from the late 1940s through the 1970s. While short of attaining "super-star" status, she nevertheless enjoyed a popular, steady and accomplished vocal career. She went from a small town choir (Troy, New York) to become a soloist at New York's Radio City Music Hall, to several of the USA's major opera companies, to a debut at New York City Opera,(1956–1964) to the Metropolitan Opera, for a special reading performance of Marvin David Levy's, "Mourning Becomes Electra." Along the way, she spent a year traveling with the USO, entertaining wounded World War II service men in hospitals across the USA, premiered new works,(Earl Wild's oratorio,"Revelations", ABC-TV, 1962) and pioneered in the early days of television opera (La Traviata, ABC-TV, 1959). A web site, OliviaBonelli.com, commemorates her musical life and serves as an historical record of one singer's journey through the operatic world of the 1950s and 1960s.

"Olivia Bonelli sang Micaela last night in Carmen at the Carter Barron Amphitheater, and stopped the show with her third act aria. She is a young singer, with the manner, vocal and dramatic, of a patrician. Her singing is etched in clear lines of the most elegant sound, and her French enunciation was the model other members of the cast might well have followed. When she was on the stage there was an aura about the whole thing. I can think of a whole raft of roles in which I hope to hear her in the very near future. The evening brought us Olivia Bonelli as a new artist of great promise and for that we are grateful." -