Calle de María Malibrán

Behind the name stands one of the most celebrated voices of the nineteenth century. María Felicia García Sitches was born in Paris in 1808, daughter of the tenor and singing master Manuel García, a Sevillian who carried the bel canto school across half of Europe. She grew up among stages and made her debut in London at seventeen as Rosina in The Barber of Seville. The surname the street bears today she took from Eugène Malibran, a French merchant she married very young. When the marriage broke up, she was already shining on her own in Paris, London and Milan, with a range spanning nearly three octaves. She died young and dramatically: in 1836, newly married to the violinist Charles de Bériot, she suffered a fall from a horse in England. She refused treatment, kept singing, and faded away in Manchester a few days later, at twenty-eight. In the streets of El Viso, thick with the names of artists, this short lane of barely thirty metres keeps the name of that child prodigy who sang across Europe and lived like a lightning flash.