Maria Cebotari

Maria Cebotari was working as an actress at the Moscow artist theater before she decided in 1929 to attend a singing study in Berlin.

She was a celebrated Romanian soprano and actress, one of Europe's greatest opera stars in the 1930s and 1940s.

In 1931 she got an engagement as an opera singer in Dresden and launched with it a very successful career. She sang in Dresden till 1943, from 1936 also at the Berliner state opera. Especially her interpretations of the works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Richard Strauss belonged to her specialities.

She divorced Count Virubov in 1938, and married the Austrian actor Gustav Diessl, with whom she had two sons. In 1946, she left Berlin and joined the Vienna State Opera House. She visited Covent Garden again in 1947 with Vienna State Opera Company and sang Salome, Donna Anna in Don Giovanni, Countess Almaviva in Le nozze di Figaro. On September 27, she was Donna Anna to the Ottavio of Richard Tauber, making his final stage appearance, less than a week before his cancerous left lung was removed.

Her son Peter was born in 1941. In October 1945 her second son Fritz was born. After she and her husband had died, the orphaned children went into care of Curt Goetz and Valerie von Martens, who took them in 1949 to Switzerland. In 1954 the boys were adopted by Clifford Curzon, an English professor and his American wife Lucille Curzon-Wallace, a heir to a pharmaceutical factory.

She also played in the movie 'Odessa in fiamme (Odessa in flames)', in 1942, directed by Italian director Carmine Gallone (script by Nicolae Kiritescu). The movie is a Romanian-Italian co-production, about the drama of the refugees from Bessarabia (Republic Moldova), in World War II and does homage to the Romanian troops who freed Bessarabia from the Red Army which occupied it in 1940. The movie includes contemporary newsreels showing refugee columns running away. It won the great prize at the Festival of Venice, in 1942. Because of the invasion by Soviet troops in Bucharest in 1944, the movie became banned, along with many others, and the actors in the movie arrested. Many such movies were either destroyed or censored and nothing was heard of it for more than 50 years. Luckily, someone re-discovered it in the Cinecittà archives in Rome, and it was shown for the first time in Romania in December 2006.

She suffered from severe pain during the performance of Le nozze di Figaro at La Scala Opera House in early 1949. At first, doctors did not take it seriously. However, on March 31, 1949, she fell down during the performance of Karl Millöcker's operetta Der Bettelstudent in Vienna. During surgery on April 4, doctors found cancer in her liver and pancreas. She died from cancer on June 9, 1949 in Vienna.

Director Victor Druc's documentary "Aria" (2005) about the life of Maria Cebotari faced difficulties when screening in Moldova during the Communist administration (which ended in 2009), due to a part in the movie where the soprano self-identifies as Romanian, contrary to the official policy of the Communist government that calls the ethnic majority Moldovan, rather than Romanian.