Margarita Pedroso

A young lady of Cuban aristocracy—daughter of the Marquises of San Carlos de Pedroso—had trained her voice in Italy with the famous baritone Cesare Badiali.

In Havana in 1880, she represented the finest example of a non-professional singer who satisfied her artistic concerns by displaying her talents in the salons of the most distinguished and select nobility. However, endowed at the same time with a humanitarian spirit, she organized with her friends several opera performances dedicated to charitable causes, which she performed publicly with uncommon success in these types of functions, in the Havana theaters of Albisu, Tacón and in the Sauto, in Matanzas.

It was precisely at this time that her debut occurred in the opera Norma by Bellini, at the Gran Teatro de Tacón, in benefit of the society El Buen Pastor. The cast of the function was made up of Margarita in the titular role; Carmen Vandergucht (Adalgisa), Ignacio Varela (Polión) and Juan Prieto (Oroveso).

Other titles performed by her, sung entirely in Italian and dedicated to the same purposes, were La sonnambula by Bellini and Lucia di Lammermoor by Donizetti, all directed musically by the Majorcan maestro Carlos Anckermann. The institutions that received the benefits of her work were, among others, the Casa de Beneficencia of Havana, the Hospital Reina Mercedes (under construction), the civil hospitals of Camagüey, as well as those affected by flooding that occurred in Santiago de Cuba and those from the earthquake in Andalucía.

The chronicler José Fornaris published in the newspaper El Triunfo his judgment on Margarita's art: "...in addition to possessing a fresh, sonorous, velvety voice, she has the gift of feeling with passion and transmitting what is felt, qualities that are rarely found united..."