Rita Aurelia Montaner Facenda

Legendary singer, actress and pianist who premiered fundamental works from the lyrical, folkloric and popular repertoire. Called "The Only One" by the people of Cuba.

She was born in Guanabacoa. She graduated as a pianist in 1917 from the Peyrellade Conservatory of Music and Recitation, with Carmelina Pascual (music theory), Pablo Meroles (music theory, harmony, piano and singing) as teachers. Later, in New York, she was a student of Italian singing professor Alberto Bimboni.

She gave piano recitals at benefit concerts. She married in 1918, and although her husband did not want her to continue in show business, Rita insisted on pursuing her vocation.

On March 16, 1922, she participated in the Cuban Music Concerts organized by composer Eduardo Sánchez de Fuentes, accompanied by the orchestra conducted by Gonzalo Roig. On October 10 of the same year she sang at the inauguration of commercial radio in Cuba with the orchestra conducted by Luis Casas Romero.

In 1923 she performed at the Teatro Nacional (now Gran Teatro de La Habana), at the Luisa theater in Cienfuegos and at the Principal de la Comedia in Havana, in a sacred music concert.

She sang with soprano Lola de la Torre the duet from La gioconda by Ponchielli at the Falcón hall. The performance was reviewed by Alejo Carpentier the next day in the press, where he called attention to Montaner's exquisite voice timbre and her confidence in attacking high notes.

That same year she performed with Ernesto Lecuona at the piano in a festival of Cuban songs. In 1924, she sang a work by Jorge Anckermann –Marita– as a duet with Alejandro García Caturla and among other performances, she offered a recital of lieder by composer Guillermo M. Tomás.

In 1926, while in the United States, she accepted a contract with the Schubert Follies company with which she toured much of the Union states. At the Apollo theater in New York she had a season with the orchestra of Catalan Xavier Cugat. After six months of performances she returned to Cuba.

Ernesto Lecuona chose her to perform in his zarzuela Niña Rita o La Habana de 1830 (premiered at the Regina theater on September 27, 1927) the role of a calash driver who sang and danced. Her interpretation in that work of Ay, Mamá Inés by Eliseo Grenet, became a stunning success. She also sang in the revue La Tierra de Venus, also by Lecuona, and popularized Canto siboney.

Between 1928 and 1929 she made dozens of recordings for Columbia Records. She performed with great success at the Palace theater in Paris with a group of Cuban artists –among them Sindo Garay, who performed a duet with her son Guarionex–, a performance that made Carpentier exclaim that Rita Montaner had created a style in which she shouted, at the top of her voice, suburban songs that tasted of tenement patios, sugar plantation bateys, Chinese shops, Chinese festivals and prize lollipops.

She returned to Cuba and performed that same 1929 at the Encanto, Payret, Nacional and Campoamor theaters. She was contracted to perform in Spain, where she sang zarzuelas with the aplomb and nonchalance that her voice and extraordinary personality gave her. She was already an idol when at the beginning of the following decade she presented in Cuba Lecuona's María La O.

In 1931 she had a season as supporting actress with the famous Al Jolson in his show. She toured with the musical Wonder Bar (with Jolson and Ethel Waters) through Detroit, Washington, Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Cleveland and Chicago.

Her restless spirit led her to perform in Mexico in 1933 where she launched her accompanist pianist, Bola de Nieve (Ignacio Villa), as a soloist. The following year she performed again in the United States and Buenos Aires with Rafael Betancourt as pianist.

In 1935, back in Havana, she began to orient her repertoire more toward Afro-Cuban music. She established working relationships with composer Gilberto Valdés and from then on she became one of the most important interpreters of his work. Regarding the singer, maestro Gonzalo Roig commented in an interview that Sangre africana would have no better interpreter than Rita Montaner, because the contributions she usually made to the songs were perpetuated and respected by the authors themselves.

In 1937 she offered the first concert of Afro-Cuban music by Gilberto Valdés at the Amphitheater of Havana together with singer Alfredito Valdés, a group of African drums and the orchestra conducted by the composer, who years later recalled that Rita was extremely patriotic and the voice of Cuba was what was worth most in the world to her. Rita could sing from a contralto voice to a light soprano voice, but she would not exchange Cuban music for international music.

During those years Montaner played the leading role in the best works of Cuban zarzuela: Cecilia Valdés (by Gonzalo Roig), Rosa la china, El Cafetal (by Lecuona). She participated in the Cuban films It Happened in Havana (1938) and The Romance of the Palm Grove (1938), by Ramón Peón García. She sang on Radio Caracas, Venezuela, and, back in Havana, played the leading role in the comic opera sainete by Rodrigo Prats Amalia Batista (1940). At the end of that year she was the central figure in New York in the Broadway show Havana-Madrid.

In 1941 she starred in the novel Cecilia Valdés, by Cirilo Villaverde on CMQ Radio. She performed with Hugo del Carril at the Teatro Nacional and appeared in the film Musical Romance (1941) by Ernesto Caparrós.

In the nineteen forties, Rita Montaner moved closer to the people. She did Cuban theater or Spanish zarzuela when the occasion presented itself, but she cultivated comic sketches, as she was as good an actress as she was a singer. When she sang vernacular music, she was so stylized and sophisticated that she achieved a particular way of expression on the most popular themes; it was the time when she performed Golpe de Bibijagua, El Marañón, Ponme la mano Caridad.

At the beginning of that decade, on RHC Cadena Azul, she played the character of La Chismosa in the satirical-customary radio program that was suspended in 1942 by order of Fulgencio Batista's government. Rita received a tribute from the Socialist People's Party in which Nicolás Guillén named her "Rita de Cuba".

Guillén reaffirmed her as "The Only One", because only she had made the Havana tenement, the Cuban street, a universal category.

She was crowned Queen of Radio in 1945 in a show in which she performed with Chano Pozo and Abelardo Barroso.

The following year, Mejor que me calle premiered on CMQ, a space similar to the one banned earlier in which Rita played "Lengualisa". In the Diario de La Marina it was even stated that Rita made fun of the politics in power and took her place alongside the people, because through her the people spoke and protested.

She made films in Mexico in 1947 (María la O, Angelitos negros, alongside Pedro Infante). She performed at the Hispano theater in New York with Bergaza at the piano.

With the arrival of television, "The Only One" once again captured the public's attention with her program Rita y Willy, with Álvarez Guedes as supporting actor. In September 1952 she was the main figure in a great spectacle offered at the Blanquita theater (now Karl Marx), where Benny Moré made his debut.

In 1953 she was contracted to perform on Radio Continente (Caracas, Venezuela) and later in Havana she performed in the shows of the Montmartre Son y Danzón cabaret. She performed in the revue La calle, alongside Benny Moré, the Trío Matamoros, Guillermo Álvarez Guedes, Maño López, Leopoldo Fernández, Aníbal de Mar and Mimí Cal.

Rita returned to the stage and achieved a resounding triumph in 1956 with the character of Madame Flora in the opera The Medium by Menotti, premiered in the Hubert de Blanck hall with the orchestra conducted by Paul Csonka.

She achieved another success in 1956 with Mi querido Charles, with Argentine actor Adrián Cúneo and, the following year, with Spring Fever, by Noël Coward. While performing one of the shows, she noticed she was losing her voice in the first act, but she overcame that difficulty and managed to finish it. This was her last performance.

She died on April 17, 1958. Before that, she received a grand televised tribute on CMQ TV and Channel 4, as well as twenty radio stations in a network. Dozens of the best Cuban artists participated in making wishes for her recovery. Her funeral was massive.