Rosario García Orellana

Born in Madrid on October 2, 1905. She was the daughter of a Cuban father and a Spanish mother. When she was two years old, the family moved to Cuba.

Her father, Manuel García Infanzón, an architect, pianist, and music professor, would be the first to teach his daughter the secrets of this art and to give her singing lessons.

The young woman would make her debut in the halls of Diario de la Marina, in a tribute to painter Ignacio Zuloaga, on May 27, 1925, after overcoming a shyness that her teacher only managed to ease by encouraging her to sing in front of anyone who visited them or frequented the neighborhood, including grocers and mailmen.

It would be the beginning of a career that would lead her to triumph in Cuba, the United States, and South America, and inspire Ernesto Lecuona to compose one of his most difficult vocal works: "Escucha al ruiseñor" (Listen to the Nightingale). The exhortation was clear: the nightingale was Rosario.

After her debut in the halls of El Diario de la Marina, she began to sing on some radio stations and theaters in Havana.

Her meeting with Ernesto Lecuona is described in one of his letters: I was introduced to Ernesto Lecuona when his sisters Elisa and Ernestina took me to his house, where I met his mother. There, Lecuona proposed a tour of Oriente to me, and on December 11, 1929, we left for Santiago de Cuba. I debuted on the 13th of that same month at the Teatro Vista Alegre. The presentation was very good, with two grand pianos and the accompaniment of Ernesto and Ernestina... Lecuona taught me the "Canto indio" by humming it to me on the train, and that's how I learned it and sang it: without rehearsal.

She performed alongside the Lecuona brothers in several cities in the easternmost province of Cuba, and upon her return to Havana, she agreed to her father's request to reveal to the composer the full extent of her vocal range: He had me do a trill in high mi-fa, and from there came "Escucha al ruiseñor", which Lecuona wrote for me. I premiered the song at the Teatro Payret on May 3, 1930, and it pleased the audience so much that I had to repeat it. Later I sang it many times on the radio and in theaters, and I had the honor of being accompanied by him on different occasions...

Lecuona would describe her voice as "phenomenal," and in an interview given to "Bohemia" magazine he would add: Extensive voice, well-timbered and lovely; perfect squareness and musicality. And an exquisite temperament. She has everything to succeed.

She sang with the Philharmonic Orchestra and the Symphonic Orchestra of Havana, performed several zarzuelas by Ernesto Lecuona, and in 1931 he invited her to personally meet José Mojica at the Hotel Nacional, where the artist was staying, and to sing for him. Her voice thrilled the Mexican tenor and it was he who offered to help her make her way in the United States, and asked her to write to him in California as soon as she arrived in the United States. Mojica managed, in 1932, to have the Cuban woman begin recording for Victor. Among the chosen songs would be "Escucha al ruiseñor", the habanera "Tú", and "Flor de Yumurí".

After her triumph in New York, she held an audition for the prestigious Chicago Opera Company (an audition in which the song that had become her calling card did not fail to appear: "Escucha al ruiseñor") and they hired her.

On November 25, 1933, the New York Times displayed the following headline: Cuban Diva Triumphs in Opera. Rosario García Orellana made a brilliant debut at the Hippodrome. She had five curtain calls. The immediate note, translated into Spanish, reads: Rosario García Orellana, Cuban soprano, made her debut last night in the role of 'Gilda' in "Rigoletto", before an audience of 4,000 people. After the "Caro nome", which she was obliged to repeat, her success was definitive... Her voice, light but sure, without the nervousness typical of debutantes, maintained the line in the high registers and was singularly clear in the ornamental notes, the crescendo and the trills. The note added that the singer was applauded for several minutes.

Her career diversified and she would sing as readily in the famous radio programs sponsored by the General Electric company, as at the Paramount Theater, at the N.B.C., at Carnegie Hall, at the Pan American Union in Washington (accompanied by the United States Marine Band), and in the Radio City Music Hall shows, where she had to perform works of great vocal demand 4 to 5 times a day. She also dubbed films for Metro Goldwyn Mayer and performed alongside artists of the renown of tenor James Melton.

Two curious facts disclosed by Oscar Fernández de la Vega: among the films in which she participated in dubbing is "The Picture of Dorian Gray"; her physical beauty dazzled several visual artists who asked her to pose for them and left testimony of that beauty in oils and busts.

She left Cuba on January 27, 1932, after offering a farewell concert at the Teatro Principal de la Comedia, and went to New York, where she managed to triumph. She returned to the island in 1934 to perform at the Teatro Nacional, at the Teatro Auditorium, and on the radio.

She would return in 1937 and in 1939, and she would be as readily received at the Presidential Palace by President Laredo Bru as she would sing on the radio under the batons of maestros Gonzalo Roig and Amadeo Roldán, and in the main theaters of some cities on the island: Santiago de Cuba, Manzanillo, Holguín, Camagüey, Sancti Spiritus, and Matanzas.

But the soprano also reaped applause in South America. An Argentine magazine announced: "Buenos Aires opens its cage to the nightingale of Cuba". And there, in Argentina, among other activities, she performed alongside Libertad Lamarque.

The tour took her to Brazil, Venezuela, and Colombia, where she received news that forced her to fly to Havana: the imminent death of her father.

She also sang in Puerto Rico. Among the testimonies of her success in this country is the cocktail that the Club Mayagüez Country created in her honor, "Special Charito", whose formula would appear printed in island advertising: an ounce of milk, an ounce of Boca Chica rum, a teaspoon of Kresto, a teaspoon of sugar, and crushed ice. Everything well shaken.

The successes in New York kept multiplying. In 1942, she performed alongside Carmen Amaya, and she would offer a recital dedicated to Schubert as readily as she would perform alongside Juan Arvizu or accompanied at the piano by María Grever. In 1944 she performed at the City Center in New York with the Ballet Russe de Montecarlo and participated in an event where such diverse figures as pianist Jorge Bolet and reciter Eusebia Cosme came together.

In 1945, she was hired by the famous Spanish Ballet of La Argentinita to perform at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, where she interpreted Miguel de Falla's El amor brujo in an arrangement suited to her soprano coloratura range.

But the artist, of solid religious formation, began to feel more at ease in less worldly environments and to sing, with increasing frequency, in churches. She would end up joining the Venerable Third Order of Saint Francis of Assisi in 1961.

A couple of phrases extracted from one of her letters prove revealing:
One must not forget that an art is studied, and that it is always grateful to those who dedicate themselves to it. We are born with the voice, and moreover, we are granted the privilege of being able to emit it freely...

I have very good memories of my artistic career, but I would not want to be a singer again, as it requires many sacrifices and is a career full of difficulties.

The dresses, the lights, the stages, the applause, the tours, the youth, had disappeared but they were not missed, life's course was not reproached: it had been lived and was still being lived with an instructive awareness that life is, more than loss, inevitable transformation, passage.

In the "Cuban Voices" section of her book Visitaciones, the great Cuban poetess Fina García Marruz described soprano Rosario García Orellana thus, whose high notes, according to her contemporaries, reproduced the song of nightingales. As the story goes, when the twenties of the past century came to an end, Orellana made her first public presentation in the halls of Diario de la Marina on the occasion of a tribute to painter Zuloaga.

Accompanying Ernesto Lecuona, in 1929 she made a tour of Cuban cities during which she achieved resounding success with the "Canto indio" by the aforementioned composer, pianist, and orchestra director.

Subsequently, she performed at radio station CMBZ, achieving great popularity, until in 1930 Lecuona invited her to debut in the creole lyric theater during the season that on March 1 of that year he began at the Payret with the premiere of his zarzuela María la O, with a libretto by poet and writer Gustavo Sánchez Galarraga, in which Rosario García Orellana was the second interpreter of the title role.

Inspired by the timbre and her marvelous high register of the soprano, at that time Lecuona created for her "Escucha al ruiseñor", a piece that consecrated her forever before the Havana public. In 1932 she achieved a new success with the maestro's music by participating at the Principal de la Comedia in the premiere of the operetta La guaracha musulmana, also with an argument by Sánchez Galarraga, which was followed by her performances in other works by the maestro such as El calesero, El Cafetal, and La Tierra de Venus, among others.

Next came her performances with the Philharmonic Orchestra of Havana and in the so-called "Saturdays" at the Martí theater with the renowned composer and orchestra director Gonzalo Roig.

In search of new horizons, in September 1932 she traveled to New York, where from then on she would spend most of her artistic work and established her residence until her death, which occurred not so many years ago, when she was over one hundred years old.

Despite being unknown, her vocal ability opened doors for her immediately and she would be hired at the Casino in Atlantic City, where she sang works by different authors, but mainly by Lecuona, whose "Escucha al ruiseñor" she included in her first phonograph recordings in the United States of North America, achieving with that title a triumph similar to that in her homeland.

Upon hearing such a composition, Salmaggi, then director of the Chicago Opera Company, hired her to interpret the character of 'Gilda' in Verdi's opera Rigoletto, in performances in which, at the insistence of the public, she would sing the well-known "Caro nome" about five times.

She also participated in concerts at the Paramount, in the New York Plaza and Biltmore hotels, at the Pan American Union in Washington, on Columbia Broadcasting System radio stations… her voice was heard in numerous American cities.

With well-established prestige, she later made tours through nations of Hispanic America, in which, alongside works by renowned Spanish authors, she sang Cuban music in theaters and radio stations.

"My concerts of Cuban music were always received with extraordinary warmth," she declared to the press on one occasion. Throughout several decades she maintained contact with her island, only lost with the inexorable passage of time, which also exhausted the prodigious fountain of her throat, which allowed her to enhance the name of her homeland wherever she set foot on foreign soil.

This love for her native land was confirmed once when she confessed to a journalist that before going out to sing, while many commended themselves to a virgin or a saint, she only invoked the name of Cuba. Beautiful superstition of one of our great artists, identified in her time as "the Cuban nightingale"!

She died in New York on November 3, 1997.