"The Cuban Nightingale" Died in Dominican Republic

December 11, 2021

The lyric singer and teacher María Remolá, known as "The Cuban Nightingale," passed away on Thursday, December 9, 2021 at the age of 91 in a nursing home in Dominican Republic, where she spent the last years of her life, reported the digital newspaper Nota Clave.

Remolá, a fundamental figure in lyric art on the island, considered the largest of the Antilles her homeland, where she emigrated with her family from Barcelona at age 14.

Born in Barcelona, Spain, on December 7, 1930 and settled since 1952 on the Island, where she acquired Cuban citizenship, Remolá was a founder of the National Lyric Theater of Cuba, where she performed works such as The Barber of Seville, La Traviata, Rigoletto, Don Pasquale, Lucia di Lammermoor, The Merry Widow, The Count of Luxembourg, Marina, Doña Francisquita, Luisa Fernanda and María la O.

Her interpretation of the work "Listen to the Nightingale," by Ernesto Lecuona, was also especially well-known, for which she was nicknamed "The Cuban Nightingale."

Her talent made her the owner of a prodigious vocal force that made her a great exponent of bel canto.

For several years she accompanied Armando Pico as the main figures in the show of the emblematic Havana cabaret Tropicana. She toured the defunct Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Mongolia, Vietnam, Korea and Mexico, France, United States and Spain. She was a founder of the National Lyric Theater in Cuba, a company with which she performed a very extensive repertoire of operas, operettas and zarzuelas.

Her collaboration with the National Ballet of Cuba is also known in the works by Alberto Méndez: Ode to Joy, with music by Ludwig van Beethoven, and The River and the Forest, with music by Cuban Félix Guerrero, who was her husband.

"Although her elaborate technique is considerable, and the brilliance of the highest register has its own elegance, there is a strange provincialism in her work. Remolá's tendency was to close the arias a third above the traditional high note," said critics Nicholas E. Limansky and Joahn Carroll about her.

"The Latin vibration of her voice can become difficult at times, but she is quite capable of a controlled high pianissimo; the final phrase of 'Caro nome' leaps to a calm G-sharp in pitch that travels through a remarkable diminishment of tone to conclude in a mere whisper," they added.

"Her best effort, however, is Adam's variations on 'Ah vous dirai-je Maman'. After an extraordinarily long and difficult cadence with flute, Remolá ends with a B sustained above a high C, the highest and most sustained note that any classical artist has ever recorded," the specialists concluded.

On September 18, 2010, the Máximo Avilés Blonda hall of the Palace of Fine Arts, in Santo Domingo, was dressed in its finest to pay homage to the unforgettable lyric singer, whose successful artistic career in singing and later in the training of new vocal talents spanned more than 50 years.