This was young prima donna Matilda Florella, in the role of Amina in Bellini’s opera ‘La Sonnambula’ at Novara in Italy in 1867, where an enthusiastic press admired “the strength of range, the perfect quality of tone, and the feeling with which she interprets music and drama”.
She had been born plain Matilda Illingworth in Cabbage Fold, Keighley, in 1843, her father a mill bookkeeper, her mother a dressmaker and her older sisters worsted power-loom weavers.
But her soprano voice, “more than ordinarily noticeable” in concerts, brought her to the attention of several local manufacturers who sent her to the Royal Conservatoire at Brussels, where she won a first prize in the pupils’ annual competition of 1862.
As Matilda Florella she studied in Milan and had operatic success in Italy and Germany. She was greeted with rapturous applause whenever she returned home, counting the Duke of Devonshire among her patrons.
But by 1881 she had passed her peak, living “a retired life” with an aunt in Keighley. It was rumoured that she had taken to drink.
When she died, aged only 50, in 1893, the Keighley News briefly recognised her former “considerable eminence as a soprano vocalist”, while the ‘Keighley Herald’ stated that “her musical career was not a complete success”. The ‘West Yorkshire Pioneer’ simply called her “a popular vocalist”.
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