French mezzo-soprano most famous for creating the title role in Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen (1875). She also created the title role for the opera Fantasio by Jacques Offenbach in 1872.
She was taught singing by her father, Mécène Marié de l’Isle, who also had a successful opera career. Her début came in 1859 in Strasbourg, and she sang in Italian in Lisbon. In 1855 at age 18 she had married a sculptor named Galli (“Jean-Pierre Victor Gally” who died in 1861) and thus took her stage name, Galli-Marié.
Émile Perrin, the director of the Opéra-Comique, heard her performing Balfe’s The Bohemian Girl at Rouen and brought her to Paris. She sang at the Opéra-Comique until 1885, premiering in Pergolesi’s La serva padrona. Her most famous roles were in Thomas’s Mignon (1866) and Bizet’s Carmen (1875).
Undertaking much touring, she performed Carmen in Brussels (16 January 1876), Naples (the Italian premiere), Genoa, Barcelona, Lyon, Liege and Dieppe before returning in the Opéra-Comique revival of the original production on 22 October 1883. In London she appeared at Her Majesty’s Theatre in a touring production in 1886, and returned to the Opéra-Comique in 1890 to sing in a fundraising performance to erect a monument to Bizet (this was her final performance).
Sometime in the late 1860s and early 1870s she and the composer Émile Paladilhe became lovers. She kept pet marmosets, and sometimes took them to rehearsal. She died on 21 September 1905 at age 68 in Vence, near Nice.
Link to Wikipedia biography