Soprano Maria Caniglia was born in Naples. She studied at the Conservatorio di Musica S Pietro a Majella, Naples, and made her debut in Turin in 1930 as Chrysothemis in Elektra. That year she made her first appearance at La Scala as Maria in Pizzetti’s Lo straniero, and sang there regularly until 1943, and again from 1948 to 1951. She appeared at Covent Garden in 1937 and 1939, and with the Scala company there in 1950; she was at the Metropolitan during the 1938-39 season.
Caniglia sang most of Verdi’s lyric-dramatic soprano roles, from Leonora in his first opera, Oberto, produced during the Verdi year (1951) at La Scala, to Alice in Toscanini’s Falstaff (1935, Salzburg). She was much admired as Tosca, Adriana Lecouvreur and Fedora and recorded several operas with Beniamino Gigli, including the 1943 recording of Un ballo in maschera from which this sample comes. She displays the quintessential Italian soprano sound here. My only quibble is in her execution of the little cadenza at the end of the aria. It seems too abrupt at the start, then a bit hurried as it continues. Perhaps that was the style of the period; Herva Nelli similarly flips off the little cadenza in the other big aria (taken from a different recording of Ballo) which I have posted elsewhere on this site.