Salvini-Donatelli's real name was Lucchi. She was born in Florence about 1815 and started her career on the stage as an actress.
Her operatic début was in Venice, in 1839, at the Teatro Apollo. There she sang the rôle of Rosina in Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville).
Her long career took her to opera houses all over Europe but she is best remembered for creating Verdi's Violetta, in La Traviata, in Venice, in 1853.
Verdi was delighted by her powerful and beautiful soprano voice and admired her interpretation of his dramatic r├┤les. Always fat, in mid-life she put on a great deal more weight, despite which she continued to appear as young characters, including the wraith-like, consumptive Violetta.
She died in Milan in 1891, fortunate, perhaps, to have made her career in the nineteenth-century, when the beauty of a singer's voice was held to be more important than any physical or dramatic incongruities in casting.
