Death Anniversary: Maria Cebotari — June 9, 1949

Maria Cebotari died in Vienna in 1949, thirty-nine years old and at the height of a career that had run from Berlin and Dresden to Salzburg and the Vienna State Opera. Seven years earlier she had sung in Odessa in fiamme, one of the ninety-six Italian films of 1942.

A note on this date. Treccani and the Deutsche Biographie give only the year of Cebotari’s death, 1949, and the place, Vienna. The day shown here — 9 June — rests on Wikipedia alone. What is independently documented is the funeral: the photograph above, in the Austrian National Library’s collection of US Information Services images, records the procession on the Ringstrasse and is dated 13 June 1949. If you can point us to a record carrying the day of death, write to us and we will confirm or correct the page.