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Olivia Bonelli

singer

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
People and ideasInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionNov 13, 2024
Entity authorityQ7088031 ↗
Source-derived summary

Olivia Bonelli (1920–1990) was an American operatic soprano.

Her career covered a span of almost 30 years, from the late 1940s through the 1970s. While short of attaining "super-star" status, she nevertheless enjoyed a popular, steady and accomplished vocal career. She went from a small town choir (Troy, New York) to become a soloist at New York's Radio City Music Hall, to several of the USA's major opera companies, a debut at New York City Opera (1956–1964), and the Metropolitan Opera for a special reading performance of Marvin David Levy's "Mourning Becomes Electra." Along the way, she spent a year traveling with the USO, entertaining wounded World War II servicemen in hospitals across the USA, premiered new works (Earl Wild's oratorio "Revelations", ABC-TV, 1962) and pioneered in the early days of television opera (La Traviata, ABC-TV, 1959). Her performances would receive reviews in major newspapers.

References

The New York City Opera, by Martin L Sokol, Macmillan Publishing Company, Inc, 1981.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Olivia Bonelli” is singer. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Olivia, Bonelli and singer, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewStrongest as a route into the people, institutions and dated events that shaped the subject’s public record. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1920, 1990, 1956, 1964—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1920. For this dossier, Olivia, Bonelli and singer is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “singer” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 13, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q7088031. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1920, 1990, 1956 and 1964.

Critical limits

A concise life account rarely captures disputed attribution, private networks or the changing language used to describe a career. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
Verify next

Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Olivia Bonelli”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Olivia Bonelli primary sources, Olivia Bonelli archive and Olivia research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Olivia Bonelli”?
  2. Which primary records establish identity, chronology and institutional ties?
  3. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
Subject index

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Olivia Bonelli” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.