home : about : articles : callas
blog : verdi : translation : photos : contact

Marion Lignana Rosenberg is a writer and translator currently based in New York. At Harvard, she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and graduated with highest honors in Romance Languages and Literatures.

Marion’s essay “Re-visioning Callas” won a Newswomen’s Club of New York Front Page Award. She wrote the entry on Maria Callas for Notable American Women: Completing the Twentieth Century (Harvard University Press).

An acclaimed broadcaster and journalist, Marion has contributed features, reviews, and essays about the arts to Newsday, Time Out New York, Salon.com, Forward, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Magazine, Opera News, and Playbill. She has offered commentary on WNYC’s “Soundcheck” and produced and hosted programs for WHRB in Cambridge, MA. At WHRB, she produced what was probably the first broadcast anywhere of the complete works of Giuseppe Verdi, including a number of then-unpublished compositions.

Marion’s writing has appeared in the programs and season books of the Metropolitan Opera, New York City Opera, and other companies in the United States and Europe. She has contributed Italian-language articles to America Oggi and Oggi 7.

Blogosphere: Best of Blogs (Pearson) and the San Jose Mercury News, among others, hailed Marion’s blog, vilaine fille (active 2004–08) as one of the Web’s finest opera and classical music destinations.

Marion has led workshops on classical music criticism under the auspices of the National Endowment for the Arts and Columbia University. Earlier in her career, she wrote and edited best-selling Italian- and French-language instructional materials in a variety of media (print, video, audio, etc.) for a leading international publisher.

A certified translator of both Italian and French, Marion dotes on vintage and contemporary European pop (including Luigi Tenco, Serge Gainsbourg, Françoise Hardy, Jacques Brel, Georges Brassens, Jacques Dutronc, Lucio Battisti, Gianmaria Testa, Ivano Fossati, and Carla Bruni). Among the moderns, her great musical love is Rufus Wainwright.

In the secret universe (the one that makes sense), Marion is the love-child of Dalida and il Maestro, Paolo Conte.

contact me : colophon