Caroline Barbot

Caroline Barbot was a French soprano who created Leonora in Verdi's La forza del destino at St Petersburg in 1862. Born Marie-Caroline Douvry in Paris, she won a first prize at the Paris Conservatoire in 1850 and married the tenor Joseph Barbot, who also taught her. She sang at the Paris Opéra, where Verdi heard her in Les vêpres siciliennes in 1859. From 1860 she and her husband sang across Italy, at Bologna, Rome, Milan, Turin and Naples, and in Russia, and she continued to appear into the early 1870s. She later taught at the Toulouse Conservatoire.