Don’t be fooled by the smiles or apparent display of “affection”. Circa 1983, Adel and Gloria.
Gloria and I in Rome circa 1968
Gloria trying to cut my brother’s hair at their Department of Housing home in Bonnyrigg, NSW, Australia circa 1980.
Gloria aged fifteen, Madrid Spain circa 1950.
Gloria Trillo was born in 1935 on the 14th of March in Tetouan Morocco.
Gloria was one of four children with her paternity a rather questionable one given her natural blonde hair, fair skin, and green eyes. Her Spaniard mother Lucia had sought refuge in Morocco from Franco authorities which is why Gloria was born here. Very little is known about her father Edelmiro Trillo (not to be confused with Gloria’s brother who was named after him) who abandoned the family when Gloria was around the age of six after Lucia uncovered his various infidelities.
From the age of fifteen Gloria’s mother Lucia started grooming her for operatic stardom. I often heard Lucia mention that she wanted to be a singer but her pseudo aristocratic family forbid her to embark on said career. Sadly, it appears that to some extent, Gloria suffered the all too familiar telltale effects of stage mother management. Gloria once told me all she really wanted to do as a little girl was get married and be a housewife. As life went on, I am certain Gloria blamed Lucia for all of her failures including the ones she herself was directly responsible for.
Gloria studied vocal opera at the Madrid Royal Conservatory until she turned twenty one years of age when her and Lucia relocated to Rome Italy to further her studies at the Santa Cecilia Conservatory of Music where one of her teachers was the coloratura soprano Elvira de Hidalgo who’s most famous pupil was none other than the legendary soprano Maria Callas.
My mother had a spectacular soprano’s voice and did moderately well in the opera world. The only YouTube recording found of her 1969 performance of La Buona Figliuola by Piccini which took place at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples can still be viewed (see above for an excerpt taken of my mother on her own as the Marchesa Lucinda).
How or why my mother ended up singing for her supper in a Trastevere theatre restaurant instead of becoming a true Primadonna of the Opera, I do not know. Just as there are other unexplained or unearthed gaps in my family history (i.e. my biological father’s entire story), the decline of Gloria’s career is also a mystery.
In 1974 Gloria began a relationship with a Trastevere colleaugue, the untrained Sicilian tenor Alfio Gemmellaro who was also my mother’s junior by seven years. Late that year Gloria announced we were all relocating to Australia. Her younger brother Edelmiro had already done so three years earlier attesting that the relatively new culture of this nation would surely welcome an artist of Gloria’s calibre with open arms. Edelmiro could not have been more wrong.
Not only did Australia reject the now forty year old singer, Gloria went on to spend the rest of her life on welfare and in public housing.
The remainder og gloria’s story and her disgraceful behaviours towards myself, my stepfather, and even my disabled half brother, are well documented in my autobiography in which I credit Gloria as Gilda.
