Maria Gabriella Munari was born in Ferrara, Northern Italy. She began her musical education by studying guitar, then she studied vocal technique at the Conservatory of Ferrara and after obtaining her Master of Music Degree she specialized in German Lied and chamber music with Prof. Liliana Poli at the Conservatory of Florence. She also took master classes at the Mozarteum in Salzburg with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Zara Doluchanova, Paul von Schilawsky and Anton Dermota.

Her repertoire comprises a wide range of operatic and concert literature, reaching from Mozart, Verdi and Rossini to Satie, Poulenc, Debussy, Luigi Nono, Manuel De Falla and Heitor Villa-Lobos as well as the German Lied.

Her agile and expressive voice and her affinity for chamber music made her one of the most requested interpreters of contemporary music throughout Italy.

Thanks to a decade-long cooperation with the ensemble Octandre in Bologna, who were devoted to the music of the 20th century, as well as with the Accademia Chigiana in Siena she became the voice of an entire generation of Italian composers in the 1980s and 1990s such as Luca Francesconi, Claudio Ambrosini, Carlo Galante, Claudio Scannavini and Salvatore Sciarrino, premiering many of their works. Special attention drew her interpretation of Luciano Berio’s “Folk Songs”, which she performed in many places, including the Teatro Filarmonico in Verona.

In the course of her long-standing career she performed in theaters such as the Rome Opera House, the Gran Teatro La Fenice in Venice, the Teatro Regio in Parma as well as in numerous European festivals, singing under the baton of various conductors, including Marcello Viotti, Vladimir Delman, Aldo Sisillo, Giampaolo Bisanti, Adriano Martinolli d’Arcy and Giampiero Taverna.

At the Piccolo Teatro in Milan she worked with stage director Giorgio Strehler, at the Teatro del Giglio in Lucca with Aldo Tarabella and at the Rome Opera House with Massimo Pradella and Memè Perlini.

Several times, she sang live on Italian public radio and television, including concerts with the RAI National Symphony Orchestra. She also recorded discs for the label Ricordi.

Another important aspect of her career was established by her focussing on the interpretation of folks songs, written down by professional composers such as Manuel De Falla or Federico Garcia Lorca. A highlight of this path was a concert program with songs from the Jewish sephardic tradition, which she and the guitarist Maurizio Pagliarini played at the most important sites of Jewish religion throughout Europe and which they also recorded on CD.

Besides her artistic activities she was also devoted to teaching as professor of voice for over thirty years at the Conservatories of Lecce, Modena, Rovigo and Ferrara, furthermore giving master classes in Italy and the US as well as directing  her own students’ opera productions.

She lives in Ferrara, her hometown. Being born there and learning the regional dialect already influenced her career from the start, since from a young age she used to sing dialectal folk songs of the Po Plane on concert tours as well as record them on vinyl disc, accompanying herself on a guitar and also being accompanied on a mandoline by her father, the violinist Guglielmo Munari.