In the 1866/7 season at Covent Garden she sang the title-rôle in Bellini's Norma, under the name of Maria Vilda. She returned in the 1874/5 season to recreate the same rôle.
In 1878 she was invited to sing the rôle of Brünnhilde in Wagner's Ring cycle at Leipzig. In 1884 she returned to Vienna, where she sang Donna Anna in the centenary performances of Mozart's opera.
All her life she’d been overweight and had lived with sniggers from colleagues and audiences. In 1891, at the age of fifty-eight, she fell in love with a man many years her junior, who rejected her because of her appearance. Unable to face life without him, she threw herself out of a fourth floor window and died.