Opera Singer. The second wife of composer Hector Berlioz. Born Marie-Geneviève Martin to a French father and Spanish mother, she took her mother's maiden name when she began singing professionally in Paris in the late 1830s. She met Berlioz in 1841, when his marriage to former actress Harriet Smithson was crumbling. A decade younger than the composer, dark and lively where Smithson was fair and withdrawn, she soon became his mistress and Berlioz used his influence as a critic to secure Recio a one-year contract with the Paris Opera (1841 to 1842). Among the roles she performed were Ines in Donizetti's "La favorite", Isolier in Rossini's "Le comte Ory", and Alice in Meyerbeer's "Robert le diable". By all accounts she was a mediocre singer and Berlioz's own reviews focused on her svelte appearance rather than her talents. Her 1843 debut at the Paris Opera Comique was a fiasco, after which she insisted on performing in concerts of her lover's music - much to his horror. "She sings like a cat", he confided to conductor Ferdinand Hiller. Berlioz attempted to exclude Recio from his 1843 concert tour of Germany through a series of comical ruses, but she tracked him down; to assuage her fury he orchestrated the song "Absence" from his cycle "Les nuits d'été" as a vehicle for her. They lived together from 1844 and she continued to complicate his life even after he succeeded in squeezing her out of his musical plans. Shrill and unthinking when it came to defending what she felt were Berlioz's interests, she cruelly confronted the ill Smithson in 1848 and later stirred pots against his relations with Franz Liszt (a longtime friend) and Richard Wagner. When they married after Smithson's death in 1854, Berlioz told his son he felt "obliged" to do so, and he repeated that statement in his posthumously published memoirs. She nevertheless provided the difficult musician with 20 years of companionship, and he countered complaints about her behavior with a resigned shrug: "What can I do? I love her". In her last years Recio suffered from heart disease, the cause of her death at 48. Her mother remained devoted to Berlioz and nursed him through his final illness in 1869.