Soprano Licia Albanese has died in New York at the age of 105.

Lauded for her technical ability and for her interpretations of roles in Puccini’s Tosca, and most famously Madame Butterfly, the Italian-born singer rose to prominence between 1940 and 1966 and appeared in hundreds of performances at New York Metropolitan Opera.

Albanese died in her apartment on Friday 15 August, according to her son, Joseph Gimma Jr. “My mom had a wonderful, wonderful life and great career,” he said.

Born in Torre a Mare near Bari, her career began in her native Italy in the 1930s, before she moved to the US, where she appeared in a variety of operas alongside Jussi Bjorling, Tito Schipa, Franco Corelli, Beniamino Gigli, and Giacinto Prandelli.

“I remember a ‘Boheme’ broadcast when I kept smelling something terrible in the final scene, where I was dying. I kept singing, but in between I would whisper to everyone, ‘My God, what is that smell?’ And finally at the end, Pinza pulled a herring out from under my pillow,” she told the New York Times in 1989 of her time alongside Italian star Ezio Pinza.

“People would come backstage at the end and say, ‘Oh, how beautiful it was; you were all crying so much it made us cry.’ But we had really been laughing so hard we had tears in our eyes.”

Albanese founded the Licia Albanese-Puccini Foundation in 1974 to support young singers and in 1995, President Bill Clinton presented her with the National Medal of Honor for the Arts.

• This article was amended on 7 October 2019. An earlier version mistakenly attributed the opera Tosca to Verdi.