Hughes Cuénod

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Hughes (Adhémar) Cuénod. Swiss tenor born on June 16, 1902 in Corseaux-sur-Vevey, Switzerland.

Hughes Cuénod received his training at the Ribaupierre Institute in Lausanne, at the conservatories in Geneva and Basel, and also in Vienna. He started his career as a concert singer. In 1928 he made his stage debut in Johnny Spielt auf in Paris, and in 1929 he sang for the first time in the USA in Bitter Sweet. From 1930 to 1933 he was active in Geneva, and then in Paris from 1934 to 1937. During the 1937-1939 seasons, he made an extensive concert tour of North America. From 1940 to 1946 he taught at the Geneva Conservatory. In 1943 he resumed his operatic career singing in Die Fledermaus in Geneva. He subsequently sang at Milan’s La Scala (1951), the Glyndebourne Festival (from 1954), and London’s Covent Garden (1954, 1956, 1958).

Hugues Cuénod is a singer who has sung everything from Guillaume de Machaut to Igor Stravinsky. Among his finest roles were Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Basilio, the Astrologer in The Golden Cockerel, and Sellem in The Rake’s Progress. In pre-war Vienna and Paris, he frequented aristocratic salons and worked with Nadia Boulanger, and after the war, the new early-music boom relied heavily on his light, unmannered, natural sound. An outstanding sight-reader, with a flair for the unusual, he made some pioneering LP’s and left a recording heritage of the finest order, especially noted for his interpretation of French mélodie (he knew and worked with Arthur Honegger, Georges Auric, Albert Roussel, Francis Poulenc and others), Johann Sebastian Bach, Elizabethan song, Louis Couperin and Stravinsky. He holds the record as the oldest person to make a debut at the Metropolitan Opera, singing the Emperor (Turandot) in 1987, aged 85.

In 2006 he celebrated his 104th birthday.

[edit] Reference

Nicolas Slonimsky et al., Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Classical Musicians, Schirmer Books, April 1997, 1595 pages. ISBN 0028712714