Régine Crespin
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RégineCrespin (born Marseille, France, 23 February 1927) is a French operatic soprano, later a mezzo-soprano, who excelled in both the French and German repertoire.
She began taking singing lessons at the comparatively lateageof sixteen. After failing to pass her Baccalauréat but doing well in a singing competition, she went to Paris and studied at the Conservatoire.
She made her début in 1950 in Mulhouse, as Elsa in Lohengrin, and the same year appeared in that role in Paris.
Notable subsequent parts added to her repertoire were Cassandre and Didon in Berlioz' Les Troyens; Carmen; Fauré's Pénélope; Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride; Charlotte in Massenet's Werther; Offenbach's La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein and La Périchole; Madame Lidoine and Madame de Croissy in Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmélites; Tosca; the Countess in Tchaikovsky's Pique Dame; Kundry in Wagner's Parsifal, and Sieglinde and Brünnhilde in his Die Walküre. Above all, perhaps, she was loved for her Marschallin in Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier.
Régine Crespin retired from singingin [1989]], but continues to teach.
[edit] Recordings
Her classic recording of Berlioz's Les nuits d'été and Ravel’s Shéhérazade with Ernest Ansermet and the Suisse Romande Orchestra is still generally regarded as the finest of all versions on disc. Among her other important recordings are Sieglinde in Die Walküre, and the Marschallin, both for Decca with the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Sir Georg Solti. She also assumed the role of Brünnhilde on Herbert von Karajan's recording of Die Walküre with the Berlin Philharmonic recently re-released by Deutsche Grammophon as part of its "The Originals" series.
[edit] Memoirs
Her memoirs, La vie et l'amour d'une femme (the French name for Schumann's song cycle Frauenliebe und -leben) are quite candid, providing much detail of the singer’s private life as well as unusual insights into her professional world. She revealed justifiable pride in having sung German operas in Vienna and at Bayreuth, and Italian operas at La Scala, adding that neither Renata Tebaldi nor Elisabeth Schwarzkopf ever sang a French role at the Paris Opéra!
[edit] Appreciation
A representative review (from Amazon.com) read:
- The now-retired Régine Crespin is easily the greatest soprano voice to come out of France since World War II, notable not just for its body and luster but for such an effortless sense of line that you're never aware of the individual notes, only the overall musical idea they're meant to create.
