Jean-Vital Ismaël (28 April 1825 – 15 June 1893) was a French opera singer. During a stage career spanning 40 years, he created many leading baritone roles, including Zurga in Bizet's Les pêcheurs de perles and Ourrias in Gounod's Mireille. Born Jean-Vital-Ismaël Jammes in Agen, he was largely self-taught and made his stage debut in 1841 at the age of 16. After singing in a several provincial theatres, he was engaged by the Théâtre Lyrique company in Paris and later by the Opéra-Comique. Following his retirement from the stage, Ismaël lived in Marseille where he died at the age of 68.
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Ismaël was born Jean-Vital-Ismaël Jammes to a working class Jewish family in Agen. He showed an early interest in singing and as a teenager developed a beautiful baritone voice. However, his family were too poor to afford any kind of music lessons for him, and at the age of sixteen he left home to earn a living as a street singer, working his way on foot to Bordeaux and then Nantes.[1] At Nantes, he was taken on as a chorister at the opera house and before his 17th birthday achieved local success when he stepped in at the last minute to sing the role of Max in a production of Adam's Le chalet. He then set off for Paris hoping to further his training as a singer, but he was virtually illiterate and was refused admittance to the Paris Conservatory. Instead, he taught himself to read and write and took a few singing lessons from an unknown teacher. He worked largely on his own to learn the music for the major baritone roles of his day and managed to secure a position singing baritone and bass roles in a small opera house at Verviers in Belgium.[2] He soon returned to France and after performing in several small provincial theatres, was eventually engaged by the Opéra de Rouen, where he appeared with great success in a series of leading roles.
In 1862, he was engaged by Léon Carvalho for his Théâtre Lyrique company in Paris. Ismaël's time with the company marked the peak of his career. Amongst the roles he created during that time were Zurga in Bizet's Les pêcheurs de perles and Ourrias in Gounod's Mireille. He also sang the title role in Verdi's Macbeth for the premiere of its revised 1865 version as well as Falstaff in Nicolai's The Merry Wives of Windsor and the title roles in Rigoletto and Don Pasquale.[3] Ismaël stayed with the Théâtre Lyrique until Carvalho went bankrupt in 1868. He then sang at the Opéra de Marseille before returning to Paris in 1871 to join the Opéra-Comique at the Salle Favart. There, he sang the in the premieres of several more operas and operettas including Offenbach's Fantasio and Delibes' Le roi l'a dit as well as singing in the company's first performances of Gounod's Roméo et Juliette (as Frère Laurent) and Le médecin malgré lui (as Sganarelle).[3]
In the mid 1870s vocal problems attributed to laryngitis caused him to retire from the Opéra-Comique.[4] He was appointed Professor of Operatic Declamation at the Paris Conservatory in 1874, but two years later he was abruptly dismissed from his post without explanation. Ismaël repeatedly, but unsuccessfully, asked for a public investigation into the affair.[5] In straightened financial circumstances caused by his dismissal from the Conservatory, he returned to the stage appearing in comic operas and operettas at the Théâtre du Casino in Montecarlo and the Théâtre de la Renaissance in Paris until 1880. In 1877, the year in which Ismaël appeared in the premiere of the Strauss operetta La tzigane at the Théâtre de la Renaissance,[6] the satirical revue Le Trombinoscope devoted an entire issue to him with a biography by "Touchatout" (Léon-Charles Bienvenu).
Ismaël married twice, first to the soprano Anaïs Cœuriot, who appeared under the name Anaïs Ismaël after their marriage. They were divorced in 1885, and shortly thereafter he married Rose Garcin, a young opera singer who had been one of his pupils. The following year, he brought a lawsuit against his first wife to prevent her from continuing to perform under his last name but was unsuccessful. At the time of the court case (May 1886), and much to the onstage consternation of Anaïs, both she and his second wife found themselves singing in the same production of Faust at the Théâtre du Capitole—Anais Ismaël as Marguerite and Rose Garcin-Ismaël as Marguerite's guardian, Marthe.[7] According to Étienne Destranges, writing in Le Théâtre à Nantes, Rose Garcin-Ismaël had been a singer of great promise, but by 1889 her voice was already in decline.[8] Jean-Vital Ismaël spent the last years of his life at his villa outside Marseille where he died on 15 June 1893 at the age of 68.[9]
Ismaël is known to have created the following roles:[3]