Meyerbeer: Ah, mon fils! (from Le Prophète)

In her third ‘Tragédiennes’ album for Virgin Classics, French soprano Véronique Gens continues her exploration of the highways and byways of the French operatic repertoire, this time covering the late 18th and 19th centuries and with a prime focus on roles for the deeper, darker-toned female voice.

The French soprano Véronique Gens, joined once again by Christophe Rousset and Les Talens Lyriques, continues her exploration of the highways and byways of the French operatic repertoire with this, her third ‘Tragédiennes’ album. It covers the late 18th and 19th centuries and travels from Carthage and Palestine to the Pyrenees, Tudor England and 16th century Germany, and alongside such names as Gluck, Berlioz, Meyerbeer, Verdi (his Don Carlos, written in French for Paris), Saint-Saëns (his rarely heard Henri VIII rather than Samson et Dalila) and Massenet, features composers who no longer hold a place on the world’s operatic stages: Gossec, Méhul (much admired by Berlioz), Mermet and Kreutzer (the violinist and dedicatee of Beethoven’s sonata).

Perhaps surprisingly, Gens’ main emphasis in this recital is on arias written for mezzo soprano, but there have always been darker shades in Gens’ timbre and French composers of opera created some of their most impressive roles and arias for the deeper-toned female voice. In fact, this recital makes explicit tribute to a series of Parisian divas would today probably be classified as mezzo sopranos: Marie-Thérèse Maillard, Cornélie Falcon (who gave her name to a particular sub-category of voice – a high mezzo/deep soprano), Rosina Stoltz and Pauline Viardot. Even Marie-Constance Sass, the first singer of the magnificent soprano aria ‘Toi qui sus le néant’ from Verdi’s Don Carlos – better known in its Italian version, ‘Tu che la vanità’ and now often sung by lyric sopranos – was also the creator of the sultry ‘falcon’ role of Sélika in Meyerbeer’s l’Africaine.

That Gens can hold her own in such exalted historic company becomes clear from the BBC Music Magazine‘s assessment of her last ‘Tragédiennes’ album: “Passion, ardour, rage, tenderness – the full gamut of human expression emerges in this selection of works created for French operatic femmes fatales … Music director Christophe Rousset and soprano Véronique Gens’s second disc of musical ‘Tragediénnes’ is a thrilling mix of the familiar … and the little known … The whole makes a wonderful odyssey … Gens’s agile voice is the perfect vehicle to cope with these emotional extremes, from the enchanting to the chilling. She is never afraid to sacrifice pure beauty of sound in favour of rhetorical and dramatic effect, giving due weight to the plights, laments and plangent outpourings of these timeless, tragic heroines. Rousset coaxes some crack playing from Les Talens Lyriques, combining the immediacy and intimacy of chamber music with all the colours and intensity of a large-scale symphony orchestra.”

This singer possessed a remarkably beautiful voice, an excellent singing technique and a wide vocal range. After her debut in 1899, her career began successfully in Europe. She moved to North America in 1907 and was immensely popular there until her sudden death in 1915. She is particularly remembered for her portrayal of Dalila and Gluck’s Orfeo.

The great American mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne celebrated her her 70th birthday in January 2004 and that year also marked 50 years since her professional debut.

Horne’s debut in 1954 was in in Los Angeles. That same year her name and voice was brought to many more people than could ever hear her in the opera house through the 1954 film Carmen Jones in which she sang the dubbed voice of Dorothy Dandridge. Her Covent Garden debut was as Marie in Wozzeck (sung in English at that time) in 1964 – she had made her San Francisco debut in 1960 with the same role. It was with Joan Sutherland that Marilyn Horne found the perfect vocal partner and their performances in the great bel canto operas by Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti took the opera world by storm in the 1960s and early 1970s.

By the time she retired in 1998, Marilyn Horne’s long and distinguished career embraced an enormous variety of operatic roles, as well as a wide variety of solo song ranging from Schubert, Schumann and Mahler through to modern American songs. Such a wide repertory was due to the sheer range of her voice and its remarkable flexibility, a voice that could sustain long lines of melody as well as negotiate the most florid vocal pyrotechnics.

Marilyn Horne participated in a number of complete opera recordings (among them classic recordings of Norma and Semiramide with Joan Sutherland) for Decca and also made ten recital programmes.

The complete recitals are now reissued in their entirety as a Collector Edition on 11 CDs and preserve the original sequence of music as presented on vinyl; the original LP cover art is reproduced for the CD sleeves.