Frederica Von Stade

While Von Stade’s lovely, lyrical timbre is eminently ideal for the greater gentle heroines, she was also delightfully coltish but still aristocratic as Cherubino, her most well-known part, and additional trouser tasks such as for example Massenet’s Cherubin, Hansel, and Octavian, a spunky Rosina, and she actually created the part of the absolutely villainous Marquise de Merteuil in Conrad Susa and Philip Littell’s The Dangerous Liaisons. She has specialized in Mozart, Rossini, and nineteenth hundred years French repertoire, but she also sings Monteverdi, Rameau, and Richard Strauss, the mezzo edition of Bellini’s La Sonnambula, French chanson, and German lieder, aswell as jazz and musical theatre tracks. While her family members had produced several professional and novice music artists, including a great-aunt who sang in the Opera Comique, Von Stade became an opera vocalist almost by opportunity, when in 1966, she signed up for the Mannes College of Music like a part-time college student, to learn to learn music on her behalf own enjoyment. Knowing her potential skill, the faculty urged her to sign up full-time, and during her second yr, she began research with Sebastian Engelberg, who trained her technique and trained her how exactly to open up an higher range she hadn’t also known she possessed. In 1969, she auditioned for the Metropolitan Opera, though still uncertain that opera was the profession on her behalf, and was instantly provided a three-year agreement. Some of her assignments were little parts, including her 1970 debut function as the 3rd Boy in Die Zauberflöte, she do sing the casual lead. One particular lead assignments was Cherubino, and Rolf Liebermann, who was simply in attendance that evening, provided her the function for the Paris Opera for the 1973 functionality that started a long-standing association using the Paris Opera and French music. Cherubino was also her debut function on the Glyndebourne Event the same yr, with Salzburg another yr. In 1976, she and her then-husband and tone of voice instructor Peter Elkus, shifted to Paris, and she also produced her La Scala debut as Berlioz’s Marguerite in La Damnation de Faust. In 1985, she experienced personal plus some vocal complications when she and Elkus ceased working collectively, and in 1990 divorced. She was constantly cautious in building her repertoire, under no circumstances pushing her tone of voice beyond Octavian in Rosenkavalier, which she put into her repertoire in 1976, or Charlotte in Werther, which she got on in 1980. A number of the tasks she added had been ones written on her behalf, such as for example Tina in Dominick Argento’s The Aspern Documents. She also lowered a few of her most much loved functions, including Cherubino in 1992 and Rosina in Il Barbiere di Siviglia in 1994, when she experienced that she was no more the youngster that this functions demanded, which there were a lot of additional mezzos to defend myself against those functions. While she by no means recorded Rosina, among her finer functions, she made several superb recordings. Her Tunes from the Auvergne (Sony) certainly are a model of elegance and simplicity, even though her physical portrayal from the adolescent aristocrat Cherubino obviously can’t be captured on the sound-only moderate, her documenting of Le Nozze di Figaro with Solti (Decca) is usually a pleasure, and for most, her Mélisande with Karajan (EMI) may be the greatest on record.