Adolphe Nourrit

Not yet 20 years of age, Adolphe Nourrit made his professional operatic debut in 1821 as Pylades in Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride, being welcomed by his father performing the tiny role of a Scythian.

He sang during a turning-point in French operatic vocalism, when performers began using a rounder, more open-throated and Italianate method of voice production than hitherto had been the case, with less resort to falsetto by tenors.

Indeed, the scores of the musical passages written for Nourrit by Rossini, Giacomo Meyerbeer and others, contain orchestral markings which indicate that he could not have been singing in falsetto in his upper register.

For example, when it came to La Juive, he wrote the words of Eléazar's aria "Rachel, quand du Seigneur"; and he also insisted that Meyerbeer rework the love-duet climax of Act 4 of Les Huguenots until it met with his approval.

In the early 1830s, he embraced the ideas of Saint-Simonianism and dreamed of founding a grand opéra populaire which would introduce operatic works to the masses.

Beside singing and teaching, Nourrit composed and wrote scenarios for ballets at the Opéra de Paris, including the libretto for La Sylphide (1832).

In October 1836, impresario Duponchel engaged Gilbert Duprez, who commanded an exciting high C from the chest, as joint "First Tenor" with Nourrit at the Opéra de Paris.

The intimacy of the salon apparently suited him well and although criticized for a weakening voice, his singing displayed impressive nuances of feeling and a wide dramatic range.

Donizetti complied but the new work, Poliuto, was banned from performance on the secular stage by the authorities because of its Christian subject matter, and Nourrit felt betrayed.

His wife, arriving in Italy in July 1838, was shocked by what she considered to be the impaired sound of his singing and by the fragile state of his physique; he was being leeched regularly and was constantly hoarse.

Anyhow our boy made the best of it by using the less discordant stops, and he played Schubert's Die Sterne, not with a passionate and glowing tone that Nourrit used, but with a plaintive sound as soft as an echo from another world.