Maurice Renaud

He made his début at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie, Brussels, in 1883 and remained with that company until 1890, singing in the premières of Ernest Reyer's Sigurd in 1884 and in his Salammbô in 1890, opposite Rose Caron in both.

In October 1890 he joined the Opéra-Comique, making his debut as Karnak in Lalo's Le roi d'Ys, and also singing title roles in Don Giovanni and Der fliegende Holländer and Scarpia in Tosca.

Casts for these performances were often extraordinary: Carmen with Emma Calvé, Emma Eames, and Albert Saléza; Don Giovanni with Lilli Lehmann, Lillian Nordica or Emmy Destinn, Suzanne Adams, Zélie de Lussan and Edouard de Reszke; Manon with Mary Garden; Rigoletto with Nellie Melba or Selma Kurz, Enrico Caruso, and Marcel Journet.

Renaud toured extensively, appearing at Saint Petersburg, Berlin, Monte Carlo, where he sang in the premières of Massenet's Le jongleur de Notre-Dame (1902) and Chérubin (1905).

In 1906, Oscar Hammerstein I signed Renaud for the Manhattan Opera House, at the urging of Nellie Melba, who loved his striking good looks and elegant Jean de Reszke-like persona.

Renaud's greatest parts at the Manhattan included Don Giovanni, Scarpia, Germont, Hérode in Hérodiade, and the three villains in The Tales of Hoffmann.

On 21 November 1910, he appeared as Scarpia with Carmen Melis, later Renata Tebaldi's teacher, prompting the Boston critic Horatio Parker to write, "...this was as vivid and racking a performance of Tosca since it first came to the stage!"

Regrettably, arias from many of his most celebrated operatic roles were not committed to disc; but what he did record is sufficient to demonstrate his greatness as a singer and interpretive artist.

Maurice Renaud was a handsome man, trim and erect, with regular features, deep-set eyes, wavey chestnut-coloured locks and a magisterial handlebar mustache that completed the picture of virile magnetism.

To Italian and German parts he brought an elegance and nobility nurtured in the school of dramatic declamation of the Académie nationale de musique, related to that of the Comédie Française and the whole historic conception of tragic and heroic performance in French literary theater.