Régine Crespin
Crespin began her career in France, earning her first critical successes in the French provinces during the early 1950s and then becoming a fixture at the Opéra National de Paris in the mid-1950s.
Crespin retired from the stage in 1989, after which she taught singing for many years at her alma mater, the Conservatoire de Paris, and gave numerous acclaimed master classes at conservatories and universities internationally.
She moved to Nîmes with her family at the age of five[2] and her parents Henri and Margherita opened a large shoe store in that city, Palombo,[3] which they ran for many years.
[7] Crespin was then engaged by the Opéra national du Rhin to portray Elsa in Richard Wagner's Lohengrin – sung in French – at Mulhouse in 1950.
[11] Crespin decided to leave Paris in 1952 and try her luck performing with opera houses in the provinces of France : she sang in Marseilles, Nîmes, Nice, Lyons, Bordeaux, Toulouse, etc.
[4] When Crespin first auditioned for Wieland she had initially assumed that he would cast her in what the French call les wagnériennes blondes, such as Elsa, Eva, Sieglinde, and Elisabeth.
[10] She sang the Marschallin again for the 1959 Glyndebourne Festival and for her debut at the Royal Opera Covent Garden in 1960, bringing "Gallic finesse, complemented by an ideal sense of proportion, supported by perfect German… she never succumbed to exaggeration, physical or vocal, never seemed fussy, never confused sadness with tragedy".
Her first performance at the house was on 19 November 1962 singing the Marschallin with Hertha Töpper as Octavian, Otto Edelmann as Baron Ochs, Anneliese Rothenberger as Sophie, and Lorin Maazel conducting.
In 1961 she made the first of many appearances at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires singing the Marschallin and Kundry, returning the next year as Tosca, Fauré's Pénélope and the title role in Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride and 1964 as both Cassandre and Didon in "Les Troyens".
In 1966 she sang Ariadne at the Aix-en-Provence Festival and that same year made her first appearance at the San Francisco Opera singing both Cassandre and Didon in Berlioz's Les Troyens.
[2][22] This period also led to her interest in Offenbach and her sophisticated wit found its place in recordings of Métella, the Grand Duchess of Gérolstein[24] and La Périchole, along with Dulcinée (Massenet's Don Quichotte).
[7] Crespin sang in many concert halls around the world, where her repertoire included Marguerite in La Damnation de Faust, and Les nuits d'été by Berlioz.
In recital, along with lieder (Schumann, Schubert, Brahms) she excelled in the French mélodie repertoire, especially Debussy and Poulenc, where the savouring of words and ability to capture the mood of songs made her a memorable interpreter.
Crespin also frequently traveled to give master classes at Universities and music conservatories in Europe and the United States during her retirement years.
[2] Her memoirs, La vie et l'amour d'une femme (the French name for Schumann's song cycle Frauenliebe und -leben), are quite candid, providing much detail of the singer's private life as well as unusual insights into her professional world.
[28] In her autobiography Crespin analyses the difficulties she found in the recording process, and notes that the Decca engineers called her, affectionately, 'the French cannon' due to the size of her voice.
Her classic recording of Berlioz's Les nuits d'été and Ravel's Shéhérazade with Ernest Ansermet and the Suisse Romande Orchestra is regarded by many as one of the finest versions on disc.
The discography section of her autobiography contains entries for complete works of composers from Berlioz, Bizet, Fauré, Massenet, Offenbach, Poulenc, Strauss to Wagner.
