Alexandrine-Caroline Branchu News
French opera soprano
- soprano
- France
- opera singer, stage actor
Last update
2024-04-24
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2021-08-02 07:33:33
Admired by Berlioz and Wagner, the operas of Gaspare Spontini were hugely influential in their day yet are still a rarity on the modern operatic stage
Soprano Caroline Branchu as Julia in Spontini's La Vestale Berlioz wrote in his memoirs, 'My religion is that of Beethoven, Weber, Gluck, Spontini', yet Berlioz' great admiration for Spontini's three major French operas, La Vestale, Fernand Cortez and Olimpie, has not translated into the modern era. In the post-War era of re-discovery of bel canto, Spontini's operas have tended to be revived as vehicles for great female singers and his finest opera, La Vestale, performed in Italian translation rather than French. But the composer seems to have attracted an element of ill luck during his lifetime as well, and you can't help feel sorry for him, for all that he was evidently not a likeable man (Berlioz wrote, after Spontini's death, in a letter of 1/2/1856, 'He was not a likeable man, but I had come to love him by dint of admiration. The very asperities of his temperament […]
2019-05-02 06:08:39
Revivifying Olimpie: Spontini's opera in a terrific new recording from Palazzetto Bru Zane
[…] Olimpie failed. He moved to Berlin where he was given a post by the King of Prussia, and Olimpie was performed in Berlin with a new German text by E.T.A. Hoffmann, and a revised ending [this German version is usually called Olympie]. This was a success and the new libretto was translated back into French. The revised opera was performed in Paris in 1826, it barely did better than the original in 1819. Caroline Branchu as Statira in Spontini's Olimpie in Paris in 1819 Olimpie is based on a Voltaire play from 1761 in which the classical unities are preserved, and the ending with its triple death was designed to provoke 'terreur'. The original 1819 libretto preserved the sense of the Voltaire play but reduced the number of deaths to two. The revised version, however, substantially re-wrote the final act, removing the deaths altogether and adding a lieto […]
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