英文简介
Early life
Crespin was born in Marseille.
Crespin's childhood was affected both by growing up during World War II and her mother's alcoholism.
She began taking singing lessons at the comparatively late age of sixteen. After failing to pass her Baccalauréat but doing well in a singing competition, she went to Paris and studied at the Conservatoire.
Career
She made her début in 1950 in Mulhouse as Elsa in Lohengrin, and the same year appeared in that role in Paris.[1] After her debut, she sang with the Paris Opera but in regional centres. Her big break was being chosen as Kundry in Parsifal at the 1958 Bayreuth Festival, despite the fact that she had not sung Wagner in German.
Notable subsequent parts added to her repertoire were Cassandre and Didon in Berlioz' Les Troyens; Carmen; Fauré's Pénélope; Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride; Charlotte in Massenet's Werther; Offenbach's La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein; Madame Lidoine and Madame de Croissy in Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmélites; Tosca; the Countess in Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades; Kundry in Wagner's Parsifal, and Sieglinde and Brünnhilde in his Die Walküre. Above all, perhaps, she was loved for her Marschallin in Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier.
Régine Crespin retired from singing in 1989, but continued to teach until her death in Paris in 2007.
Recordings
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 the finest of all versions on disc. Among her other important recordings were Sieglinde in Die Walküre, and the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier, both for Decca with the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Sir Georg Solti. She also assumed the role of Brünnhilde on Herbert von Karajan's recording of Die Walküre with the Berlin Philharmonic recently re-released by Deutsche Grammophon as part of its "The Originals" series.
Memoirs
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. It was first published in French in 1982 and was republished in an expanded English version called On Stage, Off Stage: A Memoire in 1997.
References
The New York Times "Régine Crespin, French Soprano, Dies at 80" 6 July. 2007
via Washington Post, "French Opera Great Crespin Dies at 80", July 5, 2007
Washington Post, "French Opera Great Crespin Dies at 80" July 5, 20
