Éva Gauthier

Éva Gauthier

Éva Gauthier (born September 20, 1885 in Ottawa , † December 26, 1958 in New York City ) was a Canadian opera singer ( alto , soprano ).

Life

As a child, Gauthier had piano lessons with Edgar Birch and from the age of thirteen singing lessons with Frank Bruel and sang solo parts at St. Patrick's Church and the Notre Dame Basilica . With the support of her uncle Wilfried Laurier , she traveled to Europe in 1902 for further training. Here she tried unsuccessfully to take lessons from Nellie Melba's teacher Mathilde Marchesi and then studied with August-Jean Dubulle , the teacher Joseph Sauciers and, after a vocal cord operation, with Jacques Bouhy , the interpreter of Escamillo in the premiere of Carmen .

1905-06 she engaged Emma Albani for a concert tour through Great Britain and her farewell tour through Canada. A scholarship from Baron Strathcona enabled her to study in London in 1906, where she was a student of William Shakespeare . In 1907 she sang the soprano part in Charles Albert Edwin Harriss ' Coronation Mass for Edward VII at Queen's Hall . In Milan she studied with Giuseppe Oxilia from 1907-08 and later with Carlo Carignani . Caruso's sister-in-law Rina Giachetti prepared her for her stage premiere as Micaela in Carmen , which took place in Pavia in 1909.

After her role as Mallika in Léo Delibes ' Lakmé at the London Covent Garden Opera Company was temporarily reassigned, Gauthier undertook a trip to Indonesia. There she met the plantation owner Frans Knoote , whom she married in 1911, and she was one of the first western trained singers to study Indonesian gamelan music . She went on concert tours through Japan, China, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia and New Zealand before going to the USA after the outbreak of the First World War.

There she tried herself as a vaudeville singer for a short time before concentrating on a repertoire of Javanese and modern Western European music. At a concert at New York's Aeolian Hall in 1917 she sang a. a. three songs by Maurice Ravel , Igor Stravinsky's Three Japanese Poems and Five Poems of Ancient China and Japan by the American composer Charles Tomlinson Griffes . After this concert, Stravinsky decided that in future she would sing all premieres of his vocal works, and she became known as "The High Priestess of Modern Song".

In 1920 the Music League of America sent Gauthier to Paris to arrange a concert tour through the USA with Maurice Ravel . This was the beginning of her friendship with Ravel, and on this occasion she learned a.o. a. also know Eric Satie and the composers of the Groupe des Six . In the next few years she performed with well-known orchestras and conductors in the USA and went on concert tours with Ned Rorem , Celius Dougherty and Colin McPhee as accompanists.

In 1923 she gave a concert at the Aeolian Hall under the title Recital of Ancient and Modern Music for Voice , which went down in the history of American music. While in the first part of the concert she juxtaposed classical opera arias by Vincenzo Bellini and Henry Purcell with modern compositions by Arnold Schoenberg , Darius Milhaud , Béla Bartók and Paul Hindemith , in the second part she sang Irving Berlin's Alexander's Ragtime Band , compositions by Jerome Kern and Walter Donaldsen and accompanied by the composer, three songs by George Gershwin , with which she introduced music influenced by jazz for the first time in a classical concert. The successful concert was later repeated in Boston and London.

A few months later she sang songs by Heitor Villa-Lobos at the Festival of the International Society of Contemporary Music in Venice . At the height of her career she was associated with numerous famous contemporary composers such as Debussy, Gershwin, Manuel de Falla , Francis Poulenc , Satie, Stravinsky, John Alden Carpenter , John Singer Sargent and Amy Lowell .

At the end of the 1920s, Gauthier had to interrupt her concert activity due to illness and did not resume until 1931 with a performance in Havana, but could no longer build on her great successes. She sang the soprano part in the premiere of Satie's Symphony Socrate and in 1935 and 1936 the vocal role in Stravinski's ballet Perséphone , but in 1937 she withdrew from the concert stage.

She then founded a singing studio in New York, gave master classes and acted as a juror in singing competitions. She organized concerts for her students and other young musicians, and she was one of the founders of the American Guild of Musical Artists . In her final years Gaulthier was ill and dependent on financial support. On her 100th birthday in 1985, Joan Patenaude-Yarnell performed a program with pieces from her repertoire at the University of Montreal . Gauthier's younger sister Juliette Gaultier de la Verendrye became known as a violinist and folk singer.

Web links

• Éva Gauthier at Operissimo  on the basis of the Great Song Lexicon
• Library andArchives Canada - The Virtual Gramophone - Conrad Gauthier
• The Canadian Encyclopedia - Eva Gauthier