Blanche Arral

Blanche Arral , actually Claire Lardinois , also Clara L. Wheeler (born October 10, 1864 in Liège , Belgium , † March 3, 1945 in Palisades Park , New Jersey ) was a Belgian opera singer ( soprano ).

Life

Blanche Arral was born Claire Augustine Mélanie Francoise Lardinois in Belgium on October 10, 1864 , but was called Clara Lardinois. She was the youngest of seventeen children of Count Jean Gregoire Lardinois and his wife Marie Caroline Fréderic. When she was ten years old, her family moved to Brussels . A friend of her father's, Prince de Caraman-Chimary, who was the president of the Brussels Conservatory , convinced him that his daughter should take singing lessons at the Conservatory. Clara Lardinois studied from 1877 to 1880 and also took private lessons from Alfred Cabel.

In 1881 she visited Paris and briefly studied at the local conservatory, where Mathilde Marchesi prepared her for her operatic debut. On December 8, 1882, she made her debut at the Opéra-Comique in the role of one of the three Israelite girls in Étienne-Nicolas Méhul 's "Joseph". From 1884 to 1890 she was part of the permanent ensemble of the Opéra-Comique .

The impresario Raoul Gunsbourg invited Clara Lardinois to come to Russia, where she made her debut in the Arcadia , a summer theater in Saint Petersburg , in 1891 . In 1892 she married the Russian nobleman Sergei Peshkov, who died - allegedly in a mysterious way - on a trip to Turkey in 1894 .

After Clara Lardinois had stayed in her homeland in Belgium for a few years, she traveled to San Juan , Costa Rica in 1897 , where she opened the new opera house there with a role in Gounod 's "Faust". Here she appeared for the first time under the name Blanche Arral . A few years later, when she was performing in Egypt , she used another stage name: Ada Nelson . In 1901 and 1902 she worked in Egypt, then from 1903 to 1906 she traveled to Asia with stops in Saigon , Hanoi , Hong Kong , Shanghai , Singapore and Java .

From 1906 to 1908 Blanche Arral toured Australia and New Zealand , where she gave a series of concerts. In 1908 she met the American author Jack London and his wife in Suva , Fiji , whereupon London later gave her a brief mention as Lucille Arral in his novella Smoke Bellew .

From 1908 Blanche Arral stayed in the USA, where she only had sporadic appearances in concerts until her marriage in 1915. She was with the 25 years younger school teacher and later headmaster Dr. George Benjamin Wheeler married and lived in Cliffside Park , New Jersey , since 1915 . Blanche Arral died on March 3, 1945 in a sanatorium in Palisades Park , New Jersey, where she had been a patient since October 10, 1944. She was buried as Clara L. Wheeler in Elmwood Cemetery in Middle Granville near Saratoga , New York .

Works

• The Extraordinary Operatic Adventures of Blanche Arral. Opera Biography Series No. 15. Amadeus Press, 2003, ISBN 1-57467-077-8 .

Web links

• Blanche Arral at Operissimo  on the basis of the Great Singer Lexicon