Jean de Reszke

Jean de Reszke

Jean de Reszke (born January 1, 1850 in Warsaw , † April 3, 1925 in Nice ) was a French opera singer of Polish descent. He was one of the most important tenors of the 19th century.

Life

After training with highly renowned teachers, he made his debut as a baritone in London in 1874 , but soon underwent further training as a tenor and sang as such from 1879 in Madrid, from 1884 to 1888 in Paris, from 1881 to 1891 in London and from 1891 to 1901 as a celebrated crowd puller the New York Metropolitan Opera . De Reszke was at the height of his career as one of the greatest tenors in opera history.

In 1901 he ended his stage career and settled in Paris, where he worked as a singing teacher until his death. Among his students was the contralto and mezzo-soprano Sara Jane Layton Walker , who later became known as Mme. Charles Cahier .

His brother Édouard de Reszke (1853–1917) was successful as a bassist , his sister Joséphine de Reszke (1855–1891) as a soprano .

Sound recordings

Despite his former popularity, Jean de Reszke is now only known in expert circles. One reason for this is that Reszke used the newly invented medium of record differently than z. B. Caruso was very skeptical and refused all his life to give his consent to the publication of recordings of his voice.

So exist of him as only one still existing recordings only six short passages on phonograph cylinders , the so-called "Mapleson cylinders" which Lionel Mapleson, the former archivist of the Metropolitan Opera, with an Edison phonograph during performances secretly and without the approval of Artist made; Unfortunately, the quality of the recordings is so poor that they only give a vague idea of ​​de Reszke's abilities. Rumors that de Reszke recorded for the sound engineering pioneers Gianni Bettini or Pathé Cylinder in Paris around 1900 may be based on mere wishful thinking.

A single visit by de Reszke to a recording studio has been documented: in 1905 he was persuaded to step in front of the trumpets for the renowned Milan- based record company Fonotipia . Two recordings were made, which Fonotipia intended to market as a special sensation for the market launch of the 35 cm plate format: “C'est la! ... Salut! tombeau! sombre et silencieux! ” from the opera Roméo et Juliette by Charles Gounod (matrix number 69000) and “ O Souverain, O Juge, O Pere! ” from the opera Le Cid by Jules Massenet (matrix number 69001). Press dies were made and an unknown number of test presses of both titles were produced. For reasons unknown, De Reszke was so dissatisfied with the recordings that he forced Fonotipia to refrain from publishing, although the advertising campaign had already started and the company had announced the appearance of the records in newspaper advertisements. The press rams and almost all test pressings were destroyed; however, several records seem to have ended up in collectors' hands. The original matrices have been archived at Fonotipia; they are said to have been destroyed in a warehouse in France during the First World War . Specimens from the test series were suspected to be in a Parisian bank vault and in the collection of the British royal family without this ever having been confirmed. The path taken by a pair of plates that has been preserved can be traced back to the inventory of a Budapest collector around 1940; since then the pressings have been considered lost, although a serious trace seems to lead to Cuba . There are no known copies of the two disks.

literature

• Karen Henson: Opera Acts: Singers and Performance in the Late Nineteenth Century , Cambridge Studies in Opera, Cambridge UP 2015

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Karl-Josef Kutsch , Leo Riemens : Large singer lexicon . Volume 2: Castori – Framboli. Fourth, enlarged and updated edition. KG Saur, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-598-11598-9 , p. 1117.
2. ↑ Pekka Gronow, Ilpo Saunio: An International History of the Recording Industry . Continuum International Publishing Group, 1999, ISBN 0-30-470590-X , p. 15 f.