Sophie Cruvelli

Portrait of Sophie Crüwell, 1852 ( Compiègne Castle )

Sophie Cruvelli , née Sophie Johanne Charlotte Crüwell (born March 12, 1826 in Bielefeld , † November 6, 1907 in Monte Carlo ) was a German opera singer (soprano).

Life

Sophie Crüwell came from a Bielefeld merchant family . She and her older sister Marie Crüwell (later stage name Marie Cruvelli) received singing training from Louis Spohr in Kassel . In 1844 she moved with her sister to Paris, completed her training first with Francesco Piermarini , then with the formerly famous tenor Marco Bordogni . The music magazine Revue et gazette musicale de Paris made its first public appearance in January 1846 . Then she went to Milan and completed her training with Francesco Lamperti .

According to current knowledge, she made her operatic debut in Venice, but not in the famous La Fenice. On April 17, 1847, she sang the main female role in Verdi's Ernani at the Teatro Apollo . She celebrated her second premiere on this stage in the lead role of Norma von Bellini on May 22nd. Her next engagements took her to Udine, where she sang Odabella in Verdi's opera Attila on July 24, 1847 and then in the same house I due Foscari , also by Verdi. In Rovigo , where she sang Odabella again, she was discovered in late 1847 by Benjamin Lumley , impresario at Her Majesty's Theater in London, and signed for the 1848 season. Her debut as Elvira in Verdi's Ernani alongside such famous singers as John Sims Reeves and Giovanni Belletti was enthusiastically received. In her first season she also appeared in Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia , in Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro (Countess) alongside Jenny Lind (Susanna), in Verdi's Nabucco (Abigaille) and again in I due Foscari (Lucrezia). The end of the season was outshone by the sensational performances by Jenny Lind. But there is nothing to suggest that, as is often rumored, a prima donna war took place between the world star Lind and the debutante Cruvelli. After a short interlude with Bellini's Norma at the Royal Opera House in Berlin, she sang from November 1848 to March 1849 at the Teatro Grande in Trieste a. a. in Verdi's Attila , Ernani and Macbeth .

At the end of 1849 she was Odabella in Verdi's Attila, the prima donna on the opening night of La Scala in Milan . During this season there were a total of sixty appearances in Attila , Nabucco , Ernani , Il Barbiere di Siviglia , Norma and David Riccio at the most famous opera house in Italy. In the same year she appeared with great success at the Teatro Carlo Felice in Genoa in Verdi's new opera Luisa Miller , as well as in Ernani , Nabucco and Attila as well as in Bellini's Norma .

After Benjamin Lumley had also become impresario of the world-famous Parisian Théâtre-Italy in 1851 , he hired her for London and Paris. The Parisian Ernani debut was a sensation. One of the first highlights of the singer's career was the 1851 season at Her Majesty's Theater in London at the time of the World's Fair . After her portrayal of the Fidelio -Leonore, she was compared with the legendary London predecessors Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient and Maria Malibran . After that, Norma overwhelmed audiences and critics. As a tragedy, she was placed on a par with Rachel's most famous actress at the time . This is how the Cruvelli became one of the greatest musical tragedians of her time. There may have been more technically perfect female singers back then, like Giulia Grisi , Marietta Alboni , or Pauline Viardot . After Maria Malibran, however, there was no longer a singer who fascinated the audience more with the unity of performance and song. Verdi would have used her in the world premiere of Traviata in Venice in 1853 had she not been under contract with Lumley. At the beginning of 1854, probably at the instigation of Giacomo Meyerbeer , she was committed to the Opéra in Paris to the highest fee ever paid of 100,000 francs (about 600,000 euros) for eight months. Her debut as Valentine in Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots was the talk of the town in what was then Europe's cultural metropolis.

She was the favorite singer of Emperor Napoleon III. even though she was considered capricious and unpredictable. This led to the Cruvelli scandal on October 2, 1854: despite the express order of the Minister of State Achille Fould to sing Valentine, she did not appear at the Opéra. The audience had to be put off the next day, but the singer continued to disappear. Preparations for the world premiere of Verdi's opera Les vêpres siciliennes , which the composer had written for the voice of Cruvelli, were also canceled and the director of the Opéra dismissed. Despite the pledge of her property and the threat of a fine of 300,000 francs, the singer could not be found until the first week of November. Shortly after her miraculous reappearance, she sang Valentine on November 13 to the cheering of the audience at the Paris Opéra. Attachment and threats of punishment were forgotten. Not a "preferred honeymoon " with Baron Vigier, as always claimed, but a profound conflict with Achille Fould, the most powerful minister in the country, was probably the reason for the "Cruvelli's flight". The belated premiere of Verdi's Les vêpres siciliennes on June 13, 1855, in which she sang Hélène, was her last great triumph.

On January 8, 1856, she married Baron George Vigier (a grandson of Marshal Davoust ) and withdrew from the stage. Even if her opponents among the critics emphasized her sometimes mannered presentation and the incomplete training of the voice, in the opinion of the music critic Rodolfo Celetti she was one of the three most typical Verdi singers between 1840 and 1880, according to Maurice, with Eugenia Frezzolini and Theresa Stolz Strakosch was the “most beautiful voice in the dramatic genre” in her time. A befitting return to the stage allowed her from 1858 glamorous charity concerts, mostly at her winter residence in Nice, where the international society of the Second Empire met every year . For this she drew, the Protestant who confessed her life, Pope Pius IX. 1874 with the papal golden rose ("virtue rose"). Even when she organized the first performance of Richard Wagner's opera Lohengrin in France with great effort and courage in Nice in 1881 and even sang Elsa, this was done as part of a charity event.

Sophie Cruvelli died at the age of 81 on November 6, 1907 in the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo after a visit to the Opéra de Monaco , which at the time was under Raoul Gunsbourg's direction . Her grave monument can still be found today in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

literature

• Georges Favre: Une grande Cantatrice Niçoise La Vicomtesse Vigier (Sophie Cruvelli) 1826-1907 . Editions A. et J. Picard, Paris 1979.
• The Musical World , years 1848, 1851, 1852, 1853, 1854, 1855.
• Georges Titus Ferris: Great Singers . Malibran to Titiens, second series. Appelton and Company, New York 1891.
• Benjamin Lumley: Reminiscences of the Opera . Hurst and Blackett, London 1864.
• Christian Springer: Verdi and the interpreters of its time . Verlag Holzhausen, Vienna 2000.

Web links

Commons : Sophie Cruvelli  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ^ "Critica teatrale", in: Gazzetta Privilegiata di Venezia , April 22, 1847.
2. ^ "Critica teatrale", in: Gazzetta Privilegiata di Venezia , May 26, 1847.
3. ↑ Article about Sophie Crüwell with photos of her tomb