Nicole Automobile and Étienne Dupius / Photograph: Yan Bleney
Opera singers often get collectively romantically—although not at all times beneath authorized sanctions–however it may be uncommon when each companions are concurrently on the high of the occupation. U.S. opera corporations have recently ignored married worldwide stars Australian soprano Nicole Automobile and Canadian baritone Étienne Dupuis, however many intrepid opera vacationers might be gathering on the Dallas Opera tonight to see them in a brand new manufacturing by Louis Désiré of Verdi’s Don Carlo in its four-act Italian model. Automobile and Dupuis lead the solid as Elisabetta and Rodrigo, showing together with Stephen Costello within the title function and Christian Van Horn and Clémentine Margaine as Filippo II and his mistress Princess Eboli with Morris Robinson because the Grand Inquisitor.
Previous to the opening, the couple shared some ideas with Parterre Field about many issues operatic together with Don Carlo versus Don Carlos, Regie administrators and some great benefits of performing collectively.
Automobile is returning to the Dallas Opera the place she made her US debut in 2014 because the Countess in Le nozze di Figaro, however Dupuis is making his firm debut in what has turn into a signature function for him. His dashing Rodrigue all however stole the present when the Metropolitan Opera for the first time introduced Verdi’s sprawling historic work in its unique language in Sir David McVicar’s darkly boring manufacturing in 2022.
“I’ve accomplished the function many occasions,” Dupuis shared. “Each time it grows within me, and I begin to develop habits that solidify that–for me–are the core of Rodrigo.” Going from manufacturing to manufacturing, from director to director, he usually has to cease and say to himself “wait, however the music right here does this, and also you’ve justified it by pondering your character might be pondering this. So, it’s virtually inconceivable now for me to alter that. It’s cemented in me.” And but he adapts.
Automobile, too, has carried out the opera in French, as Élisabeth within the celebrated Paris Opéra manufacturing by edgy Polish director Krzysztof Warlikowski “who appears to hold the power of each character inside himself, and he creates absolutely realized, three-dimensional individuals, not caricatures or pastiche variations. That offers us [as singers] one thing wealthy and alive to inhabit and discover.”
In inspecting the distinction between the 2 variations of Verdi’s opera, Dupuis finds that “as quickly as you modify the language, it’s virtually like altering the opera. The music could also be acquainted, however all the things shifts.” As a local French speaker, he finds that all the things in Don Carlos feels “natural;” nevertheless, “Verdi reworked parts of the music when adapting it into Italian, so Don Carlo is a not easy translation. It’s a fastidiously revised model meant to operate dramatically and musically in a distinct language. The problem, then, is to not assume that figuring out the opera in a single language means we routinely understand it in one other. Every model requires a radical relearning, virtually as if we had been approaching the work for the primary time.” One other French version of an Italian basic awaits the baritone in late April when he performs Henri Ashton within the new Opéra-Comique mounting of Lucie de Lammermoor starring Sabine Devieilhe.
Like all these acting at high opera corporations worldwide, each need to work in a wide range of manufacturing types from probably the most conventional and conservative to probably the most difficult and transgressive. In 2017 Automobile starred as Mimì in Claus Guth’s (to some) outrageous outer-space La bohème on the Paris Opéra. When requested about it, she mentioned, “I imagine each director has one thing significant to say. Our accountability as performers is to interact with their imaginative and prescient and attempt to perceive why they’ve set an opera in a selected time interval or made particular decisions concerning the characters. Even when a manufacturing departs from a conventional method, I see it as a part of my function to assist information the viewers by means of the director’s pondering, and to make clear how I perceive and embody that idea in my very own efficiency. In the end, it’s our job, and above all of the director’s, to make these decisions really feel justified and coherent. Opera, in spite of everything, can resonate in any interval and in any setting, so long as the imaginative and prescient behind it’s clear and convincing.” Very diplomatic!
An unorthodox method can typically be remarkably illuminating for a singer. Dupuis carried out his first-ever Don Giovanni within the premiere of Ivo van Hove’s manufacturing, one which ultimately arrived years later on the Metropolitan Opera. The provocative Belgian director instructed Dupuis two issues about his character: “He talked about him being a sociopath, after which he talked concerning the film Disgrace with Michael Fassbender. I discovered it a lot enjoyable and so liberating to have the ability to go on this path, having not accomplished the function earlier than, not having all these different ideas consistently making an attempt to come back in my head to inform me one thing else than what I used to be making an attempt to do.”
Some Regie stagings, nevertheless, can show tougher than others. When she took over Elisabetta from Asmik Grigorian, Automobile discovered “most likely probably the most difficult Don Carlo I’ve accomplished up to now was the Vienna manufacturing, directed by Kirill Serebrennikov which removes the story totally from its conventional context. The visible world he creates, with historic artifacts and museum-like costumes, is extremely subtle and placing. However I believe audiences typically battle to attach with it emotionally. While you watch it as a spectator after which carry out in it your self, you’re feeling that distance.”
The couple, who has an eight-year-old son, met greater than a decade in the past when performing Eugene Onegin collectively on the Deutsche Oper Berlin. Tchaikovsky’s opera, which ends unhappily for the pair they portrayed, was additionally the automobile for his or her first go to collectively to Dallas 4 years in the past after they joined Fabio Luisi and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra for an Onegin semi-staging.
Like so many singers earlier than them, they made their Met debuts collectively as Mimì and Marcello within the legendary Franco Zeffirelli manufacturing of La Bohème,
In the course of the winter of 2020 they returned individually to Lincoln Middle for Mozart, he for the Rely in Le nozze di Figaro, whereas she glided over the amusement park in a balloon as Così fan Tutte’s Fiordiligi, its run lower quick by the worldwide explosion of COVID-19. A month later, the couple joined many others for the Met’s At House Gala the place they memorably carried out a duet from Massenet’s Thaïs accompanied by Dupuis on the piano from their Parisian house.
2022 was a banner yr for Automobile and Dupuis within the US: following the Met Don Carlos and the Dallas Onegin, they debuted with the San Francisco Opera as Donna Elvira and Don Giovanni and appeared in an all-Verdi live performance beneath SFO music director Eun Solar Kim. Within the fall, Automobile joined Allan Clayton for the Met’s acclaimed revival of Peter Grimes as a warmly sympathetic Ellen Orford, a task she repeated the next yr in Robert Carsen’s new manufacturing at La Scala.
However since Carlos/Grimes neither of those elegant and versatile artists have appeared on the Met, nor wherever else within the nation till the present Don Carlo. Their inexplicable absence will proceed for Dupuis: I’ve been instructed that after Dallas he has no US engagements on the books for subsequent three years!
However they continue to be very busy elsewhere, significantly on the Vienna Staatsoper the place they’ve been featured in a variety of vital new productions. Within the fall of 2020 Dmitri Tcherniakov produced Onegin through which Automobile was paired not with Dupuis however with André Schuen within the title function. The couple did nevertheless co-star as Marguerite and Valentin in Frank Castorf’s pitch-black Faust in 2021. Later that yr Dupuis was Figaro within the theater’s antic new Il barbiere di Siviglia reverse Vasilisa Berzhanskaya and Juan Diego Flórez.
His sterling Rodrigo was featured within the premiere of the Serebrennikov Don Carlo in addition to within the revival later that season through which Automobile joined him. Within the spring of 2023 Automobile turned Blanche in Vienna’s new Dialogues des Carmélites after Devieilhe properly determined the function wasn’t for her. In January she carried out Rusalka on the Staatsoper, a task she sang in Sydney final summer time for her return to the Opera there after an absence of seven years.
Past the upcoming Donizetti, Dupuis is likely to be seen as having developed right into a Verdi specialist. He just lately moved from Paolo Albiani to the title function of Simon Boccanegra which he carried out in Berlin with Automobile as his daughter Amelia. Collectively they carried out Il trovatore in his native metropolis with Opéra de Montréal, and Dupuis’s Don Carlo was singled out for particular reward within the Royal Opera’s La forza del destino co-starring Sondra Radvanovsky and Brian Jagde. Earlier than arriving in Dallas, Dupuis jumped in as Renato for the opening of the Paris Opéra’s new Un Ballo in Maschera reverse Anna Netrebko and Matthew Polenzani.
However he demurred when requested about this focus. “I’m not consciously focusing extra on Verdi, however these are the roles which are coming my manner increasingly. And I definitely can’t say I don’t take pleasure in them, as I am keen on them. I really like the drama in Verdi and inhabiting these characters to search out the sunshine inside the shadows. Lots of the roles I sing are both thought of villains or darkish figures, usually related to darker, bigger voices. What I attempt to do is carry them into the sunshine, right into a extra human house, to point out them as full human beings, not simply the antagonist of the piece.”
When requested about non-Verdi roles he’d wish to sort out, Dupuis mentioned, “Wolfram in Tannhäuser, definitely. And maybe in the future I wouldn’t say no to Telramund in Lohengrin. Or Scarpia. If my spouse had been singing Tosca, I’d like to sing Scarpia. I believe we might do some actual injury in that Act II duet.”
Earlier than their Tosca occurs, Vienna will quickly host Automobile’s significantly demanding function(s) debut(s) when for the primary time she takes on the three heroines of Puccini’s Il Trittico. Joined in June by Ambrogio Maestri, Arsen Soghomonyan and Violeta Urmana, she deems this tour-de-force “an enormous problem. Actually monumental.” She’s discovering Il Tabarro’s Giorgetta probably the most fascinating, “a personality who operates on a really instinctive, virtually primal degree. She doesn’t come from privilege or refinement. She says what she feels. There’s one thing uncooked and deeply life like about her. There’s a lot heartbreak in Tabarro. If we focus solely on the lovers, Giorgetta and Luigi, we miss half the story. The despair written into her music, particularly in relation to Michele and inside herself, runs very deep. That emotional complexity is what I’m actually immersing myself in.”
Étienne Dupuis in Faust in Vienna / Photograph: Michael Pöhn
Massenet’s Hérodiade is a hardly ever carried out work that the couple has just lately embraced showing in live performance performances in Lyon, Paris and Berlin, she as Salomé, he as her predator Hérode. Their German engagement fashioned the idea for the current Naxos recording carried out by Enrique Mazzola and that includes Don Carlo(s) companions: Margaine within the title function and Polenzani because the prophet Jean.
As to why they take pleasure in performing collectively so usually, Automobile prompt, “I believe Étienne would agree that it’s at all times a present after we get to share the stage. Not solely will we create these characters facet by facet, however we additionally get to witness one another’s artistry up shut. As each an artist and his companion in life, that’s a unprecedented privilege.” Dupuis joked that “instantly after Nicole sings her aria the whole firm turns to me and says,’“So what’s it like being the second-best singer in your family?’” However he feels “it’s a wholesome dynamic — I don’t even see it as competitors. We’re not competing with one another. We’re pushing one another to be higher. I at all times sing higher after I know Nicole is onstage and even sitting within the viewers, and I’m pretty sure the identical is true for her.”
She considers it “a luxurious to have a trusted set of ears each in the home and onstage, somebody who can say, “I seen you tried this tonight,” or “Possibly experiment with a distinct vowel there, it would really feel simpler.” That type of help is invaluable.” He concluded that “there’s no draw back to it. If something, it deepens all the things we do onstage.”
This interview received’t be the final Parterre readers will examine Automobile and Dupuis, with upcoming critiques of each the Dallas Don Carlo and Automobile’s new recording, Palazetto Bru Zane’s newest resurrection: Clemence de Grandval’s Mazeppa.
Although there are a lot of extra YouTube movies on-line of Nicole Automobile and Étienne Dupuis, Chris’s Cache makes a short reappearance providing the pair in some rarer audio excerpts:
Nicole Automobile and Étienne Dupuis Extracts
Massenet: Werther Dupuis—Lyon 2020
Puccini: Manon Lescaut Automobile—Melbourne 2024
Verdi: Don Carlo Automobile, Elina Garanca & Dupuis—Vienna 2025
Verdi: Un Ballo in Maschera Automobile & Dupuis—Melbourne 2025
Dvořák: Rusalka Automobile & Piotr Beczala—Vienna 2026
