The nice Romanian soprano Ileana Cotrubas died on 20 August at her dwelling in Vienna on the age of 87. Although I solely managed to see her carry out twice, her throbbing, plangently weak voice has been in my ears for practically so long as I’ve been serious about opera.
Quickly after I started listening to the Texaco Metropolitan Opera Saturday afternoon broadcasts in grade college, I grew to become intrigued by Early Opera. Due to my native library’s huge LP assortment, Handel grew to become an early favourite however 17thcentury Italian works took me longer to heat as much as. After a number of tries, Cavalli lastly clicked for me due to Glyndebourne’s L’Ormindo recording. Round that point the competition’s follow-up manufacturing of Raymond Leppard’s realization of La Calisto was receiving raves, and after I noticed a King Karol advert in Opera Information for its new Argo double-LP I instantly requested my dad and mom to order it for me.
I’d already turn out to be a faithful Janet Baker stan by then, so the set’s revelation was the irresistible Calisto of Cotrubas. I learn in Excessive Constancy that the BBC had televised the elegant Peter Corridor manufacturing, however I used to be by no means capable of watch their Calisto till many many years later.
Quickly after, I eagerly obtained Leppard’s Mozart Mass in C Minor that includes Cotrubas and Kiri Te Kanawa, one other of my teenage soprano crushes.
Having turn out to be uninterested in dwell opera in my native southwestern Ohio, I started making common culture-vulture jaunts to New York Metropolis after I was in school. Two of my first three journeys have been centered across the openings of Met Mozart new productions with these two divas. In January I noticed Te Kanawa’s Fiordiligi after which on my birthday (it was destiny!) the corporate premiere of Idomeneo, which sadly proved to be the one time I noticed Cotrubas (as Ilia) in a staged opera.
Mimì in La bohème was her US calling-card function: it served for her U.S. debut at Chicago Lyric in 1974; then two years later she arrived on the Kennedy Middle with the visiting firm from La Scala in its famed Franco Zeffirelli manufacturing. Her Mimì first appeared on the Met quickly after the corporate’s historic La bohème dwell telecast in 1977, then San Francisco the next yr. Her Met Mimi wasn’t broadcast, so the broader American public needed to wait till that fall to find the soprano when she starred as Gilda in a brand new Met manufacturing of Rigoletto which was telecast dwell with Plácido Domingo, Cornell MacNeil, and the inimitably bodacious Isola Jones.
Nicely earlier than I lastly heard Cotrubas in particular person, I had been gathering pirates of her performances on reel-to-reel tape. Not being a giant Domingo fan, I skipped the industrial recording Covent Backyard’s L’elisir d’amore and as an alternative snapped up a dwell pirate with José Carreras as an alternative as Nemorino. And as I’ll all the time desire comedian to tragic Donizetti, I additionally ordered her scrumptious Norina from Chicago 1974, once more with Geraint Evans in addition to Alfredo Kraus and Vicente Sardinero.
The late Jason McVicar (aka early Parterre’s Enzo Bordello and an excellent good friend of James) wrote me that his favourite of all my Trove Thursday postings was Haydn’s Die Jahreszeiten performed by James Levine with Cotrubas, Francisco Araiza and José van Dam.
Cotrubas’s New York profession was not as intensive because it might need been: she dropped out of a revival of John Dexter’s manufacturing of Don Pasquale (conceived for Beverly Sills) and likewise left city early after clashing with conductor Eugene Kohn over his conducting of La bohème. By the way in which, Dexter was to have directed her Met Violetta scheduled for the autumn of 1980. Nonetheless, that season’s lengthy labor strike pushed it to March of the next yr when she apparently received her means and Dexter was changed by Colin Graham.
Her native withdrawals additionally included two fascinating “what-might-have-beens;” due to her shut affiliation with Matthew Epstein, she was to star in two of his legendary mid-Nineteen Eighties live performance opera displays at Carnegie Corridor. For the Marilyn Horne-Rossini collection, the impresario really misplaced all three of his European divas, to get replaced by American ones: for La donna del lago, Semiramide, and Tancredi, Frederica von Stade, June Anderson, and Lella Cuberli in the end partnered with Horne rather than the initially introduced Agnes Baltsa, Monserrat Caballé, and Cotrubas. The latter was additionally to have been the Countess in Capriccio (what a wonderful remaining scene that may have been!) in January 1986, however as an alternative Felicity Lott stepped up.
Her remaining Met function was Micaëla taking on the function from Leona Mitchell (who had changed the initially introduced, however often-elusive Gabriela Benacková) through the 1987 Carmen run that starred Agnes Baltsa, Carreras, and Samuel Ramey. Trove Thursday featured her Micaëla in an equally starry Carmen with Christa Ludwig, Jon Vickers and Justino Diaz.
9 years after these Micaëlas, I heard Cotrubas once more when she returned one final time (years after her opera retirement) for the mammoth 1996 Levine 25th Anniversary Gala throughout which she provided “Meine Lippen sie küssen so heiss” from Lehár’s Giuditta, final sung on the Met in 1960 when Leonie Rysanek provided it at one other gala. Nonetheless, my most well-liked Cotrubas particular Met look occurred on the 1983 Centennial Gala when she sang with signature depth the “Aire de Lia” from Debussy’s L’Enfant Prodigue, the primary time I heard it.
One among Cotrubas’s remaining new roles was Charlotte in Massenet’s Werther which she sang in Vienna in 1990.
The soprano’s industrial opera discography isn’t huge however contains such essential releases because the Carlos Kleiber La Traviata, Carlo Maria Giulini Rigoletto, Claudio Abbado Carmen, Herbert von Karajan Le Nozze di Figaro, Levine Die Zauberflöte, and John Pritchard Hansel und Gretel.
Through the years, nonetheless, I’ve collected a superb variety of Cotrubas dwell audio recordings (together with a Paris Die Fledermaus through which she got here to grief within the Csárdás that I in the end deleted).
Many have been uploaded to YouTube, with three particular ones I’d wish to level out: Euridice in Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice with Julia Hamari and Cuberli, performed by Riccardo Muti, 1976; Konstanze in Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail with Martti Talvela, performed by Lorin Maazel, Salzburg 1980; and Magda in Puccini’s La rondine performed by Bruno Bartoletti, Chicago 1985.
Lastly, I complement the audio recordings I’ve already posted on Parterre with 4 extra: three roles she hardly ever sang (Amina, Nedda and Marguerite) alongside along with her Met Russian Tatyana, a job which some followers could know from an early Covent Backyard Onegin in English.
Bellini: La sonnambula
Amina: Ileana Cotrubas
Lisa: Elizabeth Gale
Teresa: Phyllis Cannan
Elvino: Dennis O’Neill
Rodolfo: Robert Lloyd
Conductor: Manfred Ramin (Cotrubas’s husband)
Royal Opera, Covent Backyard
18 November 1981
Broadcast
Tchaikovsky: Eugene Onegin
Tatyana: Ileana Cotrubas
Olga: Cleopatra Ciurca
Larina: Ariel Bybee
Filippyevna: Batyah Godfrey
Onegin: Leo Nucci
Lenski: Vladimir Popov
Prince Gremin: Sergei Koptchak
Triquet: Anthony Laciura
Conductor: Neeme Järvi
Metropolitan Opera
26 September 1984
In-house recording
Leoncavallo: Pagliacci
Nedda: Ileana Cotrubas
Canio: Plácido Domingo
Tonio: Matteo Manuguerra
Silvio: Wolfgang Schöne
Beppe: Heinz Zednik
Conductor: Adam Fischer
Wiener Staatsoper
6 June 1985
In-house recording
Gounod: Faust
Marguerite: Ileana Cotrubas
Siebel: Rachel Joselson
Marthe: Olive Fredricks
Faust: Neil Shicoff
Mephisto: Ruggero Raimondi
Valentin: Franz Grundheber
Conductor: Alain Lombard
Hamburgische Staatsoper
28 October 1985
In-house recording
