Régine Crespin

Régine Crespin (23 February 1927 – 5 July 2007) was a French singer who had a major international career in opera and on the concert stage between 1950 and 1989. She started her career singing roles in the dramatic soprano and spinto soprano repertoire, drawing particular acclaim singing Wagner and Strauss heroines. She went on to sing a wider repertoire that embraced Italian, French, German, and Russian opera from a variety of musical periods. In the early 1970s Crespin began experiencing vocal difficulties for the first time and ultimately began performing roles from the mezzo-soprano repertoire. Throughout her career she was widely admired for the elegance, warmth and subtlety of her singing, especially in the French and German operatic repertories.

Crespin began her career in France, earning her first critical successes in the French provinces during the early 1950s and then becoming a fixture at the Opéra National de Paris in the mid-1950s. Her international career was launched in 1958 with a critically acclaimed performance of Kundry in Richard Wagner's Parsifal at the Bayreuth Festival. She soon appeared at most of the major opera houses in the United States and Europe and also made a number of appearances in South America. She had a long and fruitful association with the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, making over 125 appearances at that house between 1962 and 1987. Crespin retired from the stage in 1989, after which she taught singing for many years at her alma mater, the Conservatoire de Paris, and gave numerous acclaimed master classes at conservatories and universities internationally.

In recognition of Crespin's artistry as a singer, the Marguerite Long–Jacques Thibaud Competition, which had been restricted to pianists and violinists, was expanded in 2011 to include singers, and renamed the Long-Thibaud-Crespin Competition.

Crespin was born in Marseille in 1927. She moved to Nîmes with her family at the age of five and her parents Henri and Margherita opened a large shoe store in that city, which they ran for many years. Crespin's childhood was not an easy one, being affected both by growing up during World War II and her mother's alcoholism. She initially intended to be a pharmacist but was prevented in pursuing this path after failing to pass her Baccalauréat at the age of 16. Up to this point her father had not allowed her to study singing. However, as her career path was limited by the exam results he finally allowed her to start taking lessons for purely pragmatic reasons. She went on to win first prize in a singing competition a few years later, and, at the age of nineteen, she went to Paris to study at the Conservatoire de Paris in the classes of Suzanne Cesbon-Viseur, Paul Cabanel and Georges Jouatte. Four years later, in 1950, she was awarded first prize in the school's onstage competitions for opera and opéra comique and second prize in the school's singing competition. Traditionally past winners of Conservatoire's competitions were offered performance contracts with the Opéra National de Paris, but Crespin was for some unknown reason not offered one. This created a somewhat tenuous relationship between Crespin and her country's musical establishment which extended into the early portion of her career. ...

Source: Article "Régine Crespin" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.