Lucrezia Bori

Lucrezia Bori ( born December 24, 1887 in Valencia as Lucrezia Borja y Gonzales de Riancho, † May 14, 1960 in New York City ) was a Spanish opera singer (soprano ).

Life

Bori studied piano and music theory at the Conservatory of Valencia. In a trip to Italy in 1908 her voice was discovered and she was there singing lessons, among others, Melchiorre Vidal in Milan. In 1908 she made ​​her stage debut as Micaela in Bizet's Carmen at the Teatro Adriano in Rome. Performances at various Italian theaters ( including the Teatro San Carlo in Naples) followed. 1910, she was engaged as Manon Lescaut for a guest performance by the New York Metropolitan Opera in Paris and then engaged at the request of Arturo Toscanini at La Scala. There she made ​​her debut as Carolina in Cimarosa's Il matrimonio segreto and sang Octavian in the Italian premiere of Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier. In the same year, she also debuted at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, should follow to the other guest performances.

On 11 November 1912 she made ​​her debut at New York's Metropolitan Opera in turn in the title role of Puccini's Manon Lescaut as a stage partner of Enrico Caruso. There she sang in the episode numerous leading roles of the Italian repertoire and was praised by critics hymnal. Also in Boston, she was acclaimed as Madama Butterfly stormy.

After to her vocal cords nodules had formed, they had to withdraw from the stage after an unsuccessful operation in 1915. After another operation, long preservation ( she said herself that she was then a year spoke not a word ) and then an intensive study of 1919 she celebrated her comeback at the Opéra de Monte Carlo as Zerlina in Mozart's Don Giovanni.

In 1919, she returned as Mimi back to the side of Beniamino Gigli at the Metropolitan Opera and sang there for another 17 years as a crowd favorite, the great roles of the Italian and French repertoire, including many U.S. premieres (including Così fan tutte, La vida breve, L' heure espagnole and La Rondine ). She also gave guest performances and concerts worldwide. Regularly she was at the Ravinia Festival in Highland Park in Chicago as a guest.

Your farewell stage on March 29, 1936, she celebrated with a gala performance at the Metropolitan Opera, after more than 600 performances in 29 roles at this theater. Bori even sang scenes from Manon and La Traviata, also Kirsten Flagstad, Lauritz Melchior, Elisabeth Rethberg, Ezio Pinza, Rosa Ponselle, Giovanni Martinelli, Lawrence Tibbett and Richard Crooks came to her in honor. After the end of her stage career she was the first woman to the Board of Directors of the New York Met and was chairman of the Association Metropolitan Opera Guild. In concerts she performed a few more years, some sound recordings was followed by her stage farewell.

Although she sang the great roles of verismo in the heyday of this style, her singing style classical models, was arrested, and her rather small and delicate voice differs markedly from that of other verismo divas. The critic Jürgen Kesting sees Lucrezia Boris power is that they are " the nuances, the subtleties, the lyricism of singing familiar in an era in which most divas succumbed to the loud, garish and gross effects ".

Stage roles

(Selection)

  • Georges Bizet: Carmen - Micaela
  • Domenico Cimarosa: Il matrimonio segreto - Carolina
  • Claude Debussy: Pelléas et Mélisande - Melisande
  • Gaetano Donizetti: L' elisir d' amore - Norina
  • Manuel de Falla: La vida breve - Salud
  • Charles Gounod: Roméo et Juliette - Juliette
  • Engelbert Humperdinck: King Children - Goose Girl
  • Ruggero Leoncavallo: Pagliacci - Nedda
  • Franco Leoni: L' Oracolo - Ah - Yoe
  • Carlos Lopez Buchardo: El Sueño d' Alma - Alma ( world premiere)
  • Pietro Mascagni: Iris - Iris
  • Pietro Mascagni: L' amico Fritz - Suzel
  • Jules Massenet: Manon - Manon
  • Italo Montemezzi: L' amore di tre re - Fiora
  • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Così fan tutte - Despina
  • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Don Giovanni - Zerlina
  • Jacques Offenbach: Les Contes d' Hoffmann - Antonia, Giulietta
  • Giacomo Puccini: La Bohème - Mimì
  • Giacomo Puccini: Madama Butterfly - Cio-Cio San
  • Giacomo Puccini: Manon Lescaut - Manon Lescaut
  • Giacomo Puccini: La Rondine - Magda
  • Maurice Ravel: L' Heure espagnole - Concepción
  • Nikolai Rimsky -Korsakov: Snegurochka - Snegurochka
  • Deems Taylor: Peter Ibbetson - Mary ( world premiere)
  • Giuseppe Verdi: Falstaff - Alice Ford
  • Giuseppe Verdi: Rigoletto - Gilda
  • Giuseppe Verdi: La Traviata - Violetta
  • Ermanno Wolf- Ferrari: L' amore medico - Lucinda
  • Ermanno Wolf- Ferrari: Il segreto di Susanna - Susanna

Recordings

  • The Complete Victor Recordings, Volume 1: 1914-1925, Volume 2: 1925-1937 ( Romophone, a total of 4 CDs)
  • Duets with Lawrence Tibbett, Tito Schipa, John McCormack, Beniamino Gigli
  • Mascagni: Iris ( IRCC )
Manon Lescaut (Puccini) Highland Park (Illinois) Carlos López Buchardo Iris (opera) L'heure espagnole Falstaff (opera) John McCormack (Tenor) Integrated Authority File
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