Félia Litvinne
Born: October 11, 1860; St. Petersburg, Russia
Died: October 12, 1936; Paris, France
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Félia Vasilyevna Litvinne (born Françoise Jeanne Schütz) was one of the great opera singers of the decades before and after 1900. A dramatic soprano, her powerful voice was nevertheless flexible, her musical style was passionately expressive, and she had, by eyewitness accounts, remarkable stage presence.
In addition, she was an outstanding linguist. This may be because of her heritage and upbringing: she was raised in Russia but her
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Composers
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Berlioz, Hector (1)
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Bizet, Georges (1)
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Donizetti, Gaetano (1)
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Fauré, Gabriel (1)
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Gounod, Charles (2)
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Hahn, Reynaldo (1)
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Mascagni, Pietro (1)
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Massenet, Jules (2)
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Meyerbeer, Giacomo (1)
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Nápravník, Eduard (1)
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Rubinstein, Anton (1)
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Saint-Saëns, Camille (1)
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Schumann, Robert (1)
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Verdi, Giuseppe (1)
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Wagner, Richard (3)
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Biography |
by Joseph Stevenson
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Félia Vasilyevna Litvinne (born Françoise Jeanne Schütz) was one of the great opera singers of the decades before and after 1900. A dramatic soprano, her powerful voice was nevertheless flexible, her musical style was passionately expressive, and she had, by eyewitness accounts, remarkable stage presence.
In addition, she was an outstanding linguist. This may be because of her heritage and upbringing: she was raised in Russia but her parents were a German-descended father and a French-Canadian mother. In those days when the leading cast members in an opera might sing a part in his or her own native language, Litvinne would switch to whichever language her colleague of the moment was using.
She was a student of Victor Maurel and Pauline Viardot in Paris. She made her debut there at the age of 23 as Amelia in Verdi's Simon Boccanegra. She quickly become one of the favored exponents of heroic Verdi and Wagner soprano roles. She sang Brünnhilde in 1887 at La Monnaie in Brussels, the first production of Wagner's Die Walküre in French. She appeared in the leading European opera houses, including La Scala of Milan, La Fenice in Venice, and the Opéra of Paris. Beginning in 1890 she was a regular at the Imperial Theaters in Moscow and St. Petersburg, where she sang Russian opera in addition to her standard European repertory.
Her Metropolitan Opera debut was as Valentine in Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots in 1896. She became a favorite in New York, where her roles included Verdi's Aida, Donna Anna in Mozart's Don Giovanni, Sélika in Meyerbeer's L'Africaine, and Brünnhilde in Wagner's Siegfried. Her debut at Covent Garden in London was in another great Wagnerian role, Isolde in Tristan und Isolde. She sang in London regularly until 1910, with Brünnhilde of Götterdämmerung as her farewell.
She became known as one of the great Brünnhildes, singing it several times in complete Ring cycles in Russia between 1899 and 1915, and participated in the belated French premieres of both Tristan and Götterdämmerung in 1902 conducted by Alfred Cortot.
She left several recordings made in the first decade of the twentieth century, several of which have Cortot as her pianist. She was the author of a memoir, My Life and My Art. |
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