On October 6, 2018, Montserrat Caballé died in Barcelona where she was born on April 12, 1933. Her heavenly voice had been silent for several years already, but fortunately her many recordings, including some forty complete operas, bear witness to her talent, that delightful voice and her unique style that found the right balance between bel canto and dramatic tension.
Montserrat Caballé grew up in a modest family. Her mother recognized her talent fairly early on, and a patron made it possible for her to study at the Liceo in Barcelona. The start of her professional career did not go smoothly, and she got her first serious chances in 1956 at the Basel opera house where she sang such disparate roles as Richard Strauss's "Salome", Renata in Prokofiev's "The Fiery Angel" and Cleopatra in Handel's "Giulio Cesare".
Later, Caballé would admit that this had actually been an excellent training ground, since you absolutely had to have good vocal health to sing Verdi's Aida one evening and Mozart's Pamina the next. From that period, she retained her love for operas by Mozart and Richard Strauss, a repertoire that she subsequently, much to her regret, performed scarcely. For on April 20, 1965, she achieved her great breakthrough when she stepped in for the ailing Marilyn Horne in a concert performance of Donizetti's "Lucrezia Borgia" at Carnegie Hall in New York and established her reputation as one of the great bel canto performers of the post-Callas period. After her first aria, the audience gave her a twenty-minute ovation, and at the end of the performance her world career began, which took her to all the major stages of the world. Thanks to her exceptional technique with which she could achieve dynamic nuances and coloraturas, could color tone, and could play light and shadow in long-spun melodic lines, she stood in a class of her own. And then there were those heavenly pianissimi.
She initially excelled especially in the Bellini, Donizetti and Rossini repertoire, but allowed her velvet timbre to also flourish in the operas of Verdi and Puccini and many other composers, and did not shy away from discovering little-known scores. She was not a great actress, not a "singing-actress" as Callas had been, but she had presence and authority on stage and knew how to support the majestic serenity of her vocal interpretation with few gestures. Her long career reached a peak in the mid-seventies. Then she began to add roles to her repertoire such as Puccini's Turandot, which were not particularly conducive to her unique "vocalità". Yet she would remain active for a long time to come, gave concerts and recitals (a few even with her daughter, also a soprano) and occasionally still appeared on the opera scene in character roles such as the Duchesse de Crakentorp in Donizetti's "La Fille du Régiment" with which she made the audience of the Vienna State Opera roar with laughter.
I was privileged to admire Montserrat Caballé in many of her brilliant roles and interviewed her a couple of times. On these occasions she proved to be a warm, affectionate woman who knew her worth but who also kept both feet on the ground, assumed no extra diva airs and remained humble.
That the media primarily remember her in a duet with Freddie Mercury, among others at the 1992 Olympic Games, is telling of our times!
Let us enjoy what the admirable diva Montserrat Caballé gave the world with a recording for her own people, one of numerous recordings which you can find, among others, on YouTube.
- WHAT: In Memoriam Montserrat Caballé
- PHOTO: Reuters
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YzuvVRis9Q[/embed]