On April 15, beloved Spanish soprano Victoria de los Angeles passed away in Barcelona, Spain. Her body was brought promptly to the Catalonian Regional Palace, where it lay in state for a viewing. A family spokesperson said the singer had been admitted to the city’s Teknon Clinic on Dec. 31 with heart and respiratory problems and lapsed into a coma shortly afterward.
Colleagues were quick to express their sorrow, and their admiration for the soprano. Peruvian tenor Juan Diego Florez was “very sad” about the death of a singer who had one of the “most beautiful voices in Spain,” said Madrid’s leading daily newspaper, El País. Mezzo-soprano and fellow Spaniard Teresa Berganza also spoke to the press of her grief over the death of the diva, noting in the French newspaper Le Monde that an epoch of song has now disappeared.
De los Angeles received her education at Barcelona’s Liceu Conservatory, and in 1945, began her operatic career at the same city’s Gran Teatro de Liceu, as the Countess in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. Four years later, she was singing at l’Opéra in Paris, where she made her debut as Marguerite in Gounod’s Faust. The next year she sang Mimi in La bohème at Covent Garden, and made the first of many appearances at La Scala, singing the title role in Ariadne auf Naxos.
Also in 1950, she took New York by storm with a sold-out Carnegie Hall recital, followed by more concertizing. In early 1951, she made an extremely well-received Metropolitan Opera debut, as Marguerite.
For the next 10 years, de los Angeles sang regularly on the international circuit. In 1961, she made her first Bayreuth appearance, as Elizabeth in Wagner’s Tannhäuser. Besides the roles mentioned above, her wide ranging repertoire included Massenet’s Manon, Bizet’s Carmen, Violetta in Verdi’s La traviata, Desdemona in the same composer’s <i.Otello and Cio-Cio San in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly.
During the 1960s, de los Angeles began to devote more of her energy to concerts and less to operatic appearances. She was an extremely popular recitalist who frequently sang in French and German as well as her native language. She was famous for closing her programs with Spanish songs, which she accompanied expertly on the guitar. Her tours often circled the globe and she performed not just in Europe and the Americas, but also in South Africa, Asia and Australia.
Thankfully, de los Angeles has left us many complete opera recordings. La bohème, Faust, Manon, La traviata, and Carmen are currently available. Several of her recital CDs are also extant. Most of them are devoted to Spanish songs, but one features her with Elizabeth Schwarzkopf and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in a more varied program.
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