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| Victòria dels Àngels |
Today, The Grandma starts a new English course. This time, she is going to offer an Elementary one.
It's a rainy day after Halloween. Rainy days are the best to listen to opera and because of this The Grandma has decided to read about one of her favourite sopranos of all times, Victòria dels Àngels. She and Maria Callas are, in The Grandma's opinion, the two most beautiful opera voices in history.
It's a rainy day after Halloween. Rainy days are the best to listen to opera and because of this The Grandma has decided to read about one of her favourite sopranos of all times, Victòria dels Àngels. She and Maria Callas are, in The Grandma's opinion, the two most beautiful opera voices in history.
Victòria dels Àngels aka Victória de los Ángeles (1 November 1923-15 January 2005) was a Catalan operatic lyric soprano and recitalist whose career began after the Second World War and reached its height in the years from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s.
She was born Victoria de los Ángeles López García in the porter's lodge of the University of Barcelona to Bernardo Lopez Gómez, a university caretaker, and Victoria García. She studied voice under Dolores Frau and guitar with Graciano Tarragó at the Barcelona Conservatory, graduating in just three years in 1941 at age 18.
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| Victòria dels Àngels |
She died on 15 January 2005 of heart failure in her native Barcelona, aged 81 and was buried in the Montjuïc Cemetery, Barcelona. She had been hospitalised for a bronchial infection since 31 December 2004.
In 1941, while still a student, she made her operatic debut as Mimì in La bohème at the Liceu, afterwards resuming her musical studies. In 1945, she returned to the Liceu to make her professional debut as the Countess in The Marriage of Figaro.
After winning first prize in the Geneva International Music Competition in 1947, she sang Salud in Falla's La vida breve with the BBC in London in 1948. She was accompanied on many of her early recordings by both Graciano Tarragó and his daughter, the guitarist Renata Tarragó.
More information: Victòria dels Àngels Foundation
In her early years in particular, she also sang a lot of florid music. While she later made fewer appearances in opera, she continued to give recitals focusing on mostly French, German Lieder and Spanish art songs or songs with Nahuatl texts by Mexican composer Salvador Moreno Manzano into the 1990s.
In 1949, she made her first appearance in the Paris Opéra as Marguerite. The following year, she made her debut in Salzburg and at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden as Mimì, and in the United States with a recital at Carnegie Hall.
In March 1951, she made her Metropolitan Opera debut in New York as Marguérite, and she went on to sing with the company for ten years. In 1952, she became an instant favourite in Buenos Aires at the Teatro Colón as the title role in Madamme Butterfly. She returned to Buenos Aires many times until 1979. She sang at La Scala in Milan from 1950 to 1956 and, in 1957, she sang at the Vienna State Opera.
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| Victòria dels Àngels in Madamme Butterfly |
After making her debut at the Bayreuth Festival as Elisabeth in Tannhäuser in 1961, she devoted herself principally to a concert career. However, for the next twenty years, she continued to make occasional appearances in one of her favourite operatic roles, Bizet's Carmen.
She was among the first Catalan-born operatic singers to record the complete opera, having done so in 1958 in a recording conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham, using the recitatives added by Ernest Guiraud after Bizet's death.
Though Carmen lay comfortably in her range, she nevertheless also sang major soprano roles, the best known of which were Donna Anna, Manon, Nedda, Desdemona, Cio-Cio-San, Mimi, Violetta and Mélisande.
Victòria Dels Àngels performed regularly in song recitals with pianists Gerald Moore and Geoffrey Parsons, occasionally appearing with other eminent singers, such as Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Her recitals of Catalan and Spanish songs with the pianist Alicia de Larrocha were also legendary. She sang at the Barcelona Olympic Games in 1992, aged 68.
More information: Barcelona Centre Universitary
She made many widely acclaimed recordings, including those of La vida breve, La bohème, Pagliacci, and Madamme Butterfly. The last three paired her with the outstanding tenor Jussi Björling. She was particularly appreciative of Björling's unique talent. In her biography by Peter Roberts, Dels Àngels noted that in despite of technical developments, none of the Jussi Björling recordings give you the true sound of his voice. It was a far, far more beautiful voice than you can hear on the recordings he left.
The government of France named her a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur in 1994.
Her obituary in The Times (UK) noted that she must be counted among the finest singers of the second half of the 20th century. James Hinton, Jr. praised her meltingly lovely middle voice. Elizabeth Forbes, writing in UK's The Independent also noted that It is impossible to imagine a more purely beautiful voice than that of Victoria de los Ángeles at the height of her career in the 1950s and early 1960s.
She was ranked number 3, after Maria Callas and Dame Joan Sutherland, in the BBC Music Magazine 's List of The Top Twenty Sopranos of All Time in 2007.
More information: The Independent
So don't think in reality I am a singer,
I think I am a human being that has sung always all her life,
and has learned a little to sing,
and has found herself in the middle of a career.
Victòria dels Àngels
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