Paris mourns a modernist singer
RIPThe Opéra national de Paris has announced the death on February 19th of the French mezzo-soprano Anna Ringart. She was 86.
After studies in Germany and Italy, she sang in Lübeck, Düsseldorf and Hamburg before Rolf Liebermann recruited her to the Paris Opera where she sang 17 years.
Among many highlights she sang under Georg Solti in Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron and under Boulez in Erwartung and Lulu. In 1999 she was appointed director of the Lyric Training Centre of the Paris Opera.
I thought she was really rather good and certainly very useful to the Palais Garnier.
But I remember an appalling evening in 1976 when she was at the receiving end of a cabal after a performance of Forza.
It was unmerited, cruel and just plain nasty.
Many of us tried to out shout the people booing but they were forceful.
The distaste of that evening never left me.
When the booing is that forceful and unrelenting it suggests a claque is in operation, as they are in many major opera houses. At Garnier I heard some trying to boo a leading soprano just a few years ago in Iphigenie simply when she caught a bit of mucus on one note. They were clearly waiting to pounce on something.