Duprez, Gilbert(-Louis)

(b Paris, 6 Dec 1806; d Paris, 23 Sept 1896). French tenor and composer. He sang as a treble in Fétis's incidental music to Racine's Athalie at the Comédie-Française, and later studied with Choron. His début at the Odéon (Il barbiere di Siviglia, 1825) and the première of his opera La cabane du pêcheur at Versailles the next year met with mixed success; he continued his studies in Italy after the Odéon closed in 1828. He soon distinguished himself as a tenore di grazia, but revealed his gifts as a dramatic tenor in Bellini’s Il pirata at Turin in 1831. In the service of the impresario Alessandro Lanari, he enjoyed an almost uninterrupted run of successes in leading romantic roles, beginning with Arnold in the Italian première of Guillaume Tell (1831, Lucca), where he was the first tenor to sing the top high C as a chest note. Duprez scored a triumph as Percy in Donizetti’s Anna Bolena in Florence in 1831 (repeating his success at his first appearance in Rome in 1834), before going on to create further Donizetti roles there – Ugo in Parisina (1833) and Henry II in Rosmonda d’Inghilterra (1834). The highlight of his stay in Italy was perhaps his creation of Edgardo in Lucia di Lammermoor (1835, Naples); apparently he advised his close friend Donizetti on the structure and composition of the last scene. With the interpretation of these roles his voice became progressively darker.

Returning to France, he was engaged at the Opéra, where he made his début in Guillaume Tell (1837), achieving immediate and overwhelming success with Paris audiences. His ‘chest’ C, in spite of the disappointment of Rossini, who compared it to ‘the squawk of a capon with its throat cut’, aroused wild enthusiasm and affected the taste of the public, who would listen to Guillaume Tell only when Duprez was singing. He created leading roles in Halévy’s Guido e Ginevra (1838), La reine de Chypre (1841) and Charles VI (1843), Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini (1838), Auber’s Le lac des fées (1839), Donizetti’s Les martyrs (1840), La favorite (1840) and Dom Sébastien (1843) and Verdi’s Jérusalem (I Lombardi) (1847), and established himself as Nourrit’s successor in Robert le diable, Les Huguenots, La Juive and La muette de Portici. He also sang in London (1844–5, Lucia) and toured Germany (1850). He taught at the Paris Conservatoire (1842–50) and in 1853 founded his Ecole Spéciale de Chant; during this time his own operas were being staged in Paris.

According to Scudo, Duprez was already outstanding as a student for the breadth and incisiveness of his phrasing, though his voice then was not large. Gradually he became the first great tenore di forza, despite a vocal tessitura limited in its lower range (as shown in his refusal to sing Pollione in Norma at Rome in 1834). In France he was praised as the first true Romantic tenor and for his excellent declamation and the smoothness of his canto spianato; but his acting style was said to be exaggerated. Presumably through forcing his voice, and also because of the great number of performances he gave during his years in Italy where he had to sing as many as six times a week, a decline set in early; Berlioz greatly admired him in the vigorous music of Benvenuto Cellini in 1838, though noting (Mémoires) that his voice had coarsened somewhat. The story of the famous tenor’s rise and fall in Les soirées de l’orchestre is largely based on Duprez’s career. He composed a number of operas and his writings include L’art du chant (1845) and Souvenirs d’un chanteur (1880), a valuable account of his times and distinguished contemporaries.

In 1827 he married Alexandrine Duperron (d 1872), a soprano who made her début at the Odéon that same year. She had a reasonably successful career, often singing with her husband during the Italian period. Her repertory included Imogene in Il pirata (1831, Turin) and Adalgisa (1834, Rome), a role in which she was warmly applauded. She retired from the stage about 1837. Their daughter Caroline (b Florence, 10 April 1832; d Pau, 17 April 1875) was a soprano leggero who also sang with her father, appearing in Paris and other French cities and (1851) in London; she created a number of roles at the Opéra-Comique.

WORKS

operas

other works

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BerliozM

ES (R. Celletti)

A. Elwart: Duprez: sa vie artistique, avec une biographie authentique de son maître Alexandre Choron (Paris, 1838)

L. and M. Escudier: Etudes biographiques sur les chanteurs contemporains (Paris, 1840)

E. Devrient: Galerie des artistes dramatiques de Paris (Paris, 1840–42)

H. Berlioz: Les soirées de l’orchestre (Paris, 1852/R, 5/1895; Eng. trans., 1956/R, 2/1973); ed. L. Guichard (Paris, 1968)

P. Scudo: Critique et littérature musicales, ii (Paris, 1859)

N. Desarbres: Deux siècles à l’Opéra (Paris, 1868)

Jarro [G. Piccinni]: Memorie d’un impresario fiorentino (Florence, 1892)

U. Morini: La Reale Accademia degli immobili ed il suo teatro ‘La Pergola’ (1649–1926) (Pisa, 1926)

G. Monaldi: Cantanti celebri (Rome, 1929)

G. Landini: ‘Gilbert-Louis Duprez ovvero l’importanza di cantar Rossini’, Bollettino del Centro rossiniano di studi (1982), 1–3, 29

J. Rosselli: The Opera Industry in Italy from Cimarosa to Verdi (Cambridge, 1984)

R. Celletti: Voce di tenore (Milan, 1989)

S. Corti: Edizione critica delle lettere del tenore G.L. Duprez nell’archivio dell’impresario teatrale Alessandro Lanari presso la Biblioteca nazionale di Firenze (diss., U. of Pisa, 1991)

M. Beghelli: ‘Il “Do di petto”: dissacrazione di un mito’, Il jaggiatore musicale, iii (1996), 105–49

SANDRO CORTI