Edita Gruberová died Monday in Zurich, Switzerland, at the age of 74. She was the absolute diva of the last quarter of the XXe century, whose early career accompanied the last fires of orchestral conducting legends: Böhm, Karajan, Solti.
“Edita, your voice is a gift. “Such was the inscription of a banner waved by part of the public on the balcony of the Festival House in Baden-Baden in 2013.” The scene was almost surreal, “recalls our colleague fromOpera Magazine Laurent Barthel, with whom we were conversing on the phone when the news of the disappearance of Edita Gruberová fell, “because that evening, she had sung very poorly! It is true that in 2013, Edita Gruberová already had 45 years of career behind her and was not the type to want to stop.
“This way of occupying the land despite the ravages of time never ceases to intrigue. Corn […] the public follows, continues to congregate in endless queues as soon as an appearance of the diva is announced, for a concert or an opera which will invariably be sold out, ”wrote Laurent Barthel in his commentary on the concert. , before concluding: “Undoubtedly, the Gruberová phenomenon is to be taken for what it is: emotional or even societal, no doubt more today than artistic. “
In place of a Montrealer
Edita Gruberová had won hearts and put musical Europe, especially the Germanic sphere, at its feet. We experienced this adulation in the early 1980s in Vienna. You had to start lining up in the early morning to snatch a ticket to see the city’s darling child at the opera house. It was Herbert von Karajan who, in 1970, had spotted in the opera troupe the soprano who had come from Bratislava with his mother a year earlier. Ironically, the evening that extirpated Edita Gruberová from anonymity in the role of Queen of the Night had to be that of a Montreal soprano, Louise Lebrun, for whom she was the understudy.
Very sure highs, powerful voice, Gruberová was the essential night queen of the 1970s. France Musique tells us that she sang this role 148 times in her career.
After Karajan, Karl Böhm did not let it pass and saw the Zerbinetta (Ariadne in Naxos) of his dreams, the one his friend Strauss himself would have liked to hear. A performance from 1976 released on CD by Orfeo brings together Gundula Janowitz, Edita Gruberová and Agnès Baltsa: we can’t even imagine better. Böhm also hired him as Constance in Abduction from the Seraglio by Mozart with a recording and a video. The voice was then unreal of purity and assurance. Viennese will fight to see its premiere Traviata, which she will record later with Carlo Rizzi.
One hour of applause
Gruberová then evolved into bel canto, notably the great queens of Donizetti. She had previously made a triumph in Lucia di Lammermoor. Queen Elisabetta in Roberto Devereux was the role she played again in March 2019 for farewell to the stage in Munich, collecting according to the testimony of the Frankfurter Allmeine Zeitung nearly an hour of applause! The singer put an end to her career in September 2020.
By the physical impact of her voice, Edita Gruberová, nicknamed “the queen of coloratura sopranos”, gave the chills as could get in the 1960s, in another register, Birgit Nilsson or Leonie Rysanek.
Alongside the stage, Edita Gruberová was the solo soprano of countless recordings of sacred vocal works, notably under the direction of the great baroque conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt, of whom she was a faithful among the faithful.
His discography is thus full of references making immortal the one for which singing was, in his childhood, with his mother, the means of escaping the harsh Slovak reality and the grip of an alcoholic father.
Evoking this difficult youth alongside her mother to whom she was so close, Edita Gruberová wrote in her biography: “Through singing, we have aired our souls. »When they left for Vienna in 1969, they did not know how much Edita was going to breathe life into the lives of generations of lyrical art lovers.