Recovering the Forgotten Singer is OperaPost’s series devoted to those artists once much admired and now rarely recalled. Some were stars in their time; others left their mark all too fleetingly. Their recorded legacy calls on us to remember them here.
The French lyric tenor of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, his elegant phrasing manifest, was there to serve his contemporary French composers, whether Délibes, Lalo, Reyer, or the most successful of all, Jules Massenet. Among the era’s notable interpreters was Louis Cazette. As you will hear, his full, honeyed sound and affinity for the text succeed in overcoming the sonic limitations of the acoustic recordings of the time. An attentive listener will capture the ease with which he encompasses the dynamic and dramatic ranges of the arias and song linked to this post.
Born in 1887, Cazette graduated from the Paris Conservatoire in 1914. He served in the military for the duration of World War I. Upon his discharge in 1919 he was engaged by the Opéra-Comique. He soon took on the tenor leads of Così fan tutte, Madama Butterfly, and of French opera of the core repertoire—Mignon, Mireille, Lakmé—to much acclaim. Alas, in April 1922, days after he sang Don Ottavio in Don Giovanni, Cazette died tragically of tetanus, contracted during a rehearsal: he had been accidently stabbed in the foot with a rusty trident.
A month earlier, Cazette had put his stamp on one of the richest roles of the canon, le Chevalier Des Grieux in Massenet’s Manon. Many tenors have performed Des Grieux’s two arias exquisitely but perhaps none more so than Louis Cazette. In “En fermant les yeux (In shutting my eyes),” also known as “Le Rêve (The Dream),” Des Grieux recounts that, while walking, he had dreamt of the couple’s happy future together. Here Cazette unfurls his exemplary voix mixte, often defined as an amalgam of the closed chest voice and the open head voice. Tenors who conquer the technique deploy the voix mixte to avoid the falsetto when singing softly in the upper register.
The second aria, “Ah ! fuyez, douce image (Ah ! begone sweet vision)” makes challenging vocal demands on the singer. Betrayed by the faithless Manon, Des Grieux is about to take his vows in the church of Saint Sulpice. With top notes now marked forte, he prays that love be stricken from his heart. Though primarily a lyric tenor, Cazette is undaunted by the strenuous climax.
Concert pianist and composer Enrico Toselli is remembered for his lilting song, “Serenata,” a favorite of tenors and a congenial vehicle for Cazette.
Cazette’s eleven record sides, accessible on Youtube, document a flourishing career brutally truncated first by war and then by misfortune.