Death by soprano Rachel Yakar, grande dame de la musique baroque

2023-06-28 11:36:56

There was a time when her name sounded like the open sesame of a new era, that of a baroque repertoire which she made her honey; a time when this Mozartian was the muse of Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Jean-Pierre Ponnelle: the French soprano Rachel Yakar died on Saturday June 24, in La Rochelle, at the age of 87.

It was on the German stages that the lyrical soprano, born in Lyon on March 3, 1936, for a time attracted by the fine arts (drawing, painting, fashion), provided the musical education from which she benefited at the National Conservatory of music of Paris as well as with Germaine Lubin, also mentor of Régine Crespin or Nadine Denize. After making her debut in Strasbourg in 1963, Rachel Yakar joined the troupe of the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf-Duisburg (Germany) the following year.

For more than two decades, the young woman broke with the repertoire, navigating from Verdi (Gilda in Rigoletto) in Offenbach (Antonia des Contes d’Hoffmann), by Puccini (Liu de Turandot or Mimi from Bohemian) to Mozart (the Countess of night of Figaro), without forgetting Richard Strauss – the Marshal of the rose knight and especially Arabella –, Marguerite du Faust by Gounod, Anne in The Rake’s Progress, of Stravinsky, roles that she will perform throughout Europe.

Nobility of phrasing

This is the case of Don Giovanni by Mozart (Donna Elvira) sung in Munich then at the Glyndebourne Festival, where she made her debut, in 1977. Paris and the Palais Garnier discovered her at the dawn of the 1970s – Rigoletto of Verdi then in Micaela in the Carmen by Bizet. Ten years later, Rachel Yakar will offer them the first opera by Janacek ever staged on the Parisian opera scene, with the title role of Jenufa in French version (1981).

Read also: Leos Janacek, the wild orchestration of the voice

The soprano is finally a prophetess in her country. Besides Mozart and the perilous register of virtuosity with Celia in pike chairor the stunning Fiordiligi of So do all (the first Mozart of the Da Ponte trilogy on historical instruments in 1985, recorded at the Drottningholm Festival, in Sweden), she is essential in French opera, Mélisande Idéal by Debussy in Pelleas at the end of the 1970s (immortalized under the baton of Armin Jordan for Erato), or in the Poulenc des Dialogues of the Carmeliteswhere Madame Lidoine, of great probity, radiates humanity.

If she ventured between 1975 and 1976 in Bayreuth, called by the Freia of Ring of the centenary, by Pierre Boulez and Patrice Chéreau, Gerhilde in The Valkyrie or one of the flower girls of Parsifal, it is in baroque music that the musician inscribes an indelible imprint. Nobility of phrasing, prosodic art and charismatic presence: in 1975, Rachel Yakar imposed an ardent, sensual and pure Poppea in The Coronation of Poppea staged by the Harnoncourt-Ponnelle duo at the Zurich Opera, a collaboration that she will find again in Salzburg for Mozart.

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