Death of Béatrice Uria-Monzon, Carmen orphaned by her modernity

It would be unfair to reduce Béatrice Uria-Monzon to her Carmen, even though she has sung it hundreds of times. Because going in just a few years from Cherubino, from The Marriage of Figaro, a Mozartian mezzo, to Tosca, the singer character in Puccini's opera of the same name, requiring a dramatic soprano voice, is far more impressive. The fact remains that Bizet's gypsy remains, if we are to believe the statistics, the most popular heroine in the history of opera, and the native of Agen did not just embody her. She reinvented her, taking her out of folklore and the cliché of the sensual wolf to make her a free woman who wants to reshuffle the cards of love, impose more intelligence and wisdom in the relationships between men and women, and who dies for it. This was all to her credit and a little disturbing; the sumptuousness of her burning brunette timbre, from the insolently fleshy midrange to the high notes radiating harmonics, not excusing the affected diction, the not always stable intonation, and the liberties with the meter which still tainted her interpretation at the Théâtre Antique d'Orange in 1998. Defects which she would eventually erase while gaining the low notes which she lacked. Her Carmen was therefore a work in progress, as the Anglo-Saxons say. She "searched" for it all her life.

Beatrice Uria-Monzon also tried her hand at dozens of other roles, from Princess Eboli in Verdi's Don Carlo to Adalgisa in N