Inimitable

In 2018, operatic diva and UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador Montserrat Caballe celebrated her 85th birthday. As tradition requires, the greatest soprano of our time celebrated the anniversary under theatrical lights and to a round of unceasing applause from the audience. In June, Caballe visited Moscow and gave a concert at the Kremlin Palace. Four months later, the brilliant opera singer passed away.

A Dream Come True

Maria de Montserrat Viviana Concepción Caballe i Folch… That was the name given to a girl born to a poor working-class Spanish family in 1933. Her mother decided to name her after the Saint Mary of Montserrat. Shortly, the world will welcome the inimitable Montserrat Caballe, a singer with an extremely wide voice range, brilliant performance technique and strong character.

The girl fell for music already when she was a child. She heard opera for the first time when she was seven, and she remembered that experience for the rest of her life: Montserrat was so overwhelmed by the death of Madama Butterfly that she cried all the way home from theater, and later she memorized the whole aria by heart and sang it to her parents. Since then, she could spend hours listening to opera records. However, the dream to get onstage seemed feasible only to Montserrat herself; she would say to her mother: “Wait a little bit, the day will come, I will become famous and we will have everything!”

Meanwhile, the family barely made ends meet. The girl studied in a lyceum, but started to work at a weaving factory and later at a shop and a tailor workshop to help her family. She also took lessons in French and Italian. Montserrat could sing only to her family and neighborhood for the rest of her life, but the happy occurrence changed it all.

The Bertrand couple, owners of the Teatre del Liceu, set up an audition in search of new talents. Montserrat performed several arias and Spanish folk songs, and left no doubts that she would definitely become a star.

Bertrand family helped Montserrat enroll at the Conservatory, paying for all her expenses. Moreover, the philanthropists used their influence to help Montserrat’s younger brother receive a good education and found a new job for her father.

For four years, she studied at the Conservatory in the class of Eugenia Kemeny, a Hungarian singer who invented her own breathing technique that helped Caballe retain her unique voice to old age. Having received the highest score at the final exams, Montserrat Caballe begins a professional career.

Best Venues of the World

She made her debut on November 17, 1956, when she performed an aria of Mimi from La Boheme on the stage of a small but famous Basel Opera. The performance was a great success, and the young singer started to receive invitation from other European cities: Milan, Vienna, Lisbon, and her native Barcelona. Montserrat mastered the musical language of romantic, classical and baroque operas. However, her favorites were the works of Bellini and Donizetti, masters of bel canto style that fully reveals all the power and beauty of her voice.

The singer quickly became famous in opera circles, but real world fame came to Montserrat only nine years later. She was invited to replace Marilyn Horne, an opera diva who suddenly fell ill, at Carnegie Hall in the USA. Caballe sang the part of Lucrezia Borgia in the eponymous opera, and the public gave her a half-hour ovation. That night, a phone rang in the hotel room where the Spanish singer was staying. Some lady said in Italian: “I am Marilyn Horne. I listened to you. Secretly. I’m glad I lost my voice that day. I never sang and never will sing Lucrezia Borgia like you did. You will become the best singer in the world.” The next morning, the New York Times front page appeared with a headline: “Callas + Tebaldi = Caballe”.

And since that time, another name was added to the list of world’s greatest opera singers that included Renata Tebaldi and Maria Callas. Callas was called “divine”, Tebaldi earned the title of “gorgeous”, and Cabelle became known as the “inimitable”.

Vocal Experiments

Montserrat Caballe starred at global opera venues, but was always a supporter of experiments and keenly tried herself in various projects. In 1987, Caballe together with rock star Freddie Mercury, leader of The Queen band, recorded an album Barcelona, which included the hit under the same name. It became the anthem of not only the 1992 Olympic Games, but of the entire autonomous community of Spain. During the opening ceremony of the Olympics, the song was to be performed by Mercury and Caballe, but Freddie’s death in 1991 did not let that happen. Montserrat Caballe sang live on stage, while Mercury sang his part on the screen stretched on the wall of the hall. The song broke all chart records across the globe and became one of the most famous hits of the century.

The opera diva continued to collaborate with rock and pop musicians. Caballe recorded an album with a a Swiss band Gotthard, performed together with Italian pop singer Al Bano in Milan, and recorded songs with Vangelis, one of the pioneers of the New Age electronic music.

The creative life of Montserrat Caballe was incredibly fruitful. She worked with orchestras led by celebrity conductors, and her stage partners were the best tenors of the world; she performed not only at opera venues, but also in the State Kremlin Palace, the White House in the USA, in the UN General Assembly hall and in the Great Hall of the People in China. The singer’s repertoire consisted of 130 operas, she made over a hundred records and won the Grammy Award for the best performance of a vocal classical solo. As Montserrat Caballe herself said about her creative life, “I have an amazing, brilliant singing career. I am sure that with my help, people learnt about real music, and this confidence gives me absolute satisfaction that an artist can only dream of.”

А.Shlomina