It’s a pleasure to share this divine interpretation, provided to me by longtime friend and music critic Stephen Mudge, revealing the beloved Arleen Augér at the summit of her capacities, and which pretty well captures the Arleen that I knew, a woman of refined taste and restraint, rigorous in her artistic choices, demonstrating her sheer will in the most exacting musical styles, yet with a human, slightly mature sheen that shimmered warmly quite like no other voice. I knew her only in the last years, at the moment in which she seemed to enjoy an incredible surge of well-deserved popularity in London. Four productions brought us together, the first being her exquisite Poppea in Richard Hickox’s ‘l’Incoronazione di Poppea’ onstage in London, as well as the famous CD album of the same which we made for Virgin Records; but of course there were her soaring and seemingly effortless top lines in our quartet in Beethoven’s 9th Symphony during several concerts in Italy and the Decca CD made in London with Christopher Hogwood and the Academy of Ancient Music; then a series of concerts at the Queen Elizabeth Hall of Bach’s ‘Christmas Oratorio’ where we shared those tricky bass/soprano duos. The last collaboration was a coproduction with the Theaters of Geneva/Paris Châtelet where she assumed the title role of Handel’s ‘Alcina,’ which was filmed and circulates on Youtube.
One recalls a disciplined professional, who, like the finest I’ve known from her generation, possessed a very clear idea from the first rehearsal of the phrasing and the adequate interpretation of each piece she chose to sing. Her consciousness of excellent vocal technique was clear on and off stage. I recall more than once seeing the artist, seated in the corner of a church or a theater, softly doing vocal warm-up scales that required octave leaps, ‘bouche fermée.’ Seeing this was like watching a professional seamstress of another time carefully threading a needle (an idiom I also recall from the great Gérard Souzay), and then, as if pulling upwards the thread from the embroidery work, with equal care every time for gentle and conscious full extension to the top before proceeding to the next stitch. She repeated this, humming from each note over at least an octave, which in the end of course covered two octaves with perfectly equal registration.
Arleen was always pleasant to me, a fellow American whose careers were largely abroad, warmly outgoing with her beautiful and gracious smile, and cautious for her colleagues’ wellbeing. Funnily, when we rehearsed the Bach duos, she was actually afraid her voice might be too sheer or transparent alongside mine. Twice she asked me in confidence if I could be aware to not cover her, which of course I tried to oblige in the concerts. I’ve been told it worked fine in the hall. However there is no disputing that her voice was ample and carried beautifully in the house. I heard many rehearsals of ‘Alcina’ from the audience side and can confirm the impact of the vocally demanding ‘accompagnato’ scenes, which require alternating anger with seductive charm, and they came across effectively every time. This is all the more admirable as the orchestra in Geneva was playing at modern pitch, whereas she had already recorded the opera one half step lower, the year before. Believe me, the tessitura change makes a big difference, and she might well have been more comfortable in the lower version. And then of course, we learned during that production that Arleen was undergoing chemotherapy for the disease that would progressively end her life. She never publicly revealed the problem at any time during those last performances, and her force and courage were for me doubly appreciable in view of what she was going through at that time.
Just as the famous love duet “Pur ti miro” in ‘l’Incoronatione di Poppea’ with the divinely inspired Della Jones was an unforgettable moment of climax and sensuous delicacy, the scenes in ‘Alcina’ with Della as Ruggiero were moving and dramatically masterful, and musically an enchantment. Descending slowly that grand staircase at the enormous Châtelet Theater, in that charming da capo entrance aria “Di’, cor mio, quanto t’amai,” graceful and visually stunning as if from another era, from another magical world, and while seeming to glow from within, Arleen was dressed in her ravishing pale blue satin gown, and this is how I will continue to remember her: a defiant woman, and gloriously alive.