On Stage, Off Stage: A Memoir, by Régine Crespin. Translated by G. S. Bourdain. 1997, Northeastern Univ. Press. 289 pp., 51 photos, discography, list of roles and significant performances, index. Hardcover BK #5  Orig. US$29.95, NOW US$24.95 William Albright, reviewing in The Opera Quarterly "Régine Crespin has been acclaimed and even beloved around the world in a wide variety of roles: Wagner's Kundry, Sieglinde, and Walküre Brünnhilde; Puccini's Tosca; Berlioz's Cassandre and Didon; Poulenc's First and Second Prioresses; Bizet's Carmen; Massenet's Charlotte; Gluck's Iphigénie; Faure's Pénélope; Tchaikovsky's Pique Dame Countess; even Offenbach's Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein. One of her greatest portrayals was that of the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier, and readers of her delightful and moving memoir will finish the book well aware of why she was so marvelous in the part. Cut from the same priceless cloth, Crespin and Strauss's Marie Thérèse are irresistible women who radiate passion, charm, wisdom, humor, nobility, sentiment, grace, good sense, and indomitable resilience. "On Stage, Off Stage is dedicated to and opens with a fond salute to Crespin's Italian-born maternal grandmother, who was invariably referred to by her maiden name, Mannolini. Hosting her adoring grandchild every summer in Marseilles, Mannolini cooked like a dream and 'sang—off-key as a soldering iron but at the top of her voice —all the time,' and it is from her that the diva inherited a love of song and good food. "Encouraged by her piano teacher, Crespin began taking singing lessons at age sixteen from Madame Kossa (we are never given a first name), a retired opera singer who initially discouraged the girl, declaring that she had a chest but no voice and would never be a singer. After a three-month trial period of instruction that focused on the high-flying music of Lakmé and Lucia, Crespin had lost her top notes, but her voice, which Kossa had said was 'about as big as the head of a pin,' had become enormous. Rediagnosing her amazed pupil as a mezzo-soprano, Kossa told her charge three months later that she would be 'a big dramatic soprano in five years.' Finally, Kossa was right about her star pupil's abilities and destiny. Seven years later, in 1950, at age twenty-three, Crespin made her debut as Elsa in Mulhouse. "Unable to answer a single math question on her entrance exam but victorious in various singing competitions, Crespin chose the conservatory over college (her mother wanted her to be a pharmacist, her father an accountant in the family shoe store) and headed for Paris. There, the acting teacher told her she would have a superb career as a comic movie actress if she lost twenty of the pounds that years of Mannolini's cooking had put on her. Crespin would struggle to keep her admittedly 'generous physique' trim throughout her singing career, which ended in 1989 after more than a decade of mezzo and character roles, but she never did make any films. She did, however, become one of opera's most compelling actresses and seductive performers, a diva blessed with megawatt animal magnetism, patrician musicality, a distinctive if technically flawed voice that somehow combined a soft focus and theater-filling power, and a catalog of vocal assets that, she correctly recognizes, 'were acknowledged to be charm, sensuality, nobility, sensitivity to the essence of the words, and a proud lyricism.' Wieland Wagner invited her to Bayreuth to beam some Mediterranean sunshine onto the gloom-clad role of Kundry. An operatically ignorant prospective lover, never having heard her sing before, was reduced to tears by her classic recording of Berlioz's Les nuits d'été. And her sex appeal was so powerful that even gay men fell under its spell. Indeed, one of her paramours was a clearly repressed homosexual who was inspired to at least one night of passionate heterosexual lovemaking. "As the above anecdote suggests, On Stage, Off Stage is a tell-all book. It is probably the frankest memoir since Marilyn Horne's. Crespin recounts that when a journalist asked her if singers could make love the night before a performance, she replied, 'that depends. If it's pretty quick, perhaps. But if it's French style, out of the question!' She reports that during rehearsals for the 1957 Paris premiere of Dialogues des Carmélites she and Poulenc—who wrote the role of the First Prioress with her voice in mind—regularly swapped risqué stories, even though she doesn't repeat any of them here. And she impishly toys with scatology, recalling that her dismissal from the Paris Opera for not being slim enough to suit the director 'was the sh...abbiest thing' that he had ever done and lamenting her failure, when the old Met was razed and its appointments were auctioned off, to procure the star dressing room's toilet seat, on which the likes of Ponselle, Flagstad, and Lehmann had sat. "Crespin is sometimes astonishingly candid when discussing the most intimate aspects of her rich, full, red-blooded life. She bluntly discusses the personal pluses and minuses of her husband (writer Leo Bruder) and various lovers, including conductors Edmond Carrière and Henry Lewis and a married businessman whom Crespin considerately declines to name. She matter-of-factly mentions a student-days dalliance with lesbian sex. She forthrightly confesses how her alcoholic mother and distant father led her to stifle her emotions until she was well into adulthood. She regretfully explains her decision to have an abortion in 1958 so she could sing those precious Bayreuth Kundrys. And she painfully chronicles her bouts with breast and uterine cancer, which led to a motherhood-ending hysterectomy and agonizing radiation and chemotherapy treatments. "But even though she believes her cancer to be a cosmic punishment for her abortion, Crespin is not one to wallow in self-pity or sensationalism. Every inch the glamorous prima donna, she nevertheless refuses to take herself too seriously. She tempers the pathos and tabloid tone of some passages in her memoir, which ends with her proclaiming a Shirley MacLaine-style spirituality, with a self-effacing sense of humor that is utterly disarming. She repeatedly settles old scores with a sly smile and ends her harrowing tale of weeks of debilitating cancer treatment by joking, 'And do you think I lost a gram? Au contraire!' "The first part of On Stage, Off Stage was published in France in 1982 by Fayard under the apt title La vie et l'amour d'une femme, the French name for Schumann's song cycle Frauenliebe und -leben. It was revised for the expanded French edition published in September 1997 and translated for the American edition by G. S. Bourdain, a New York Times editor who became a friend of the diva after writing a September 1977 High Fidelity Magazine article about her. Crespin wrote her memoir during a restful summer vacation and clearly didn't check her memory against annals and reference books. She makes some minor errors regarding dates, colleagues in particular performances, and the like. But although she reveals that Yvonne Minton fell ill during the recording of Der Rosenkavalier, requiring the mezzo to record some of the Marschallin-Octavian scenes at a later date with the soprano present only on tape, Crespin doesn't mention the 1964 EMI/Angel recording of Il trovatore with Franco Corelli and Gabriella Tucci in which, I always believed, she was originally scheduled to sing Leonora. And while I applaud the discography, the list of her roles and awards, and the fascinating chapter on the art of singing (Crespin revels in her second vocation as a teacher of master classes), I rue the omission of the admittedly sloppy career chronology included in the 1982 French version of the memoir. In all other respects, though, this book is a treasurable memento of a great artist and a remarkable woman." Crespin's memoir full of verve and grace By Richard Dyer, Boston Globe "'Don't be shy to show who you are inside,' Regine Crespin advised students in a master class at Boston University in 1991. "'That is why we are singing.' "In 1982, before she bade farewell to one of the century's great musical careers, Crespin published her memoirs, borrowing its title from the Schumann song cycle that was one of her specialties of the concert stage, 'La vie et l'amour d'une femme' ('The Life and Love of a Woman'). It was one of the best autobiographies any singer has ever written; it is a book about a life and an art, about a life in an art. But the book remained untranslated and inaccessible to many of the soprano's admirers in the English-speaking world. "Crespin retired from singing in 1989 though she remains active as a teacher. Earlier this year she published a revised and expanded version of her book in France, and now Northeastern University Press has published an English translation by Crespin's friend G.S. Bourdain. The translation is vivacious and the book handsomely presented, with a selection of interesting photographs. At the end there are a list of roles, a discography and a catalog of medals and awards, though the complete chronology of Crespin's appearances, present in the French edition, is regrettably missing. Nevertheless, 'On Stage, Off Stage' is a book every singer and aspiring singer will benefit from; it is a book any lover of music, or anyone who enjoys good company, will read with pleasure. "Crespin, who turned 70 this year [1997], enjoyed a long and glamorous career in recitals and concerts as well as in French, Italian, and German roles in the leading opera houses of the world. She is justly proud of the fact that she sang German operas in Vienna and at Bayreuth, and Italian operas at La Scala, pointing out that neither Renata Tebaldi nor Elizabeth Schwarzkopf ever sang a French role at the Paris Opera. She had the admiration of colleagues in the pit, onstage, and backstage, and she returns that admiration in her book. She lops off the heads of a few cultural bureaucrats in France, and settles a few old scores with a conductor or two ('insufferable' is her word for one of them), but there are very few catty diva remarks, and generous praise for many. She sang in 'Les Troyens' and 'Carmen' for the Opera Company of Boston, and she calls Sarah Caldwell 'a genius of a director': 'She is sometimes brilliant, sometimes confused, always thrilling, with bright directorial ideas that make you discover details you had never thought of.' "Crespin worked very hard for everything she had, and she studied all her life, right up to the time of her last performances. She speaks with particular admiration and affection of such teachers as Georges Jouatte and Denise Dupleix in Paris, Zinka Milanov in New York, and Rudolf Bautz in Cologne. The book is the record of a great professional career, but 'and then I sang...' plays a relatively small part in it; her book is full of astute observations about her repertory and the art of singing, and there is much sound and generous professional advice. "And the book is at least as much about the offstage life of Crespin, 'simply a woman,' as she puts it. Most of her friends have not been participants in musical life, and she regrets not reaching out to Maria Callas, living alone and in despair in Paris. Crespin always knew what she wanted, but she also had difficulty reaching out to herself; becoming her own friend is also part of her journey and her story. Now she writes with the wisdom and perspective that come from years of experience—and from character. "One of Crespin's greatest roles was the Marschallin in Strauss's 'Der Rosenkavalier,' and this is a book worthy of that wise, gritty, vulnerable, and lovable woman. Crespin writes with complete, openhearted candor about the most intimate details of her life; her book is painful, amusing, vivacious, and utterly captivating. We understand a little better why her singing moved us so much—and why all great singing does." "Since its first publication as La Vie et l'Amour d'une Femme (Actes Sud, 1982), French soprano Regine Crespin's enchanting autobiography has been cherished as a classic of artistic biography and women's literature. Now, thanks to a grant from the French Culture Ministry, the revised and expanded 1997 version has been translated for English readers to enjoy. 'On Stage, Off Stage,' has been seamlessly translated from the French. One chapter, 'The Art of Singing,' is a standout. Her description of the physiological acrobatics required to sing a note, much less an aria, explains why opera singers deserve admiration."—La Scena Musicale "It seems strange that someone so enormously self-disciplined in her professional life—and one of her most interesting chapters is devoted to the technique of singing, and the pressures on an opera star—should have been so naive and easily led in her personal one."—Publishers Weekly

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