Euphrosyne Parepa-Rosa
Encyclopedia
Opera
Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...
tic soprano
Soprano
A soprano is a voice type with a vocal range from approximately middle C to "high A" in choral music, or to "soprano C" or higher in operatic music. In four-part chorale style harmony, the soprano takes the highest part, which usually encompasses the melody...
who established the Carl Rosa Opera Company
Carl Rosa Opera Company
The Carl Rosa Opera Company was founded in 1873 by Carl August Nicholas Rosa, a German-born musical impresario, to present opera in English in London and the British provinces. The company survived Rosa's death in 1889, and continued to present opera in English on tour until 1960, when it was...
together with second husband Carl Rosa. Her achievements were recognised by the Philharmonic Society of London
Royal Philharmonic Society
The Royal Philharmonic Society is a British music society, formed in 1813. It was originally formed in London to promote performances of instrumental music there. Many distinguished composers and performers have taken part in its concerts...
(now the Royal Philharmonic Society) with the rare award of their Gold Medal in 1872.
Life and career
Edinburgh
Edinburgh is the capital city of Scotland, the second largest city in Scotland, and the eighth most populous in the United Kingdom. The City of Edinburgh Council governs one of Scotland's 32 local government council areas. The council area includes urban Edinburgh and a rural area...
, to the soprano
Soprano
A soprano is a voice type with a vocal range from approximately middle C to "high A" in choral music, or to "soprano C" or higher in operatic music. In four-part chorale style harmony, the soprano takes the highest part, which usually encompasses the melody...
Elizabeth Sequinn (sister of basso
Bass (voice type)
A bass is a type of male singing voice and possesses the lowest vocal range of all voice types. According to The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, a bass is typically classified as having a range extending from around the second E below middle C to the E above middle C...
Arthur Edward Seguin) and the Wallachia
Wallachia
Wallachia or Walachia is a historical and geographical region of Romania. It is situated north of the Danube and south of the Southern Carpathians...
n boyar Demetrius Parepa, Baron Georgiades de Boyescu of Bucharest
Bucharest
Bucharest is the capital municipality, cultural, industrial, and financial centre of Romania. It is the largest city in Romania, located in the southeast of the country, at , and lies on the banks of the Dâmbovița River....
. Her father died when Parepa was an infant, leaving her young mother impoverished. Parepa's mother turned to the stage to support her child and herself and trained the girl in singing.
Her operatic début was at the age of 16 in Malta
Malta
Malta , officially known as the Republic of Malta , is a Southern European country consisting of an archipelago situated in the centre of the Mediterranean, south of Sicily, east of Tunisia and north of Libya, with Gibraltar to the west and Alexandria to the east.Malta covers just over in...
as Amina in La Sonnambula
La sonnambula
La sonnambula is an opera semiseria in two acts, with music in the bel canto tradition by Vincenzo Bellini to an Italian libretto by Felice Romani, based on a scenario for a ballet-pantomime by Eugène Scribe and Jean-Pierre Aumer called La somnambule, ou L'arrivée d'un nouveau seigneur.The first...
, followed by engagements in Naples
Naples
Naples is a city in Southern Italy, situated on the country's west coast by the Gulf of Naples. Lying between two notable volcanic regions, Mount Vesuvius and the Phlegraean Fields, it is the capital of the region of Campania and of the province of Naples...
, Genoa
Genoa
Genoa |Ligurian]] Zena ; Latin and, archaically, English Genua) is a city and an important seaport in northern Italy, the capital of the Province of Genoa and of the region of Liguria....
, Rome
Rome
Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...
, Florence
Florence
Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....
, Madrid
Madrid
Madrid is the capital and largest city of Spain. The population of the city is roughly 3.3 million and the entire population of the Madrid metropolitan area is calculated to be 6.271 million. It is the third largest city in the European Union, after London and Berlin, and its metropolitan...
, and Lisbon
Lisbon
Lisbon is the capital city and largest city of Portugal with a population of 545,245 within its administrative limits on a land area of . The urban area of Lisbon extends beyond the administrative city limits with a population of 3 million on an area of , making it the 9th most populous urban...
. She sang at the Lyceum Theatre, London, for the 1857 season (the year after the Royal Opera House
Royal Opera House
The Royal Opera House is an opera house and major performing arts venue in Covent Garden, central London. The large building is often referred to as simply "Covent Garden", after a previous use of the site of the opera house's original construction in 1732. It is the home of The Royal Opera, The...
in Covent Garden
Covent Garden
Covent Garden is a district in London on the eastern fringes of the West End, between St. Martin's Lane and Drury Lane. It is associated with the former fruit and vegetable market in the central square, now a popular shopping and tourist site, and the Royal Opera House, which is also known as...
burnt down), and between 1859 and 1865 appeared in opera at both Covent Garden
Royal Opera House
The Royal Opera House is an opera house and major performing arts venue in Covent Garden, central London. The large building is often referred to as simply "Covent Garden", after a previous use of the site of the opera house's original construction in 1732. It is the home of The Royal Opera, The...
and Her Majesty's Theatre
Her Majesty's Theatre
Her Majesty's Theatre is a West End theatre, in Haymarket, City of Westminster, London. The present building was designed by Charles J. Phipps and was constructed in 1897 for actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree, who established the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art at the theatre...
. During this time, she participated in two operatic premieres, creating the title role in Alfred Mellon
Alfred Mellon
Alfred Mellon was an English violinist, conductor and composer.Mellon was born in Birmingham. He played the violin in the opera and other orchestras, and afterwards became leader of the ballet at the Royal Italian Opera, Covent Garden...
's Victorine on 19 December 1859, and the role of Mabel in George Macfarren
George Macfarren
George Macfarren was a playwright and the father of composer George Alexander Macfarren. Macfarren's first play, Ah! What a Pity, or, The Dark Knight and the Fair Lady, was produced on 28 September 1818 at the English Opera House; for the next several decades, a Macfarren play was produced...
's opera Helvellyn
Helvellyn
Helvellyn is a mountain in the English Lake District, the apex of the Eastern Fells. At above sea level, it is the third highest peak in both the Lake District and England...
on 5 November 1864. She sang with Charles Santley
Charles Santley
Sir Charles Santley was an English-born opera and oratorio star with a bravuraFrom the Italian verb bravare, to show off. A florid, ostentatious style or a passage of music requiring technical skill technique who became the most eminent English baritone and male concert singer of the Victorian era...
at the opening of the Oxford Music Hall
Oxford Music Hall
Oxford Music Hall was a music hall located in Westminster, London at the corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road. It was established on the site of a former public house, the Boar and Castle, by Charles Morton, in 1861. The hall was converted into a legitimate theatre in 1917, but the...
in 1861. She also was a successful oratorio
Oratorio
An oratorio is a large musical composition including an orchestra, a choir, and soloists. Like an opera, an oratorio includes the use of a choir, soloists, an ensemble, various distinguishable characters, and arias...
and concert soloist, in constant demand in Britain, and she participated in the 19th-century English revival of the music of George Frideric Handel
George Frideric Handel
George Frideric Handel was a German-British Baroque composer, famous for his operas, oratorios, anthems and organ concertos. Handel was born in 1685, in a family indifferent to music...
.
Her first husband, Army Captain H. de Wolfe Carvelle, died in 1865, sixteen months after their wedding. In 1866, she appeared before the Royal Philharmonic Society
Royal Philharmonic Society
The Royal Philharmonic Society is a British music society, formed in 1813. It was originally formed in London to promote performances of instrumental music there. Many distinguished composers and performers have taken part in its concerts...
in Robert Schumann
Robert Schumann
Robert Schumann, sometimes known as Robert Alexander Schumann, was a German composer, aesthete and influential music critic. He is regarded as one of the greatest and most representative composers of the Romantic era....
's Paradise and the Peri
Paradise and the Peri
Paradise and the Peri, in German Das Paradies und die Peri, is a cantata for soloists, chorus, and orchestra by Robert Schumann. Completed in 1843, the work was published as Schumann's Op. 50....
. She then toured the United States with cornetist Levy and violinist Carl Rosa, the latter of whom she married in New York City in 1867. Together they quickly established the Parepa-Rosa English Opera Company there, which became popular, and which introduced opera to places in America that had never staged it before. They opened at the French Theatre on Fourteenth Street
Fourteenth Street Theatre
The Fourteenth Street Theatre was a New York City theatre located on 14th Street just west of Sixth Avenue.The venue opened in 1866 as the Theatre Francais. It was renamed the Lyceum in 1871. By the time J.H...
, New York City in September 1869 with a performance of Bale's opera The Puritan's Daughter, with Parepa singing the title role. The subsequent tour of the eastern and midwestern states included a repertoire that ranged from The Bohemian Girl
The Bohemian Girl
The Bohemian Girl is an opera composed by Michael William Balfe with a libretto by Alfred Bunn. The plot is loosely based on a Cervantes tale, La Gitanilla.The opera was first produced in London at the Drury Lane Theatre on November 27, 1843...
and Maritana
Maritana
Maritana is a grand opera in three acts composed by William Vincent Wallace, with a libretto by Edward Fitzball . The opera is based on the play Don César de Bazan by Adolphe d'Ennery and Philippe François Pinel Dumanoir , which was also the source material for Jules Massenet's opéra comique Don...
to Weber's Der Freischütz
Der Freischütz
Der Freischütz is an opera in three acts by Carl Maria von Weber with a libretto by Friedrich Kind. It premiered on 18 June 1821 at the Schauspielhaus Berlin...
and Oberon.
In 1870, The Parepa-Rosa Opera Company returned to Britain and then appeared in Italian opera at Cairo, Egypt, followed by a return to America for another successful tour in 1871-71. In 1872, they returned to Britain. In September 1873, the company changed its name to Carl Rosa's English Opera, since Parepa was pregnant.
Parepa-Rosa died in childbirth in London at the age of 37 while preparing a production of an English version of Richard Wagner
Richard Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, conductor, theatre director, philosopher, music theorist, poet, essayist and writer primarily known for his operas...
's Lohengrin
Lohengrin (opera)
Lohengrin is a romantic opera in three acts composed and written by Richard Wagner, first performed in 1850. The story of the eponymous character is taken from medieval German romance, notably the Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach and its sequel, Lohengrin, written by a different author, itself...
. Carl Rosa endowed the Parepa-Rosa Scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music
Royal Academy of Music
The Royal Academy of Music in London, England, is a conservatoire, Britain's oldest degree-granting music school and a constituent college of the University of London since 1999. The Academy was founded by Lord Burghersh in 1822 with the help and ideas of the French harpist and composer Nicolas...
in her memory.
William Winter wrote that "Great vocal powers have seldom found such ample or such touching expression as those of Parepa-Rosa did in the first act of Norma
Norma (opera)
Norma is a tragedia lirica or opera in two acts by Vincenzo Bellini with libretto by Felice Romani after Norma, ossia L'infanticidio by Alexandre Soumet. First produced at La Scala on December 26, 1831, it is generally regarded as an example of the supreme height of the bel canto tradition...
. ...one of her best successes was made as Rosina in The Barber of Seville
The Barber of Seville
The Barber of Seville, or The Futile Precaution is an opera buffa in two acts by Gioachino Rossini with a libretto by Cesare Sterbini. The libretto was based on Pierre Beaumarchais's comedy Le Barbier de Séville , which was originally an opéra comique, or a mixture of spoken play with music...
... to indicate the versatility of her talents and the scope and thoroughness of her culture." Rosenthal comments in his 1980 Grove article that her range extended over two and a half octaves to d