Marianne Crebassa

Mezzo-soprano Marianne Crebassa burst onto the global stage in the middle of the 2010s through compelling accounts of French opera and mélodie. Born in Béziers on December 14, 1986, she grew up between Agdé and Montpellier, where she trained at the local conservatories. While still in Montpellier she took part in the city’s opera production of Schumann’s Manfred and drew widespread notice with her concert performance of Bernard Herrmann’s Wuthering Heights at the Festival de Radio France, an event at which she has continued to appear even after her international career was established. There she pursued studies in voice, piano, and musicology; the breadth of that training, together with her initial stage work, secured her admission to the Young Artist Program of the Opéra National de Paris, where she gained experience in such varied scores as Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, Mozart’s La finta giardiniera, and Berg’s Lulu.

Following her 2012 graduation she made an immediate impression, singing Irene opposite Plácido Domingo in Handel’s Tamerlano and returning the next season as Cecilio in Mozart’s Lucio Silla, the role with which she later made her La Scala debut. In 2014 she created the title part in Marc-André Dalbavie’s new opera Charlotte Salomon. American engagements at the highest level followed when she appeared with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 2015 in a program of French vocal music and, in 2016, portrayed Stephano in Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. That same year Erato issued her first recording, the collection of trouser-role arias titled Oh Boy!, and she performed Cherubino in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro in Amsterdam, Berlin, and Vienna.

Her second Erato album, Secrets, a set of French mélodies recorded with pianist Fazil Say, appeared in 2017. During the 2017–2018 season she sang in Daniel Barenboim’s concerts marking the Debussy centenary, gave a recital at Berlin’s Pierre Boulez Saal, made her role debut as Debussy’s Mélisande, and returned to both La Scala as Irene and Chicago as Dorabella in Mozart’s Così fan tutte. Several of her performances have been issued on DVD, among them a 2019 account of Ravel’s Shéhérazade taped at Berlin’s Waldbühne. In 2021 she returned to Erato with Séguedilles, an album that juxtaposes rarely heard Spanish examples of the form with music by Bizet.