Adèle Charvet: “Baroque Music Was My First Love”

Adèle Charvet steps into the role of Ruggiero (Handel’s Alcina) as of October 6 at the Opéra de Lille (France), in a production directed by Ewelina Marciniak, with Le Concert d’Astrée, conducted by Emmanuelle Haïm. In the coming weeks, she will also sing Nerone in Handel’s Agrippina, on a European tour with Les Accents and Thibault Noally, followed by Poppea in Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea at the Capitole de Toulouse with I Gemelli, conducted by Emiliano Gonzalez Toro and directed by Mathilde Étienne. Winner of the Verbier Festival’s Yves Paternot Prize in 2017 and nominated for the Victoires de la Musique Classique in 2020, the French mezzo-soprano has gradually made a name for herself on European stages, from Glyndebourne to the Opéra-Comique and the Salzburg Festival. In this interview with Total Baroque Magazine, she talks about her career, upcoming challenges, and gives us a behind-the-scenes look at her profession.

This season, among many productions, you are singing in three Baroque operas: Alcina, Agrippina, and L’incoronazione di Poppea. Do you have a particular attachment to this repertoire?

Adèle Charvet: Absolutely! Baroque repertoire, particularly Italian Baroque, was my first love as a student. It is a repertoire I studied extensively at the conservatory. It’s in my DNA. All the more so because I had my very first singing lessons with my aunt Julie Hassler, who specializes in Baroque music and is extraordinarily knowledgeable. This repertoire has always been very important to me, even simply as a music lover. It is often the music I listen to outside my own practice. But when I began my career, I was very afraid of being pigeonholed, so I didn’t want to launch myself by presenting myself as a specialist. I was too hungry for other repertoires, and I didn’t want to close any doors. But after a few years in the profession, I really started asking my agents for Baroque engagements because I missed it too much. There is certainly something very natural for my voice in late Italian Baroque music. These Handel roles fit me like a tailor-made dress, particularly the castrato roles. With my mezzo-soprano voice—with a certain breadth—I feel completely at home.

Ruggiero, Nerone, Poppea: those are three role debuts…

A. C.: Role debuts are very exciting, but they can also be a little exhausting. They really put your memory through its paces, because learning a role is a long-term undertaking. There are so many hours of music to learn, to absorb. There is also all the work involved in understanding the architecture of the piece, especially with operas like these, which are extremely dense, with very intricate plots. At the moment, I’m singing Alcina while also studying Nerone in Agrippina, and I realize that I’m mixing up the plots. Sometimes the body simply needs a little more time for things to become automatic. It’s always at the final performance that I feel I’ve done good work, that I’m finally ready. I’d need to do ten more! There are roles I dream of singing again, of repeating, because it is only through repetition that things have time to sink in and the interpretation deepens. The intimacy you develop with a major role grows each time you sing it. And the role evolves as you do.

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