23 January 2012
Rita Gorr, 85, Mezzo Who Brought Scalding Dramatic Temperament, Versatility to the Opera Stage, Has Died
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Rita Gorr as Verdi's Princess Eboli at the Met, 1963
© Vernon L. Smith
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RITA GORR
Zelzate, Belgium, February 18, 1926 — Denia, Spain, January 21, 2012
One of the greatest singers to emerge on the international opera scene in the 1950s, Gorr was an artist of intensity and versatility whose penetrating, powerful mezzo-soprano and scalding dramatic temperament made her an incomparable Dalila, a magisterial Amneris and a singularly convincing Mère Marie in Dialogues des Carmélites, which she sang in the Paris premiere of Poulenc's opera in 1957. Her voice was not to every taste — some found her timbre metallic and her upper range narrow — but few would deny that Rita Gorr had a grandeur and command of the stage unequalled in her generation. Gorr sang with the daring and shrewd sense of her own worth that recalled the divas of a previous golden age: critics reaching for superlatives most often compared Gorr to Marie Delna and Jeanne Gerville–Réache, two nonpareil French contraltos of the Belle Époque.
Although she was regarded as one of the twentieth century's most significant interpreters of the French repertory, Gorr's origins were unambiguously Flemish: born Marguerite Geirnaert — she claimed that her stage name was the invention of some friends — the mezzo studied in Ghent and at the Brussels Conservatory before making her professional debut as Fricka in Die Walküre at Antwerp in 1949. Gorr was a member of the L'Opéra National du Rhin in Strasbourg (1949–52) before she became established in Paris with her debuts at the Opéra-Comique (as Charlotte in Werther) and at the Opéra (Magdalene in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg), both in 1952. Gorr's roles in Paris during the remainder of the decade included Dalila, Venus in Tannhäuser, Carmen, Geneviève in Pelléas et Mélisande, the Hostess of the Inn in Boris Godunov, the Götterdämmerung Waltraute, Herodias in Salome, Ortrud and Amneris. Gorr remained a regular presence in Paris's opera houses and in Strasbourg throughout the 1960s and the early 1970s.
Gorr's international reputation began with her appearances at the 1958 Bayreuth Festival as Fricka in Das Rheingold (her festival debut) and Die Walküre and the Third Norn in Götterdämmerung. The following year, Gorr returned to Bayreuth as Ortrud and bowed at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, as Amneris. La Scala welcomed her in 1960 as Kundry. Other European engagements for Gorr included appearances in Vienna, Rome, Bordeaux, Lyon, Orange, Geneva, Brussels, Ghent, Stuttgart, Barcelona and Lisbon.
She made impressive back-to-back debuts in autumn 1962 at the Metropolitan Opera, as Amneris to Leontyne Price's Aida on October 17, followed by Dalila in the Lyric Opera of Chicago company premiere of Samson et Dalila on November 10 — an assignment Gorr took over on short notice when Giulietta Simionato proved unwilling to re-learn in French a role she knew only in Italian. Gorr's New York appearances were relatively infrequent, despite the extravagant admiration of the local critics. She sang just forty-one performances of six roles during her five seasons on the Met roster — Amneris, Waltraute, Eboli, Azucena, Santuzza and Dalila, the latter in a new Met production of Saint-Saens's opera in 1964, opposite Jess Thomas and Gabriel Bacquier. Gorr also appeared in several memorable concert performances of Massenet works at Carnegie Hall, including Anita in La Navarraise (1963) and Charlotte to Nicolai Gedda's Werther (1965), both presented by the Friends of French Opera, and the title role in Hérodiade for the American Opera Society (1964), with Régine Crespin as Salome. In 1992, she sang Neris in a concert of Cherubini's Medée with Boston Festival Opera. Gorr's last notable U.S. opera house appearance was in 1990, as Madame de Croissy in Seattle Opera's Dialogues des Carmelites, a characterization she repeated in several subsequent stagings, including Robert Carsen's memorable 1997 production for the Netherlands Opera, and on Kent Nagano's 1990 recording with the Opéra de Lyon (Virgin).
During the peak years of her career, Gorr made a number of recordings of her best roles, including Mère Marie in Dialogues, led by Pierre Dervaux (1958); Fricka in Die Walküre (1961) and Ortrud in Lohengrin (1965), paced by Erich Leinsdorf; Amneris, with Georg Solti (1962); and several of her French specialties, including Gluck's Tauride Iphigenie (1961), Dalila (1963) and Hérodiade (1963), under Georges Prêtre for EMI.
Gorr sang opera for more than fifty years, establishing a new career in character roles such as Kabanicha in Kaťa Kabanová, Filipyevna in Eugene Onegin, Taven in Gounod's Mireille and Tchaikovsky's Old Countess. In 1996, Gorr appeared as herself in Poussières d'Amour (Love's Debris), Werber Schroeter's semi-documentary film on the presence of emotion in singing. Her last opera performances were in summer 2007, when she was eighty-one, in The Queen of Spades for Vlaamse Opera. She died after a long illness. 
F. PAUL DRISCOLL
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