The great British soprano Felicity Lott, much appreciated in the United Kingdom and also in France, her country of heart, died Friday at the age of 79, her agent said in a press release on Sunday.
Terminal cancer
This artist revealed Monday in an interview with the BBC that she was suffering from terminal cancer discovered a year earlier. Felicity Lott lived through “her illness with great dignity and total acceptance,” and “remained a very characteristic elegance and chic until the end,” said her agent, Sue Spence.
During her four decades of career, this singer nicknamed “Flott” performed in operas and concert halls around the world, known for her interpretations of the works of Richard Strauss, Jacques Offenbach and Mozart.
Legion of Honor
Born in 1947 in Cheltenham, in the west of England, this music lover began playing the piano at the age of five, then singing and violin at 12. She studied at the Royal Academy of Music and made her operatic debut in 1975, replacing Pamina at short notice in Mozart’s The Magic Flute. The one who performed regularly at the major classical music festival BBC Proms was ennobled by Elizabeth II in 1996. She was also decorated with the Legion of Honor in France.
The Royal Ballet and the London Opera saluted “one of the greatest sopranos of her time, celebrated throughout the world for the grace (…) and the pure beauty of her voice”, who had retained her “authenticity and self-deprecation” that was very British.
“The loyal admiration of the French public”
The Paris Opera also paid tribute to the one who “maintained a deeply emotional relationship with France”, after having spent a year as an English assistant in a high school near Grenoble before entering the Royal Academy. “It was there that she enrolled at the Grenoble Conservatory and met professor Elisabeth Maximović, who detected a rare talent in her and encouraged her to become a singer,” it says. “Felicity Lott carried the French repertoire with incomparable diction, a unique sensitivity and a sincere love of French culture which earned her, throughout her career, the loyal admiration of the French public,” according to the Paris Opera.
