Beautiful Life

Hugues Cuenod, operatic tenor with six-decade career, dies at 108

By Emma Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 7, 2010; 8:29 PM



Hugues Cuenod, who died Dec. 3 at age 108, was a Swiss-born tenor who won favorable reviews over more than six decades for his performances in concerts and operas. At age 84, he became the oldest singer to debut at New York's Metropolitan Opera, where his performance as a crotchety emperor in Puccini's "Turandot" won acclaim.

He insisted that he never lost his voice - a light tenor critics called "reedy and penetrating" and "high, dry and white" - because there hadn't been much of one to begin with.

"It's important not to take oneself too seriously," he said, "particularly when you are around people who do just that."

Mr. Cuenod first gained attention in the 1930s while working with the noted French conductor and teacher Nadia Boulanger.

He was a featured singer on Boulanger's renowned 1937 recordings of madrigals by Claudio Monteverdi, which reintroduced the 16th-century composer to the world.

Such obscure work, Mr. Cuenod said, was his favorite.

"I leave Beethoven alone," he told the New York Times in 1987. "It always seemed such unnecessary music."

Six-foot-five and irrepressible in comic opera roles, Mr. Cuenod performed on both sides of the Atlantic. He was known for regular appearances at the British Glyndebourne Festival Opera, including what the New York Times described as "a delightful drag part as a bad-tempered nymph" in Cavalli's "La Calisto."

Mr. Cuenod's recording of lamentations by French Baroque composer Francois Couperin had impressed composer Igor Stravinsksy, who enlisted Mr. Cuenod to sing the role of the auctioneer Sellem in the 1951 world premiere of Stravinsksy's "The Rake's Progress."

Several years later, Mr. Cuenod was lauded for his interpretation of the music teacher in Mozart's "Le nozze di Figaro."

"Towering over everyone else on the stage is the supremacy of Hugues Cuenod's Basilio," Washington Post critic Paul Hume wrote in 1964. "Here is a vibrant object lesson in the meaning of Mozart."

Hugues Adhemar Cuenod was born June 26, 1902, in the Swiss village of Corseaux-sur-Vevey, where his grandfather was mayor.

Mr. Cuenod said he became a singer mostly out of laziness while studying at a conservatory in Basel. "I was crazy about singing. I found it easier than the piano," he said. "The truth is, I never liked to work."

After graduating from the conservatory, he studied in Vienna and Paris and made his stage debut in 1928 in a production of Austrian composer Ernst Krenek's opera "Jonny Spielt Auf."

Mr. Cuenod then took a brief musical comedy turn in Noel Coward's operetta "Bitter Sweet" before finding wider fame with Boulanger.

Singing music from the Middle Ages to modern times in multiple languages, Mr. Cuenod was known for his clarity and diction. "One needs no printed text," wrote a critic in the American Record Guide, "to keep up with his medieval French."

As a member of Europe's aristocratic musical circles, Mr. Cuenod knew some of the great artists of the early 20th century. He heard soprano Elisabeth Schumann sing Richard Strauss recitals in the presence of Strauss himself and attended the 1928 German premiere of "Turandot."

Nearly six decades later, in 1987, when he made his Met debut in "Turandot," Mr. Cuenod's performance was hailed in the New York Times as "firmly and expressively sung."

Mr. Cuenod gave his last performance at 92, when he sang the role of Triquet in Tchaikovsky's "Eugene Onegin." That final performance, according to a review in Opera News, was "in perfect style."

He died of undisclosed causes in Switzerland. He had lived in a centuries-old Swiss castle with his partner, Alfred Augustin, a retired civil servant 41 years his junior.

In 2007, after Swiss law was changed to allow same-sex couples most of the legal benefits of marriage, they registered their partnership in a civil union.

"Most people were happy for us," Mr. Cuenod told the arts publication Playbill, "though a few promised us 15,000 years in hell."