Hugues Cuénod

Career

Cuénod was born in Corseaux-sur-Vevey, Switzerland. His grandfather was the mayor of Corseaux and he had English ancestry through his grandmother. In 1913, aged 11, he attended the 78th birthday party of Camille Saint-Saëns, who played piano duets with Ignacy Jan Paderewski. He received his training at the Ribaupierre Institute in Lausanne, at the conservatories in Geneva and Basel, and in Vienna. He started his career as a concert recitalist and singer. In 1928, he made his stage debut in Ernst Krenek's Jonny spielt auf in Paris, and in 1929 he sang for the first time in the United States in Noël Coward's Bitter Sweet. From 1930 to 1933, he was active in Geneva, and then in Paris from 1934 to 1937. During the seasons 1937 to 1939, he made an extensive concert tour of North America. From 1940 to 1946, he taught at the Geneva Conservatory. In 1943 he resumed his operatic career singing in Johann Strauss II's Die Fledermaus in Geneva. He subsequently sang at Milan's La Scala (1951), the Glyndebourne Festival (from 1954 on) and London's Royal Opera House, Covent Garden (1954, 1956 and 1958). Cuénod was known for his roles as Basilio in Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, the Astrologer in Rimsky-Korsakov's The Golden Cockerel, and a role written for him by Stravinsky, Sellem in The Rake's Progress. In pre-war Vienna and Paris, he frequented aristocratic salons and worked with Nadia Boulanger, with whom he made a pioneering set of recordings of madrigals by Monteverdi in 1937; after the war, the new early-music boom relied heavily on his light, unmannered, natural sound.

He holds the record as the oldest person to make a debut at the Metropolitan Opera. He debuted as the Emperor Altoum in Puccini's Turandot on 12 March 1987 at the age of 84. He repeated the role the following season for a total of 14 performances. His very last appearance on stage was in 1992, aged 90, when he sang M. Triquet in Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin at the Théâtre du Jorat in Mézières. After retiring from the concert circuit, he became an educator of the musical arts in England, with Belgian Soprano Suzanne Danco.

Awards and honours

His recording of Satie's Socrate in the 1970s, released on Nimbus Records, won Cuénod the Grand Prix du Disque Mondiale award at the Montreux Music Festival. In 1976 he was awarded the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres. On his centenary in 2002, he was awarded the World of Song award by the Lotte Lehmann Foundation.

Personal life

Cuénod resided with his life partner, Alfred Augustin (41 years his junior), in the Vaud region of Switzerland. They lived in Le Château de Lully, an 18th-century castle that belonged to his ancestors. In June 2007, when Cuénod was 105, he and Augustin entered into a civil union after changes in Swiss law gave same-sex couples many of the legal benefits of marriage.

He turned 108 on 26 June 2010 and died in at his home in Vevey on the following 6 December.