This week, I have decided to focus on French Art Song, or mélodie in French. Teyte, the spelling of whose name she changed from the original “Tate” to “Teyte” so that the French would not mispronounce it, was one of the foremost singers of French mélodie in the 20th century. We don’t have recordings from the beginning of her career in the early 1900s. The recordings that we have date from her late 40s. I will leave it to you to imagine what she would have sounded like as a young woman.
We’ll start with one of her most famous recordings, “Tu n’est pas beau” from Offenbach’s La Périchole.