Louise Dabadie, born Louise-Zulmé Leroux and also known as Louise-Zulmé Dabadie, was a French opera singer active at the Paris Opéra, where she sang both soprano and mezzo-soprano roles. Amongst the roles she created were Jemmy in Rossini's William Tell and Sinaïde in his Moïse et Pharaon. Born in Boulogne-sur-Mer and trained at the Conservatoire de Paris, she made her stage debut at the Paris Opéra at the age of 17 and remained with that company until her retirement from the stage in 1835. After her retirement she taught singing in Paris, where she died at the age of 73. She was married to the French baritone Henri-Bernard Dabadie.
Life and career
Dabadie was born Louise-Zulmé Leroux in Boulogne-sur-Mer, where she began her music studies. According to the memoirs of Louis Gentil, her father was an army officer who had died in 1812 during the retreat from Moscow, after which her mother settled in Paris with their children. Dabadie continued her music studies at the Conservatoire de Paris under Charles-Henri Plantade and was awarded first prize in singing and declamation in 1819. She also received second prize in piano in 1823, which she had continued to study after her stage debut at the Paris Opéra on 31 January 1821 as Antigone in Sacchini's Œdipe à Colone. In March of that year she was offered a permanent position at the Opéra as a remplacement, singing the roles of the primadonnas Caroline Branchu and Caroline Grassari when they were unavailable. When Branchu retired, Dabadie was promoted to the first rank. Her first big success in a major role came in August 1825 as Julia in Spontini's La vestale. In June of that year she had sung the role of The Spirit of France in Boieldieu's Pharamond. The opera was a failure at its premiere, which was attended by the recently crowned King Charles X, and only the final tableau with Dabadie was singled out for praise. She appeared on a cloud dressed in a gold breastplate and helmet and carrying a banner emblazoned with the fleur-de-lis. She then gestured to the back curtain, which parted to reveal a receding line of illustrious French kings ending with the Arc de Triomphe and the Tuileries Palace on the far horizon. , 1832 Dabadie went on to create the roles of Sinaïde in Moïse et Pharaon, Lady Macbeth in Chélard's Macbeth, Jemmy in William Tell, Mizaël in La tentation, and Arvedson in Gustave III. Her other leading roles at the Opéra included Eurydice in Orphée et Eurydice, Iphigénie in Iphigénie en Tauride, Pamyra in Le siège de Corinthe, Adèle in Le comte Ory, Amazily in Fernand Cortez, and Églantine in the first French performance of Euryanthe. Dabadie's voice was beautiful and well-schooled, with a purity of style and diction, but Laure Cinti-Damoreau somewhat eclipsed her fame when she joined the company in 1826. Several of the leading roles in Paris Opéra premieres were given to Cinti-Damoreau, with Dabadie either in secondary roles or singing Cinti-Damoreau's roles in revival performances. During this time Dabadie's two younger sisters also began performing at the Paris Opéra: the soprano Clara Lavry and the ballerina Pauline Leroux. From 1821 to 1830, Dabadie was also a principal singer in the Chapelle royale of Louis XVIII and later Charles X. She had been engaged by the Duc de La Châtre in 1821 after he heard her performance at Notre Dame Cathedral in a Te Deum marking the baptism of the Count of Chambord. In addition to her appearances at the Opéra and the Chapelle royale, Dabadie regularly sang in the concert series held by the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire and twice performed cantatas in the final round of the Prix de Rome composition competition. In 1827 she sang Jean-Baptiste Guiraud's version of La Mort d'Orphée, the first-prize winner. Berlioz hired her to sing his version of Hermine for the 1828 competition and was awarded the second prize. He hired her again in 1829 for La mort de Cléopâtre. She sang in the qualification round, but a last-minute rehearsal for the premiere of William Tell prevented her from singing it in the final round. Instead, she sent her sister Clara, who was still a student at the Paris Conservatory and was overwhelmed by the difficulty of the score. Berlioz failed to win either first or second prize. Dabadie retired from the stage in 1835. Writing in 1861, François-Joseph Fétis attributed her relatively early retirement at the age of 31 to a serious deterioration of her voice and claimed that this early vocal decline was due to the "deplorable" training system at the Paris Conservatory during the years she studied there. This assessment was strongly disputed by Jacques-Léopold Heugel in his obituary of Dabadie published in Le Ménestrel''. According to Heugel, her vocal powers were undiminished at the time of her retirement. He wrote that Dabadie had been schooled and excelled in works of the earlier classical composers such as Gluck, Sacchini, and Spontini and saw no future for herself in the newer repertoire that was coming into vogue at the Opéra. In 1822, she had married the baritone Henri-Bernard Dabadie and often appeared in the same operas with him. After their retirement from the stage, they both taught singing in Paris. The couple had several children, including a son Victor and a daughter who was also a musician prior to her marriage to the architect Edmond Guillau. Henri-Bernard died in 1853. Louise died at her home in Paris in 1877 at the age of 73. Following her funeral at the Église de la Madeleine, she was buried next to her husband in Montmartre Cemetery.
