Mado Robin

 

Madeleine Marie Robin, generally known as Mado Robin, was a French coloratura soprano,noted for her extreme upper range.  She is commonly considered to have had one of the highest female voicesof all time, similar in many ways to that of Yma Sumac.  Robin was born in Yzeures-sur-Creuse, Touraine.While some considered her  to have been a singer in the general category of the vaudeville singers of earlier days, she was in fact an extraordinary singer and considered a serious vocal artist in France, where she was, generally speaking, treated with respect and greatly appreciated. She appeared widely in concert, and on Radio and TV. I think one famous recording tells the tale.  Here is perhaps the most extraordinary of all recordings of “Spargi d’amaro pianto:”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WyMp8G3Hkg

At age 17, she married Alan Smith, an Englishman, who died shortly after World War II in a car crash. She had one daughter.

Robin died in Paris in 1960 from cancer (some sources state liver cancer, others leukaemia) a few days before the 1500th performance of Lakmé at the Opéra-Comique, which had organized the event for her birthday.

A museum to her life opened in her home town in 2009.

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