Lola Artôt de Padilla

Lola Artôt de Padilla (5 October 1876 or 1880 - 12 April 1933) was a French-Spanish soprano, renowned in Germany, where she mainly sang.

Biography

Lola Artôt de Padilla was born in Sèvres near Paris as Dolores de Padilla. Her year of birth is given as either 1880 or 1876. Her mother was the Belgian-born soprano Désirée Artôt (de Padilla), and her father was a well-known Spanish baritone, Mariano Padilla y Ramos. (They had married in 1869 while Désirée Artôt was still informally engaged to Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, but she did not inform him she had changed her mind.) Her godmother was her mother's singing teacher Pauline Viardot. She exhibited her vocal ability at a young age, but not her mother's fiery temperament.

Her mother was her sole singing teacher.

Lola Artôt de Padilla created the role of Vreli (Juliet) in Frederick Delius's A Village Romeo and Juliet (Berlin, 21 February 1907).

She was the first in Berlin to sing the title roles in Busoni's opera Turandot and Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier (Strauss considered her the best Octavian he had ever heard), the Composer in Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos, and the Goosegirl in Engelbert Humperdinck's Königskinder (European premiere, 14 January 1911).

She was famous for her interpretation of Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro and Zerlina in Don Giovanni, both by Mozart

Recordings She made a number of recordings and she appears in EMI's The Record of Singing.