From opera to Queen, wayward prima donna sang like an angel
Montserrat Caballé, the Catalan opera singer who died yesterday at the age of 85, was perhaps the last of her kind – the fat lady who sings like an angel.
The soprano was a wayward prima donna of the old school – infuriatingly unreliable, lazy and capricious, although warm, funny and generous, too. She was also an artist of musical genius, blessed with a voice of vibrant beauty and flexibility, schooled in superb technique and breath control, crowned with a matchless capacity to spin exquisitely floating sustained pianissimi above the stave.
Her repertory was astonishingly wide, ranging from Spanish renaissance music to Richard Strauss, but she was at her best in 19th-century Italian opera, and many of her earlier recordings of Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, Verdi and Puccini are ranked as classics. In performance, she was erratic – a commanding and glamorous presence, but often disengaged and liable to go her own way. During a performance of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera at Covent Garden, she stopped halfway through a duet with Pavarotti and walked off stage, returning five minutes later as though nothing had happened. On another occasion, she threw oranges into the orchestra pit, possibly as a gesture of disdain for the conductor.
Such behaviour was typical of a free and eccentric spirit that finally led her to Queen’s Freddie Mercury, who idolised her as a camp icon and a singer. Their collaboration on the smash-hit Barcelona brought her to the attention of a new public.
Health issues, mismanagement of finances and the baleful influence of her brother Carlos made her last years unhappy – she was convicted of tax fraud in 2015 and narrowly escaped imprisonment. But she should be remembered as one of the truly great singers of her generation.