BOOKS

IL NOUS FAUT DE L’AMOUR (WE MUST HAVE LOVE)

Felicity Lott (with Olivier Bellamy)

Les éditions Buchet/Chastel, 238 pages

The most Parisian soprano ever to be born in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire has written a memoir, typically enough, in French. Co-authored with Oliver Bellamy, a Gallic radio host, the book’s title is drawn from Offenbach’s La belle Hélène, recalling Dame Felicity’s light, bright, clear voice in this and other charming roles of the repertory.

A notable comic talent who repeatedly describes how her engagingly gangly movements onstage were inspired by Maggie Smith, Dame Felicity also has poignant moods to express. Her accounts of smoking, drinking, self-doubt, and past unhappy loves suggest that unsuspected depths of misery may fuel a sense of plausible wistfulness in her onstage characters. In typical Paris fashion, Dame Felicity cannot resist an anecdote slating a celebrity. She quotes at length the conductor Carlos Kleiber’s decrying of his opera-conducting rivals. According to Kleiber, Wolfgang Sawallisch was a ‘pompous, self-satisfied jackass’; Daniel Barenboim is renamed ‘Boringbum’; and Giuseppe Sinopoli, ‘Monopoli’ and ‘Psychopoli’.