Louise-Rosalie Dugazon

Louise-Rosalie Dugazon, née Lefèbvre, was a French soprano whose career spanned the final decades of the eighteenth century and the early years of the nineteenth in Parisian opéra comique. Her name gave rise to two categories of role that were used for decades in French musical theatre.

The daughter of François Jacques Lefèbvre, a dancer at the Paris Opéra, she began her training in dance, but Grétry encouraged her to devote herself to singing and supervised her studies with the soprano Marie Favart. She made her official debut at the Comédie-Italienne in 1774 as Pauline in Silvain, by the same composer. After a brief marriage in 1776 to the actor and writer Jean-Baptiste-Henri Gourgaud, known as Dugazon, she adopted that stage name. She took part in some sixty premieres at the Comédie-Italienne and the Opéra-Comique, among them Laurette in Richard coeur-de-lion (1784). She created roles in several operas by Dalayrac, such as Nina (1786), in which she sang the title role and which was probably her greatest success. Her farewell took place in 1804, when she again performed Zémaïde, before an audience that included the Emperor Napoleon and the Empress Josephine.

Her legacy endures chiefly in the designations 'jeune Dugazon' and 'mère Dugazon', which were used for young soprano heroines and mature mezzo characters respectively. In addition, the aria 'Je crains de lui parler la nuit', sung by Laurette, is quoted by the Countess in Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades.