Among the musical highlights of the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympics on Friday, July 26, were those reserved for lyrical artists, Franco-Swiss mezzo-soprano Marina Viotti and French mezzo-soprano Axelle Saint-Cirel from Guadeloupe. The former posed as a female pirate in a red dress singing on the Nave de la Liberté in front of the Conciergerie for an audience whipped up by the French metal band, Gojira, with the famous Ah! ça ira from the French Revolution (before the famous 'Habanera' from Bizet's Carmen). The latter, on the other hand, dressed in white, moved the audience to tears, delivering a vestal of "Sororité (Sorority)" on the roof of the Grand Palais, a Marseillaise that could not have been more nationalistic.
"I haven't left the boat yet," admitted Viotti, interviewed the day after the event. "I'll always keep this incredible feeling: I really thought I was going to fly away." The singer savored every second of this exceptional moment, which seemed very brief to her. Deluges of fire, confetti, cannons and saturated sounds, bareheaded in the wind and rain, amidst the clamors of the audience, she mingled with the elements, lungs deployed – "I sang my heart out," she said – without worrying about the playback required by the open air.
Viotti was contacted almost a year ago by the composer and musical director of the Paris ceremonies, Victor Le Masne. "Then nothing for months. I forbade myself to believe it, despite the little heart Thomas Jolly had sent me," said the mezzo. The singer knows the director well, having worked with him at the Opéra Bastille in 2023 in the production of Gounod's Roméo and Juliette, in which she played the transvestite role of Stephano. She knew from the outset that her accompaniment would be a heavy metal band, though she didn't know which one, and that there would also be an excerpt from Carmen as well as another title.
"With Gojira, we'd never seen each other before, even though I've known their music since I was 16," said the woman who had abandoned classical music after the death of her father, conductor Marcello Viotti, to dedicate her weekends to a metal band based in the town of Belfort. "We worked together for several months on videoconference. They were in the US, where they live. I was in Zurich, performing the title role in Carmen," she said. "We met for the first time just two days before the ceremony in this famous hangar in Seine-Saint-Denis," she said, "and obviously we only rehearsed the music, not the ceremony under real open-air conditions." The mezzo reminded us just how much both types of music are part of her life, just how much opera and metal draw on the same epic source. "On July 26, I let out my first 'growl' [metal's signature guttural sound] in 20 years!" she exclaimed.
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