page_title: Rose Renaud
section_title: "Mademoiselle Renaud l'aînée"
hierarchical_section_title: Rose Renaud / "Mademoiselle Renaud l'aînée"
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of the French opera singer Rose Renaud. The poem beneath the portrait reads: "Son Chante facile &amp; doux nous ravit, nous enflâme. / Son gosier est celui du Chantre de nos bois; / Et la pureté de sa voix / Est le symbole heureux de celle de son âme.". English translation: "Her singing, effortless and sweet, ravishes us, sets us on fire, / Her voice is that of a nightingale; / And the purity of her voice / Is the happy symbol of her soul."
context_page_description: Rose Renaud was a French coloratura soprano active at the Théâtre-Italien from 1785 to 1793. She was known for the purity and agility of her voice and her attractive stage presence. Renaud was born in Paris and made her debut in a concert there in 1781 at the age of 14. She retired from the stage in 1793. Her younger sister, Sophie Renaud, was also a soprano at the Théâtre-Italien. In at least two sources, Rose is referred to as "Mademoiselle Renaud l'aînée" to distinguish her from Sophie. However, other sources have posited that Rose and Sophie were in fact the younger sisters of a third singer known as "Mademoiselle Renaud l'aînée" who also sang at the Théâtre-Italien suggesting that aspects of Rose Renaud's biography and iconography and that of her elder sister may have been conflated in some of the existing sources.
context_section_description: According to François-Joseph Fétis in his Biographie universelle des musiciens, Rose Renaud was known as "Mademoiselle Renaud l'aînée"  to distinguish her from her sister Sophie. The same appellation is used in a portrait by De Bréa published in 1785 and entitled Mlle Renaut l'aînée. Reçue à la Comédie Italienne le 19 May 1785 (Mlle Renaut [sic] the elder. Received into the Comédie Italienne on 19 May 1785). The Bibliothèque nationale de France identifies the subject of the portrait as "Rose Renaud".
  De Bréa's portrait of Renaud was accompanied by a poem which read:
  Her singing, effortless and sweet, ravishes us, sets us on fire,
  Her voice is that of the nightingale;
  And the purity of her voice
  
  Is the happy symbol of her soul.
   
  However, in his biography of Méhul, first published in Le Ménestrel in 1884, Arthur Pougin claimed that Fétis was wrong and that there were actually three Renaud sisters, Rose, Sophie, and their elder sister whose first name was unknown but was called "Mademoiselle Renaud l'aînée". Pougin based his account of the Renaud sisters and their relationship to Méhul (especially Rose's) on lengthy quotes from the 1833 memoirs of Antoine-Vincent Arnault, Souvenirs d'un sexagénaire (Souvenirs of a Sexagenarian). Arnault had been a close friend of Méhul from the 1790s and wrote the libretto for his opera Mélidore et Phrosine. 
  In his 1880 Les Comédiens du roi de la troupe italienne, Émile Campardon  likewise refers to three Renaud sisters. In that book most of the biographical data given by Fétis for Rose Renaud is assigned to a singer Campardon calls "Mademoiselle Renaud l'aînée" (no first name given). Campardon refers to a second sister as "Mademoiselle Renaud cadette" (no first name given) who made her debut on 22 October 1785 in the role of Babette in Nicolas Dezède's Le trois fermiers. He refers to Sophie Renaud by name as the third and youngest sister. A contemporary review of Le trois fermiers in Journal de Paris also stated that it marked the Théâtre-Italien debut of "Mademoiselle Renaud cadette" singing the role of Babette and that "Mademoiselle Renaud l'aînée" was also in the cast.
  Further support for the existence of the third and eldest sister comes from a March 1790 review in Le Moniteur Universel of Henri-Montan Berton's opera Les brouilleries, a comédie mêlée d'ariettes in three acts to a libretto by Loeillard d'Avrigny. According to the review and a later account by Arsène Houssaye, Berton  had specifically composed the work for the voice of "Mademoiselle Renaud l'aînée". When illness prevented her from performing in its premiere at the Théâtre-Italien, Rose Renaud sang the role in her place to great success.
  Both Campardon and Pougin assert that it was the eldest of the three sisters who had married Loeillard d'Avrigny, not Rose. The entry for "Renaud" in the German music encyclopedia Encyclopädie der gesammten musikalischen Wissenschaften published in 1837 lists only two sisters, Rose and an elder sister whose first name was unknown, but like Campardon and Pougin, states that it was the elder sister who married d'Avrigny. In Etienne-Nicolas Méhul and Opera, musicologist Elizabeth Bartlet gives the name of d'Avrigny's wife as "Marie-Reine née Renaud".
  According to the entry in Encyclopädie der gesammten musikalischen Wissenschaften, both Rose and her elder sister were born in France but spent much of their childhood in Italy where their father worked as a violinist.
caption: De Bréa's 1785 portrait of Renaud
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)"}