(Credit: Yan-Bleney)

Born in Montreal, Étienne Dupuis has established himself as one of the most distinguished baritones of his generation. Amongst his wide-ranging repertoire, he is especially in demand for Verdi roles. In the 2023-24 season, Étienne made a series of role debuts: as Don Carlo di Vargas in “La forza del destino” at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, in the title role of “Rigoletto” in a new production at the Teatro Real Madrid, as Count Karl Gustav in the world premiere of Bilodeau’s “La Reine-garçon” at the Opéra de Montréal, as Paolo Albiani in “Simon Boccanegra” and Sancho Pança in a new production of Massenet’s “Don Quichotte” at the Opéra national de Paris.
He was also made a Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres de la république de France in 2021.

OperaWire caught up with Étienne via video conference in Washington where he was preparing for another debut, as Macbeth at the Kennedy Centre.

OperaWire: Hello Etienne. Thank you for speaking to OperaWire. I know you’re about to open as Macbeth. How are rehearsals going?

Étienne Dupuis: Big night yesterday: dress rehearsal. Big night tomorrow: opening night. I mean the house here is wonderful, it’s typical, you know, I want to say of North America… I come from Montreal… and this is where I grew up. Washington is very similar in terms of the commitment that people give to what they do with the amount of resources they have. So everyone is pitching in from their own personal passion. So I love these shows because you always feel everyone on stage is enjoying themselves and in the pit as well, backstage as well. You know, it’s not just a job, you know what I mean?

OW: Indeed. And this is your debut in this role. Tell me about how you see the character, Macbeth, how you decided to approach the role.

ED: It’s funny, so, I accepted the role and then I didn’t give it much thought for about a year because I was doing all of these new operas. I did my first “Forza,” my first “Rigoletto,” my first “Boccanegra” ( I was singing Paolo), and “Don Quichotte”… I had so many new operas coming up. But you know, I always played the part in the back of my head. I’m French Canadian, so I grew up in French. Shakespeare is not something that we went towards naturally. There were all these different things that made me feel like an imposter from the get-go, you know? And so, the way I decided to tackle it was to just be…to come at it as a newcomer from someone who wasn’t raised with it.

A lot of people think that the best way to play a role is to partly be that role. Like if you were to cast an opera with a bunch of French Canadians, hire a bunch of French Canadians, then that would be a perfect cast. But then, at the same time, in opera we spend a lot of time playing gods and kings and I’ve played murderers and rapists, I’ve played all sorts of things, and of course I am none of those. So, you know, this is what my brain was telling me, you can do this. And then I remember I got emailed for an interview. It was just like two or three questions. And the questions were all in the vein of: he’s the ultimate villain, he’s the worst scum on the earth human you could think of, how do you get around to play a role like that? And I remember thinking… I don’t think so. Why is he? There’s a context here. He’s in context in the years that he is. The next leader was always going to be the best fighter, right? It was always about survival. So who’s the best fighter, the one that can lead our armies to make sure that we survive? He was the best one. And then once he got there…and this is to me the most interesting thing about him…he really got into those witches and the witches’ predictions. And that is his downfall, because until then he’s doing just fine in this context, in the context of the years he lives in and the people that surround him. But then he starts paying too much attention to what they have to say. And as we know, as an exterior audience, is that everything they say is just one layer of truth, there’s always, another side to everything they say. 

And so…I just thought I would play him like any human today that starts to believe predictions and starts to believe in it, the way they start to believe fate before it happens. So, in this case, for a long time, he’s doomed to be invincible. It’s not a doom but it plays above his head like the Damocles sword and everything he does is informed by this. He wouldn’t take that many risks if the witches hadn’t told him that he can’t be killed you know? So, I decided to play him just as human as I could. Flawed. He loves his wife and he’s manipulated by her. He loves power. He is hurt by not being able to have a descendant, especially a male one, to father a long line of kings. These are all, except for the king’s part, these are all human traits, they’re all common, you see them around us, some of them I’ve experienced either personally or through friends. That’s how I decided to play him, and that’s how I decided to play pretty much all of my characters, I just tried to put them back in context.

OW: Who did you take inspiration from when preparing for the role, and who did you aspire to sound like?

ED: (Laughing) These are two very different thoughts! I listen to Piero Cappuccilli. He’s always my go to guy because I’m not him. That’s why I listen to him. He has this incredible easiness in creating long legato lines. And in the recording I listen to, he actually does something that I didn’t expect. He actually does a lot of sounds that will be like “ugly” sounds. Not ugly, but he’ll make a vowel very bright all of a sudden because he’s playing a character that gets scared from seeing a ghost. I really truly enjoyed that because he can be so wooden and so strong in his immobility. Everything, all the acting, all the intentions are in the singing. And so that’s not me. I’m like, I’m the guy with thoughts and movements and blah blah and then the singing suffers from it. So, I try to listen to people that are not me, like they are the opposite. I listen to Cappuccilli in a lot of roles, but in this particular one, in the “Macbeth” one, he really sold me on it.

There are many things to say about this “Macbeth,” but although Verdi wrote it, it’s different. It’s not Verdi the way we think it is. I asked my friend William Berger, who works at the Met, I asked him: what is “Macbeth?” And he said to me…and he says this to everybody…he says: “early Verdi…. midlife Verdi….. late Verdi…. and ‘Macbeth!’” It doesn’t fit a specific writing era per se, you know, he created it earlier, but then he reworked it just before “Don Carlo.” And it’s in real time. I almost never repeat any sentence. In Verdi operas, if I sing “Traviata,” or “Rigoletto,” or “Trovatore,” or any of the midlife and early works of Verdi, a lot of the lines, you get to repeat. You repeat them over, because he’s creating a musical moment. But “Macbeth” doesn’t do that much. “Macbeth” just talks. His mind races. He’s got these contradicting, conflicting thoughts and Verdi wrote it that way.

So, when I listen to Cappuccilli sing it, he manages to play with those things but just with his sound and just with his voice and that amazes me and I try to emulate some of that whilst, of course, still being myself. Of course, I really, really love Ludovic Tézier as well!

OW: 
I saw your debut last year at the Royal Opera House as Don Carlo di Vargas in “La Forza,” which you sang to great acclaim. You were a replacement stand in, I believe, and this performance seemed to elevate your career somewhat. What do you remember about the performance?

ED: Yes, that was with Brian Jagde. Brian and I love each other, we want to do as much together as we can in the future and I think we will, I have big hopes. It’s still very interesting to me that they called me because their original guy didn’t get his visa. And so, they called me and said, “Can you come and do this?” I think I had maybe a month to learn it. I knew some of it (I was supposed to do it during the pandemic months). But I remember saying, I want to do it because first of all, I love challenges. But I wanted to do it because I wanted to show a big opera house…I wanted to show people where I thought I was going and what I could do. So, “Forza” was the first one…. and that was with Sondra Radvanovsky as well!! She is probably in the top three humans of the singing world! So, I did this, and I think a lot of people in the opera house just kind of went: “Oh, you CAN do this”. And then it just kept going. Then “Rigoletto” came by and “Boccanegra” came by. And now in the future, I have “Boccanegra” and “Macbeth.” and I have “Rigoletto” coming. And that was from the first one, that “Forza.” That was what opened the door to this…. Although, also, before that in Paris I’ve got to say I’d done a “Trovatore” that got people talking as well. I think that’s where probably the “Forza” came from, the “Trovatore” I did in Paris.

OW: You mentioned that you like challenges and looking through your performance credits, I would say you have sung quite a wide-ranging number of roles, some you have only sung once or twice, but I would say you have quite a diverse repertoire.

ED: I do! I’m not going to complain. I love it. I love it. I love being able to touch all these different things. I love that my career is taking me to new places. If I had been one of those singers who only sang the same two or three roles, especially the first 10 years of my career, I don’t think I would be doing that anymore. Now it’s different. Now I’m craving a bit more time, you know, for my family and to spend less time learning new stuff.

OW: So have you sung pretty much all that you aspired to sing or is there still some dream roles that you would love to perform?

ED: Right now, I’m dreaming about sitting down with a team and creating TV shows and movies. These are my dreams at the moment. I call it my midlife crisis (laughing). That’s what I call it. It’s like a self-titled midlife crisis. Because for years and years, you ask yourself every year, am I still happy doing this? It’s important to me to rethink the pros and cons at least once a year, like in any other job! People ask you, like in interviews or, or just in coaching and stuff, and people will say: “why, why are you a singer? What do you like about being a singer? And I reply that I love being on stage. I love telling stories. I love telling stories with the group of people that I get along with. And I think THAT love is starting to not outgrow, but it’s growing bigger than just opera. Opera is still, it’s a frame still. And I’d like to start telling stories going outside of that frame if I can.

Nothing says that those things won’t be linked. Perhaps once we finish working on a project and telling a story we’d like to tell, we’d realize, hey, we’d make a great opera. You know, like, it doesn’t have to be just like a TV show or, I don’t know, five minutes on YouTube or something. But I just want to write stories and collaborate to them in any way I can. So, this is my dream at the moment. But I think there’s… I think in me there’s still a lot that I can use on stage in regard to making people feel something….. like the emotion I can create with an audience…. and it has to do with the psychological arc of a character. So of course, if you’re talking to me about Wagner, like Wolfram or something, there’s an arc, you know, it’s okay. But it doesn’t come to touch me the same as Puccini does, because Puccini’s characters are so like in real time, you know? I’d love to tell a Gianni Schicchi story. Most people think, oh, it’s a comedy. Yeah, it’s a comedy but there’s serious stuff to tell in there. Some of the greatest operas have some really good morals to them. I love to touch those. I mean, Gianni Schicchi is… I’m naming him just because I like the role. There’s many… I don’t know, there’s many. It needs a good team. It needs a good director that’s going to have a great idea for bringing the context back into today. Here, I’m going to say, I’m hesitating because I don’t want to go on a tangent, but I keep thinking that new operas should be more informed about what everyone knows today. Every opera that’s been written usually, the big masterpieces that we play today, usually stem from common knowledge at the time. You know, books that were highly popular, news that everyone had talked about, even mythology that everyone knew about. So, they had the codes. No one went in there, not knowing the codes. They probably had read the book, or if not, people had discussed it with them. Nowadays you sit someone in front of “La Boheme” or a “Carmen” and no one’s read the book, but they still have some of the codes because they’re very famous and popular operas that you can hear in other mediums but then you get them into a different opera something like “Falstaff” for example and they’ve never heard of the “Merry Wives of Windsor.” The whole time they’re like, what is happening? But it’s a genius piece. It’s genius, genius. But I go, how about we write genius pieces today on the events of today? And to facilitate things, we don’t have to write music that is so hard to understand that you need like five degrees just to get the reference of it. Like, you may have ten people in the audience going “wow!” but then you have thousands going, “what?” I think we’re doing a disservice to the art to create only that kind of new opera. So, this is the tangent coming back to what I was saying… I need directors and conductors who are willing to do that with operas we know. We don’t have to change the original setting, necessarily, but we have to change the idea of how we’re going to put things on stage.