She had been enchanting our operatic stages for barely ten years and the future promised her a first-rate career: the Belgian soprano, Jodie Devos, died on Sunday June 16 in Paris following a devastating breast cancer. She was 35 years old. With a pretty face and a look that was both tender and mischievous, the radiant young woman had a clear and brilliant tone, impressive virtuosity and a generous temperament. She should have sung the role of Aminta at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in The Olympiad by Vivaldi under the direction of Jean-Christophe Spinosi, an engagement that she was forced to cancel.
We remember an exceptional concert on June 23, 2022 at the Saint-Denis Festival: Jodie Devos replaced at short notice her compatriot Sophie Karthauser, who was ill, in The Illuminations by Britten, boldly carrying the Rimbaldian vision under the direction of Alexander Bloch at the head of the Lille National Orchestra. Prosodic beauty, quivering musicality, rage and bite, the young woman played with the form of sadism which animates this music by turns caressing and punishing, masterfully handling, like the poet, insult and ecstasy.
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Born on October 10, 1988 in Libramont in Wallonia (Belgium), Jodie Devos began singing in choirs at the age of 5. Trained in dance, the little girl learned the piano at the age of 11, before discovering lyrical art as a teenager. She first studied at the Ciney Conservatory, then at the Royal Higher Institute of Music and Pedagogy in Namur, finally with Lillian Watson at the Royal Academy in London where she obtained a Master of Art in 2013. The singer is revealed at general public the following year after winning second prize and the Musiq3 public prize at the prestigious Queen Elisabeth of Belgium Competition 2014. She then joined the Académie de l’Opéra-Comique in Paris, where she performed in The bat by Johann Strauss, The Musketeers at the convent by Louis Varney.
Queen of the Night at Bastille
Her first Lakmé by Leo Delibes at the Tours Opera in January 2017 immediately places her in the wake of her elder, Natalie Dessay, with whom she shares a taste for theater, and 2019 sees her first Queen of the Night in version stage performance at the Opéra-Bastille, where she already performed the role of Yniold in Pelléas and Mélisande by Debussy. She is also famous Gallant Indies by Rameau, staged in a hip-hop version by Clément Cogitore in October, seven months after having played Blonde in The Abduction from the Seraglio of Mozart at the Monte-Carlo Opera. In July of that same year, she participated in the 150e anniversary of the Chorégies d’Orange, where she plays the young son of the hero in the rare Guillaume Tell by Rossini directed by Jean-Louis Grinda.
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