Jeanne Maubourg (November 10, 1873 – 9 May 1953) was a Belgian operatic mezzo-soprano. She sang with the Metropolitan Opera in New York from 1909 to 1914, taught voice in Montreal, and was heard in Canadian radio dramas in the 1930s and 1940s.
Early life
Jeanne Maubourg was born Jeanne Elisabeth Goffaux in Namur,[1] the daughter of Alexis Hippolyte Goffaux, a musical conductor, and Marie Anne Nottet. (Her birth record gives 1873 as the date;[2] most secondary sources give 1875 as the year.)
Jeanne Maubourg in costume, from a 1900 publication
In 1915 she joined the Chicago Opera for a year, and in 1916 she performed in Montreal, in Gillette de Narbonne. She stayed in Montreal, and she was a member of the Canadian Operetta Society from 1923. Maubourg taught voice students in Montreal,[11] counting among her students Pierrette Alarie,[12]Fleurette Beauchamp-Huppé, Estelle Mauffette, and Monique Leyrac.[13] Film appearances by Maubourg included a role in Le Pére Chopin (1945). She hosted a program on Radio Canada,[13] and acted in the longrunning radio dramas La Pension Velder (1938–1942) and Métropole (1943–1956).[6]
Personal life
Maubourg married three times. She married her first husband, French opera singer Claude Marie Bede Benedict, in 1911.[5] They divorced in 1915.[14][15][16] She married Canadian conductor Albert Roberval in 1918. She married French actor Auguste Aramini in 1947.[17] She died in 1953, in Montreal, in her late seventies. There is a street named for her in her adopted city.[6] Several recordings by Maubourg, from about 1917 and 1924, survive.[18]
