Mario Lattré

Born in the Spanish region of Aragón in either 1940 or 1941, Lattré studied at the Barcelona conservatory for five years. His career, though, was entirely French. He made his debut, if it can be called that, on 29 January 1965 on – Télé-Dimanche, a popular TV program. He was quite a sensation, and quickly made a lot of records. And he remained a fixture on French TV, where he would sing with people like Nana Mouskouri; likewise, he appeared on the radio.

He also sang mixed concerts of operatic excerpts and light music throughout France and in Switzerland (and probably also in America, in 1969 – at least he signed a contract for that tour). Photos that show him as Rodolfo are no proof that he ever sang on stage, they were made for his (only) operatic LP. But it would seem that he sang the Luis Mariano operetta La belle de Cadix in Le Mans: there is an (undated) photo from the estate of Marcel Servoise, the long-term director of the Le Mans theater (1945–75!), signed and dedicated by Lattré "Pour M. Marcel avec mon meilleur souvenir de ma 1re Belle de Cadix" (see left column). He sang through the end of the 1980s.

In a 1969 interview, Lattré said that opera was in a deep crisis, that it had been a popular art in the beginning, that it had decayed to "a spectacle for the initiated, reserved for the bourgeoisie", and that he wanted to help popularizing it again by singing both opera and vaudeville. Whether he said so because he had failed to gain a foothold in the operatic business, or whether he didn't really try to gain that foothold because he saw opera as too bourgeois, I cannot decide.

Already in the 1960s, he started to make sculptures besides his musical career: first in wood, later in terracotta, and eventually also in bronze. He sculpted just for himself, amassing a large collection. Only in 2013 (he still lived in France at that time), he ventured the idea of perhaps exhibiting his sculptures, but it would seem that he never did.

Reference 1: Le Nouvelliste, 2 April 1969; reference 2: Ouest France, 19 September 2013; reference 3: Le Confédéré, 23 January 1971; reference 4: La Liberté, 27 January 1989; reference 5: Gazette de Lausanne, 20 November 1965; reference 6: Le Républicain du Bazadais, 28 October 1967; reference 7: Le Progrès de Cornouaille, April 1967 & December 1977