Ximena Uribe Steps Into My Grandmother's Shoes
Thursday, May 01, 2014
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| Ximena Uribe, Manila 1901 |
My grandmother was an excellent coloratura
soprano. She prided in her ability to sing Lucia in Gaetano
Donizeti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. She never sang the part on an opera stage.She was to have made her debut in mid 1899.
Unfortunately a few months before the famous Sarah Bernhart had scandalized
Manila with her
travesty performance as the Florentine minstrel in François Coppé's Le Passant.
My grandmother’s parents, José (a rich
Baker according to stories my grandmother told me) and Ventura Reyes were
present at the Ateneo de Manila and were profoundly shocked. They soon found
out that Bernhart had been a courtesan in the 1860s.
When my grandmother
Lolita informed her parents of her debut as a promising young opera singer with
talent, Pepe Reyes put his foot down telling her that opera singers and
actresses were all prostitutes. His daughter was not going to be one of those. And
that was the end of my grandmother’s promising career as an opera singer. Through
the years she was often asked to sing the Ave María the one composed by
Francisco Guerrero at church weddings. I can attest that my grandmother had a
terrific voice and volume to fill a cathedral.
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| Sarah Bernhardt |
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| José & Ventura Reyes |
In our family album
there is this picture under which my mother wrote the name Ximena Uribe in
white ink. One day I asked her who the woman with the smile was. I was told, and my mother, too, smiled that
Ximena had been a rival to Lolita and in spite of being an almost as good coloratura
soprano; Lolita and Ximena had been good friends. When Lolita had to decline her
part in the Donizeti opera, Ximena stepped into her shoes and by all accounts she
was a success. In later years she had eventful appearances in the fine opera
house of Mondragón in the Basque Provinces in Spain.
As for Sarah Bernhart,
her name persisted in our family for years. My mother was a drama queen and a
hypochondriac. From her early childhood she was often told that she was just
like “La Bernhart.”
