Loraine Sauvage

Born into a family of artists — her mother sang and acted, her grandmother began teaching her piano at the age of four — Loraine Monteagle-Sauvage, known as Loraine Sauvage, discovered her singing voice at fifteen. She trained at the conservatoire, earning diplomas in voice, musical training, and piano accompaniment.

From adolescence she performed on stage in the great roles of the lyric repertoire — La Traviata, Norma, Thaïs, Madame Butterfly, The Queen of the Night — revealing a dramatic coloratura soprano voice. For nearly ten years she competed in international competitions from Paris to Ukraine, singing with the Odessa Symphony Orchestra, while teaching voice at the Conservatoire de Paris.

In 2003 she founded her own lyric company, L'Arène Sauvage, before leaving the Parisian stages to settle in Brittany, at the Moulin de Pen ar Vern, which she transformed into a place of creation: the Moulin Opéra. There she devoted herself to teaching, describing herself as a "midwife of voices" — "there is no such thing as an ugly or nasal voice, the knots are psychological," she likes to say — and opened one of the first lyric singing workshops held entirely outdoors.

It was there that she imagined Triptyque Opéra Sauvage, taking the title role of Bellini's Norma across three sites of Breton heritage — the théâtre de Morlaix, the open-air théâtre de verdure in Huelgoat, and the Moulin Opéra — drawing nearly 1,500 spectators in 2010. Passionate about the meeting of voice, heritage, and nature, she continues this work of open-air lyric creation today.