Emma The Diva

Emma Shapplin started her music career in classical music but then moved to hard rock. When she was 18, singer Jean-Patrick Capdevielle convinced her to return to taking classical lessons so as to improve her singing technique. She discovered that although rock had given her more artistic freedom and hedonistic lifestyle than classical music, it was still not enough for her, so she decided to create her own style. This became a combination of archaic opera and modern trance and folk traditional Scottish and/or pop music. Shapplin and Capdevielle subsequently worked together on her first release, Carmine Meo. Capdevielle wrote Carmine Meo as the first part of an Atlantis themed opera, Atylantos, whose 2001 staging and CD release promoted the careers of four other gifted young singers: the French sopranos Chiara Zeffirelli and Jade Laura D’angelis, the Romanian soprano Elena Cojocaru, and the French tenor Nikola Todoravitch.

Although Shapplin was raised speaking French, and sings some of her songs in that language, most of the songs on Carmine Meo were translated from the French in which Capdevielle wrote them into Latin and ancient Provençal dialect, in which Shapplin sang them. On her second release, Etterna, she decided to perform in old (13th-century) Italian. She ...