Maurice Cazeneuve

A French tenor, born Pierre Antoine Ernest Cazeneuve, who became the Opéra-Comique's light tenor and character actor. A watchmaker and then a cellist before he went on the stage, he sang in the French provinces and at La Monnaie in Brussels from 1898 to 1900, where he created Hans in Blockx's Thyl Uylenspiegel. After his Opéra-Comique debut in 1900 he created more than twenty roles there, among them Goro in the first Paris Madama Butterfly, Maître Subtil in Messager's Fortunio and Torquemada in Ravel's L'heure espagnole. He enlisted in 1914, though past fifty, and was killed at Vauquois in 1915.