Born into a performing arts family (her mother a classical dancer and her father a theater technical director), Jeanne Crousaud received comprehensive musical training from a very young age, learning violin, piano, music theory, classical dance, and singing. After attending the Paris Conservatory (studying with Malcolm Walker, Anne le Bozec, and Susan Manoff), she joined the Lyon Opera Studio and then won three prizes at the Georges Liccioni Competition. She was subsequently entrusted with two leading roles simultaneously: Ciboulette in Offenbach’s Mesdames de la Halle at the Lyon Opera Studio, and The Little Prince in Michaël Lévinas’s eponymous opera at the Théâtre du Châtelet, the Lausanne Opera, the Geneva Opera, and the Lille Opera, in which she achieved great success. These two roles immediately defined the young singer’s dual career.
A section dedicated to contemporary musical and theatrical creation, carrying out collaborations with the most performed composers of this century: Michaël Lévinas for The Little Prince and Euphonia, Francesco Filidei for The Flood, Proesie (Festival Milano Musica, Mantua, Pisa, Lucca) and Il Cantico delle Creature (Genoa Opera), Jules Matton for The Odyssey (Imperial Theatre of Compiègne, Limoges Opera, Rennes Opera), Violeta Cruz for The Light Princess (Opéra Comique and Lille Opera), Jean-Luc Hervé, Benjamin Attahir, Dmitri Kourliandsky, Franck Bedrossian. The other, dedicated to the French, Mozartian, and Italian operatic repertoires: she has been heard as Ophelia in Hamlet at the Opéra de Saint-Étienne, Blondchen in The Abduction from the Seraglio at the Opéra de Tours, Aspasia in Mitridate, Fantasia in A Trip to the Moon at the Opéra de Montpellier, Reims, and Metz, Elvira in L’Italiana in Algeri, Donna Anna in Don Giovanni, Marie in La Fille du régiment, Clorinde in Isouard’s Cendrillon, Arthur in La Nonne Sanglante, Musetta in La Bohème, and Nicette in Le Pré-aux-Clercs at the Opéra Comique. Deeply committed to the theatrical development of the characters offered to her, she recently sang Ophelia in Hamlet, directed by K. Warlikowski, and Marie in La Fille du régiment, directed by L. Pelly and conducted by E. Pidò, at the Opéra National de Paris.
Passionate about research on time and space, Jeanne has been working for a year on directing, set design, and the conception of multidisciplinary projects (Squeak Boum at the Rennes Opera, Théâtre de l’Athénée, Théâtre de Cornouaille, Grand Théâtre de Caen, and Le Quartz in Brest; Proesie at the Teatro Gerolamo in Milan, Palazzo Ducale in Mantua, and Domaine Dello Scompiglio in Lucca); Soprano (Rennes Opera, Avignon Festival, then touring theaters and opera houses in France); and also collaborates with a team of pulmonology researchers at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital on a project to capture and materialize breath.