Édouard Woolley
Canadian opera singer and actor (1916-1991)
Édouard Joseph Woolley (31 March 1916 – 22 December 1991) was a Canadian tenor, actor, composer, and music educator of Haitian birth. He became a naturalized Canadian citizen in 1958. His compositional output includes masses for three voices and for four voices, a few songs, and some instrumental pieces. The section "Mazoumbel" from his suite for violin and piano Sous les palmiers (c. 1958) was performed in a concert of Haitian music in Montreal in 1979.
Life and career
Born in Port-au-Prince, Woolley began his studies in his native city with Carmen Brouard (piano and harmony), Élisabeth de Pesquidoux-Mahy (singing), Werner Jaegerhuber (German opera/lieder), Raoul Nargys (acting), and Henriette Perret-Duplessis (singing). After working for a few years as a choirmaster at a church in Port-au-Prince, he moved to Montreal in 1938 at the age of 22 where he studied singing with Salvator Issaurel from the time of his arrival through 1944. He then entered the Conservatoire national de musique where he earned a Doctor of Music in 1947 after writing his thesis "La phonétique appliquée à l'art du chant". At the conservatoire he was an organ student of Eugène Lapierre and a piano pupil of Edmond Trudel.
In 1942 Woolley made his professional opera debut as Antonin in Reynaldo Hahn's Ciboulette at Les Variétés lyriques (LVL) in Montreal.
The public source identifies “Édouard Woolley” as canadian opera singer and actor (1916-1991). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Édouard, Woolley and Canadian.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 29, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q8078142. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1916, 1991, 1958 and 1979.
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This entry incorporates text from “Édouard Woolley” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.