Joan Sutherland Archives - Wolfie Wolfgang

The last roses of summer here in my Lewes garden.

wolf01 — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 09:54:00 +0000

It is a glorious day here in Lewes in Southern England but tonight we are promised our first frost. My roses don’t want to know this so I am keeping quiet about it but just in case, I thought I would take a photograph of my small town garden that really doesn’t want to stop flowering yet. It will be especially sad seeing my beautiful Falstaff rose wither on the branch. So I shall enjoy it whilst it lasts.

So here is that song, The Last Rose Of Summer – sung by the American soprano Renee Fleming. It is very beautiful and, of course, sad, as it is used by the German composer Friedrich von Flotow (1812-1883) in his opera Martha (1847):

Tis the last rose of summer,

Left blooming alone,

All her lovely companions

Are faded and gone.

No flow’r of her kindred

No rosebud is nigh

To reflect back her blushes,

Or give sigh for sigh.

I’ll not leave thee, thou lone one,

To pine on the stem,

Since the lovely are sleeping,

Go, sleep thou with them

Thus kindly I’ll scatter

Thy leaves o’er the bed,

Where thy mates of the garden

Lie scentless and dead.

So soon may I follow

When friendships decay;

And from love’s shining circle

The gems drop away

When true hearts lie wither’d

And fond ones are flow’n

Oh! Who would inhabit

This bleak world alone?

I would have played Joan Sutherland’s 1961 performance of this song before now if she hadn’t always done it without the last verse but now I have said that, I can hardly leave the great soprano out of this blog (I try to include her wherever I can because I have never been able to hear too much of her) so here she is with that incomparable accompanist Gerald Moore.

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Viva l’Italia! – wolfie is learning Italian.

wolf01 — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 22:01:00 +0000

“Ieri sera ho iniziato un corso di 20 settimane in lingua italiana presso l’Università
del Sussex” – or, in plain English, last night I started a twenty week course in Italian at Sussex University which is only a five minute train journey from my home in Lewes.

I have always loved Italy and Italian culture and can, as they say, “get by” in Italian whenever I go there but now I have decided to take this seriously and to try and become fluent in speaking, reading and writing Italian – wish me luck. “Wolfie buona fortuna!”

I had Italian lessons when I studied singing at the Royal Academy of Music in London a long time ago and I have always listened to Italian opera with a passion so I do have a weirdly melodramatic grasp on every day Italian even if a raise the odd smile with some of my phrases. It is amazing how far you can get with a basic working knowledge of the operas of Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, Verdi and Puccini. Now it is time to get a bit more down to earth. So far so good but it is going to be hard work.

Before then though, here are Luciano Pavarotti and Joan Sutherland in the love duet from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor but I shall try to loose some of my Australian-Italian accent learnt during my boyhood obsession for Sutherland’s opera recordings. Pavarotti, of course, sang it like a native.

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Joan Sutherland steals the show at her Memorial Service at Westminster Abbey

wolf01 — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 23:20:00 +0000

Joan Sutherland 1926-2010

As you can see above, yesterday I was in London for the Service of thanksgiving For the life and work of Joan Sutherland – one of opera’s greatest voices and, I have to admit it, one of my personal lifelong obsessions. After seeing her perform on many indelibly memorable occasions, this was the last gig and, true to form, it was exciting, moving and also uniquely improbable.

There is nothing understated about Westminster Abbey – most English and then United Kingdom monarchs have been crowned here since 1066 and most of them, including Edward the Confessor, Henry V, Elizabeth I, Mary, Edward VI, Charles II and George II are buried here too. Elizabeth and Mary, rivals in life, are united here in death with their unlucky cousin, Mary Queen of Scots who, in Donizetti’s opera Maria Stuarda became the last operatic heroine that I saw Joan Sutherland perform.

Joan Sutherland, it has often been said was as straight-forward and “ordinary” a woman as she was extraordinary in her talents so I could not help but feel amazed that so many people were here in this momentous building so celebrate so unassuming a person.

Not only were we in the burial place of monarchs but the Abbey also has the graves of Chaucer, Purcell, Newton, Darwin, Dickens, Dr Johnson, Handel, Tennyson, Vaughan Williams, Gladstone and Pitt. In other words, we were sharing the space with the seriously great.

Prince Charles and the Dean of Westminister, Dr John Hall

There was plenty of pomp and circumstance, from the clergy in their medieval copes to the Australian High Commissioner and the Prince of Wales in their city suits …..

John Major arriving at Westminster Abbey

….not to forget that greyest of men in grey suits, our former prime minister, John Major, who accompanied his wife Norma who wrote a rather dull Sutherland biography and, yesterday, read one of the lessons. The Westminster Abbey choir sang Byrd and Vaughan Williams gloriously and the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden under its conductor, Antonio Pappano, played music from a Sutherland speciality, Handel’s opera, Alcina before the first moving incongruency raised the temperature when this most solemn of God’s houses echoed to the prelude to Verdi’s great opera about a fallen woman, La Traviata, another Sutherland triumph. Italian opera had released its earthly charm into this hallowed place and the vast congregation didn’t miss the significance.

In the end, for all the magnificence and dignity, it was two Sutherland recordings that, as in life, stopped the show when they were relayed on a hi-fi enthusiast’s dream of a sound system in this sensational accoustic. First Handel’s Let The Bright Seraphim from the album “The Art of the Prima Donna” stirred the emotions and brought many a glitter to the congregation’s eyes and then, what else, her limpid, technically perfect and exquisitely beautiful recording of Casta Diva from Bellini’s opera Norma.

Really, for all the dignity of the occasion, all we really needed was those two recordings in that glorious Gothic abbey. Perfection.

It was a very special moment, it felt as if the great singer was amongst us one last time. it has been said many times, I know, but we will never hear her like again.

Then it was time to leave, the sadly lonely figure of Sutherland’s widower and musical inspirer, Richard Bonynge walked down the nave on his own after the clergy and the royal party and then, I had to smile, the grandchildren and other relatives followed behind and some of them bore the unmissable facial features, including that most determined of jaw lines, of the great lady herself. Immortality comes in many ways.

It was a lovely final touch to leave the abbey to the sound of the bells ringing in Sutherland’s honour.

…and just as it was impossible to expel the smell of greasepaint from the Abbey, so is it important to remember this great artist in life, on stage in the opera house where she belonged. Here she is way back in the early 1960’s in an American telecast of her singing the ferociously and excitingly difficult last act aria from Bellini’s I Puritani.

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Sutherland as Tosca and me forgetting Maria Callas for a moment.

wolf01 — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 00:01:00 +0000

After all the obituaries of the great Australian soprano, including my quite personal recollections last week here on this site, I thought i had said my last words on Joan Sutherland but then I came across this clip on Utube singing part of act two from puccini’s opera Tosca – a part forever associated with that other great soprano, Sutherland’s near contemporary, Maria Callas who was also a great Lucia in Donizetti’s opera Lucia di Lammermoor.

Now that sadly both prima donnas have left us, maybe it is time to stop taking sides on who was better at what. I loved Sutherland in Lucia and will always find it near impossible to hear anyone else sing it even though I respected Callas’s dramatic intensity and control over her sensational but wayward voice in the part.

Simmilarly, having only heard Sutherland tackle the act two aria from Tosca, “Vissi d’arte”, I could never imagine her singing the part on stage and I will always love Maria Callas in that part more than in anything else that she did.

It was a surprize for me then to come across this clip made in 1968 when Sutherland sang part of that second act with the sensational, Italian baritone, Tito Gobbi as Baron Scarpia, the evil chief of the Roman police who wants to have his way with her as the price of releasing her lover. Gobbi, still the supreme Scarpia played the role many times with Callas but this short scene was his only time singing any of the role with Joan Sutherland.

I dreaded seeing it thinking that the comparison between the prima donnas would be odious and unfair but….yay! …..the Australian did good.

She would never match Callas as an actress, of course, no other soprano ever has, but she is perfectly good in the part and a lot better than many other sopranos with much less voice. Callas was unique in her greatness as an actress on the operatic stage and, it is somehow a distraction for any of us to look for anyone else to match her art.

Sutherland was a big woman with a big voice and she was capable of singing anyone off the stage in pure vocal terms. She struggled to bring dramatic intensity to her physical movements and preferred to compensate by doing it all with the voice. She was taller than Gobbi just as she was usually taller than many of the tenors that she sang with on stage even in their customary platform heels and she developed that habit of bending forward and scrunching herself up but, just as her facial expressions are familiar from similar situations of anguish in hundreds of her other roles, she does more than enough to give us a dramatic account of Floria Tosca’s predicament and, of course, her’s is a sensational account of the music with none of Maria Callas’ sour vocal difficulties and a beauty of tone that is sustained throughout her range with, as you can hear when comparing the size of the voice with Gobbi’s, a voice that was thrillingly gigantic too.

When Gobbi suggested that they do the part together on tour, she refused knowing that she had many other opportunities of showing of her accomplishments without tempting providence in the role of her greatest rival for greatest soprano of the Twentieth Century. The relatively few Puccini roles that she took on stage was a disappointment – I would have loved to see her Princess Turandot – but she knew what she was doing and we should all be grateful for what she gave us.

I regret that we have no one of the calibre of Sutherland or Callas today and that we are unlikely ever to hear their like again so I have put my prejudices behind me and just enjoyed this scene for what it is – operatic genius. I suggest you do the same.

Tito Gobbi, by the way, right at the end of his career when he did this can show us all how powerful opera can be when acting comes together in both voice and body – he too was unique.

Oh yes and that Oakleys’ For Sale sign across the road. Yep, still there in spite of their promise.

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STEPHEN DEARSLEY’S SUMMER OF LOVE BY COLIN BELL

My novel, Stephen Dearsley’s Summer Of Love, was published on 31 October 2013. It is the story of a young fogey living in Brighton in 1967 who has a lot to learn when the flowering hippie counter culture changes him and the world around him.

You can pre-order the book from the publishers, Ward Wood Publishing:

http://wardwoodpublishing.co.uk/titles-fiction-colin-bell-stephen-dearsleys-summer-of-love.htm

…or from Book Depository:

http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/Stephen-Dearsleys-Summer-Love-Colin-Bell/9781908742070

…or from Amazon:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Stephen%20Dearsley’s%20Summer%20Of%20love

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My schoolboy crush on an Australian singer called Joan Sutherland

wolf01 — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 23:24:00 +0000

I was an excitable schoolboy living in exciting times and I must have had a thing about groups beginning with the letter B. There was The Beatles, of course, the band that turned me on, tuned me in and so nearly drove me to dropping out, but that wasn’t the only exciting music for this strange English boy. There were also the Barenboims, the brilliant young pianist Daniel Barenboim and his charismatic young cellist wife Jacqueline Du Pre who rolled with Beethoven and lit up Elgar, and then there was Pierre Boulez, the avant garde French composer and conductor who was regularly conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra at The Proms in London’s Royal Albert Hall thrilling me immediately and permanently with the works of Debussy, Ravel, Bartok, Stravinsky, Webern and, yes, even Schoenberg.

I was very lucky too to witness the great showman himself, one Leonard Bernstein who not only set me dancing to Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony but who also introduced me to the symphonies of one of my other youthful obsessions, Gustave Mahler.

…and then there were The Bonynges! What can I say about them without convincing you that I was a deranged and obsessive kid who needed a spell in the army to knock some sense into him. Believe it or not, that is what my godfather told my father but that is another story. The Bonynges (dramatic coloratura soprano beyond compare, Joan Sutherland and her husband, the conductor Richard Bonynge) were my principal obsession for more years than I am willing to admit.

I discovered opera early and might have been a walk-over for any average opera singer singing Puccini and Verdi, if I hadn’t, one day, on the radio, heard this voice. Was it a human? that was my first reation. Had it been “improved”by some electronic wizardry, I wondered. Whatever it was, it stunned me and excited me in a way that no other music had ever managed before except maybe a tune called Zambezi that I used to beg my father to play when I was aged about three. The singer was, of course, Joan Sutherland, who died on Sunday, and the music was the aria “Casta Diva” from Bellini’s opera Norma. People argue to this day about who was the greatest 20th. century Norma, one of opera’s most difficult roles, was it Maria Callas or was it Joan Sutherland? Well, for you opera nerds out there, I would say it was neither! I think the American soprano Rosa Ponselle combined all the qualities and techniques needed in this ferociously difficult masterpiece when she performed it in the early decades of the last century…just listen to her records if you don’t believe me. But, for sheer vocal beauty and perfect technique, Joan Sutherland was queen of them all. I was extremely fortunate to have heard her perform Norma twice in the theatre – especially as she was partnered on both occasions by another of the “Bonynges”, the American mezzo soprano, Marilyn Horne. Here though is Sutherland performing “Casta Diva” in the days of black and white telecasts with very small choruses and terrible sound. It still blows my socks off.

So I was bitten by the so-called Bel Canto bug especially when the Bonynges were performing the operas by the early 19th. Italian composers, Bellini, Donizetti and Rossini. Joan Sutherland, exciting on record was sensational when heard live. The voice was not only perfectly controlled, thrillingly virtuosic with its trills and roulades but it was also capable of reaching high notes that I didn’t realize singers even dreamed about and it was, something not always apparent on record, a gigantically big voice. When I first heard her in concert, at the Royal Albert Hall, in a seat that was practically in the ceiling, I could hear every note pinning me to the wall. I will never forget it.

So I went to everything that The Bonynges performed in Britain at that time, largely an unfamiliar repertoire and, as far as I was concerned they could do no wrong. There was Norma with Marilyn Horne and Donizetti’s Daughter of the Regiment with a young and relatively thin, Italian tenor called Luciano Pavarotti who brought the house down and became an instant star with his stunning sequences of top C’s. Sutherland was never worried about being over-shadowed by other great singers so Horne and Pavarotti were, as far as I was concerned, part of The Bonynge band.

I was a schoolboy, remember, and my enthusiasm did, eventually get me into trouble. All that hanging around the stage door at Covent Garden paid off for the enthusiastic young autograph collector but signed programmes soon paled into insignificance. After one performance of The Daughter of the Regiment which I attended in my “sunday suit,” I was inspired to ask Joan Sutherland to sign the back of my starched collar and for her husband Richard Bonynge to sign my shirt cuff. They obliged because they liked to encourage my enthusiasm, I thought, even though Sutherland did throw me quite an “old fashioned” look. I wore the trophy the next day, Sunday, for school chapel. I was singing in the choir and had forgotten that I was seated directly in front of the head master’s wife who was definitely not amused so I suffered, and celebrated, my first piece of operatic martyrdom, when I was sentenced to two hours “detention”. I have that grubby shirt collar and cuff to this day and, significantly I like to think, I cannot even remember the headmaster’s name.

Singing was my passion in those days – especially as I was lucky enough to be a tenor. Whilst still a schoolboy I was asked to sing the tenor solos in Handel’s Messiah. It was my first time singing with an orchestra and I was very excited and more than just a little stage-struck. It also happened, by coincidence that The Bonynges were back in London doing their rather unconventionally bel canto version of Messiah too. I got a ticket, loved it and went to the stage door with my copy of the vocal score and asked Sutherland to write me a message on the page before my first entry. She obliged and wrote a note wishing me luck with my first “tenor effort.” Joan Sutherland’s message was in front of me as I stood up that night with the chorus and orchestra behind me, a large audience in front of me and my heart in my throat. Naturally, that score is still a prized possession.

My school days were memorable for many reasons but there will always be something special about my experiences with The Bonynges, the performances already mentioned but, maybe more than any of them, a concert performance of Rossini’s, at that time, unknown opera, Semiramide, with Sutherland as the Babylonian Queen and Marilyn Horne, improbably but magnificently, as her heroic son Arsace. to this day, I have not heard singing of such supreme quality or excitement. So forgive the video tape damage on this antique recording, you won’t hear the like of these singers again:

I went on to work in television some years later and with my arts television hat on, I had a number of further meetings with Joan Sutherland and Richard Bonynge. I was always trying to make a programme with them before Sutherland’s voice deteriorated but it was not to be. I had, though, a memorable dinner with them in London, where a few whiskeys got me going about my youthful excesses and, many years later I visited them at their home in Switzerland, where, sadly Dame Joan died this week. She had retired from singing at that stage but, still talking about singing, the Bonynges and me, Joan Sutherland, sitting in a chair next to mine, demonstrated what she meant by breath control, and, sitting upright in her seat, she took one of her epic breaths and sent forth, for the last time in my life, a phrase both perfectly controlled and still full of beauty.

My last meeting was in San Francisco, where now no longer a schoolboy but an executive producer, I was making a co-production with American television of a gala concert celebrating the reopening of the San Francisco Opera House. Sutherland was merely making a presentation, wearing an evening dress that one journalist said was as big as Australia, Richard Bonynge was conducting and Marilyn Horne was singing. Not long afterwards I decided to leave the world of television behind me but not before recognising how lucky that schoolboy was that he could have seen and heard such things and yet still managed to carry his obsessions into his working life.

In that morbid way that obsessives have, I have dreaded this day for a long time. The day that the World no longer has Joan Sutherland – supreme singer, quirky lady and shy private person. I shall miss her. If you haven’t seen it before, and you are still with me now, you can’t go without seeing what all the fuss was about when she gave that sensational performance of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. As they say in programme notes, on her wedding night, Lucia murders her husband and goes mad. Sutherland was born for the part and will always be remembered for it.

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