La Stupenda: The Passing of Dame Joan Sutherland

Australia’s much respected soprano, Dame Joan Sutherland, is dead at the age of 83. From 1960 when she made her Italian debut singing in Handel’s Alcina at La Fenice in Venice, she became known as ‘La Stupenda’, cast in shining armour as the saviour of Italian bel canto. While doing secretarial and tailoring courses, she studied singing at the Sydney Conservatorium under the watchful eye of her mother, herself an amateur singer. In 1947, Sutherland made her operative debut before a Sydney audience in Purcell’s Dido, playing the key role of Dido. She then started building up her operatic cache, getting funding to study at London’s Royal College of Music, then joining the Royal Opera House in 1952. That year, the illness of a Humburg State Opera soprano gave her an opportune moment. Amelia’s role in Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera was available and seized with relish.

Being a musical talent on a cultural periphery might well have been a bar to Sutherland, but it never seemed to concern her, given a household that was not averse to operatic records. In various interviews and performances, she seemed to lack that fire and brimstone disposition of the standard diva, proving to be generally even tempered and even, god forbid, well liked. What proved a source of constant concern were her attacks of ill-health that were to plague her through her career.

Her voice itself moderated over time as she began shedding the mezzo-soprano influence of her mother Muriel, creating a purity that thrilled audiences in the 1950s. Due to the persuasion of her lifetime manager, coach and partner Richard Bonynge, she moved from the weighty world of robust Wagnerian exhibitionism to the bel canto genre, something which her Italian patrons at Milan’s La Scala opera house have been ever grateful for. During the 1960s, she would make their stage her operatic home. ‘This is how La Scala remembers Joan Sutherland: not just a master virtuoso, but an obligatory example for all those who have sung Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti after her’ (France 24, Oct 11). Even La Scala did not shy away from claiming Sutherland to be something of a saviour of Italian bel canto, thereby providing ‘the impulse of a re-discovery of forgotten or underestimated titles and above all the force of a new stylistic consciousness’.

Such a move did not go unnoticed: bel canto roles tend to be associated with heroines of lithe and delicate disposition. ‘One of God’s pranks,’ noted Dame Edith Evans, ‘was to make Joan an overgrown schoolgirl and then give her a divine voice’ (Guardian, Oct 11). Sutherland, while possessing an astonishing voice of angelic powers, had a rather different physical stature, though it did not deter the likes of Franco Zeffirelli, who thankfully pushed her in the direction of Donizetti’s Lucia Di Lammermoor even if he did feel she resembled ‘a sergeant in the army with a terrible Australian accent’. From February 17 1959, when she performed the signature role of the mad Lucia before an enthralled Covent Garden audience, her fame was assured.

It is far from easy being a cultural star in a country where sporting pursuits take precedence over cerebral achievement. Matter over mind is a fundamental law ‘down under.’ In his last comedy sketches done in 1968, the British comedian Tony Hancock, playing a ’10 pound’ British immigrant seeking a better world in Australia finds in utter disgust that he is in a country where eight year olds are taught how to swim in superlative fashion. (‘I hadn’t even had my first bath then,’ claims a rueful Hancock.) Every channel suffocates under the monotony of the sporting voice, and rival cultural codes struggle to get a look-in. Hancock dreams of bringing the left-bank Parisian culture to Australia. Sutherland, in contrast, would leave the banks.

The accolades for Sutherland were many. She became something of a magnet for awards, amongst them being appointed a Dame in the 1979 New Year’s Honours list. The late tenor Luciano Pavarotti, who sang along with her at stages, was not reserved when he claimed her as having ‘the voice of the century’. But it will be her passing that will remind opera goers and listeners that a generation of sopranos – where fusion between art and life was the order of the day – is now well and truly gone.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

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