Memories of Joan

by Anthony Freud, Houston Grand Opera General Director and CEO

I first heard the news at home over breakfast in a text message from Patrick Summers. Dame Joan Sutherland had died that morning. She was 83, and had been seriously ill for a while, so it wasn’t a complete surprise. But I immediately felt a sharp sense of personal loss that has since deepened considerably. I wasn’t alone in my reaction.

During the twenty years that he conducted regularly in Australia, HGO Music Director Patrick Summers got to know Sutherland well, together with her husband, the conductor Richard Bonynge. “To hear Sutherland is to experience the greatest capabilities of the human singing voice,” says Patrick. “Listen, for example, to Verdi's ‘Santo di Patria’ from his opera Attila, an aria which, on the page, appears utterly unsingable. Yet Joan sails through it with a stentorian ease Verdi could only have imagined. Joan had such professional integrity. There were almost no cancellations in the Sutherland career; she felt a real sense of responsibility to her audiences. Her death is a reminder for HGO to be the type of company where a talent like hers could be recognized, nurtured, and sent into the world with a true sense of her own strong character.”

Dame Joan appeared with HGO in the title roles of Lucrezia Borgia (1975), Anna Bolena (1986) and in a gala concert with Luciano Pavarotti (1987).

I am sure that the world is full of people whose lives were changed by Joan Sutherland. My own passion for opera was kindled by Sutherland.

Her voice was truly miraculous. It was a combination of beauty, scale, volume and agility that was unforgettable. She had a stage presence, a charisma, a magnetism that was unique, totally individual, and set its own rules. Her performances were highly and powerfully theatrical, in their own way. She was much, much more than a great voice. But her voice was truly great: “the voice of the century,” “La Stupenda,” one of the astounding vocal miracles of our, or any other, time.

I was lucky enough to have heard Joan many times, as Violetta in Verdi’s La traviata and the Trovatore Leonora, as the Donizetti heroines Lucia di Lammermoor, Maria Stuarda, Anna Bolena, and Lucrezia Borgia, and in the title role of Massenet’s Esclarmonde.

I first met Joan properly when I worked at Welsh National Opera (WNO) in the mid-1980’s. Joan made the last five or six of her complete opera recordings with the WNO Chorus and Orchestra, all conducted by Richard Bonynge. Whenever I could get the time off work, I attended her recording sessions, either in the Brangwyn Hall Swansea, or the Watford or Walthamstow Town Halls on the outskirts of London. The most memorable were for Bellini’s Norma, with Sutherland in the title role and Montserrat Caballé as Adalgisa, with Luciano Pavarotti and Samuel Ramey as Pollione and Oroveso. Sutherland and Caballé were good friends, although the press and public assumed that there was some sort of rivalry between them, as they had a great deal of repertoire in common. They almost never sang together. Both ladies had a great sense of fun. Arriving for a session one morning, Caballé presented Sutherland with a huge bouquet of flowers. Teasingly, Sutherland said, “Ah, flowers for the diva.” “No, no, no,” said Caballé with lightning speed, “flowers from the diva.”

I had the great privilege of getting to know Joan much better during the decade from 1995, when I served as chairman of the jury of the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World Competition, and Joan was a regular member of the jury. I learned an enormous amount from her: her comments about and to young singers were always highly perceptive, completely honest, and very direct. Not surprisingly, Joan had a profound passion for and deep knowledge of singers and singing, built upon her own immense wisdom and experience.

It is inconceivable to me that Joan is no longer around. Her supreme artistry has given incalculable pleasure to countless thousands around the world. Nobody lucky enough to have heard her in the flesh will ever forget the visceral thrill of her performances, and she left behind an astonishing legacy of great recordings. To anyone who has never heard her on record, I would say: rush to buy a copy of The Art of the Prima Donna, the first great Sutherland recital recording, and play the aria “Bel raggio lusinghier” from Semiramide, or the aria from Attila to which Patrick referred. Your life will never be the same again.

Joan was a stalwart writer of Christmas cards. The last card she sent to Patrick Summers ended with a confession of how she loved to spend her quiet mornings in Switzerland: “Now, after breakfast, I warm up my voice for 10 minutes or so, just to see my old friend again.” That “old friend,” the magnificent and timeless Sutherland voice, now lives on, unforgotten, in the grateful memory of so many.

Wherever she is now, I hope Joan is singing away, doing those breathtaking vocal leaps and trills that we will never forget, running around performing mad scenes, and, of course, nailing those high E-flats every time.

Anthony Freud
Houston, TX
October 13, 2010