Opera singer Dame Joan Sutherland died

Thank you for posting this. I had no idea that she was of my parent's generation. In fact, I knew very little about her.

She's one of the very few female opera singers that I could stand to listen to for very long, especially the extremely high-noted sopranos. Some of their notes feel like they are piercing my ear drums.

I've been listening to several interviews of hers today where she talks about the technical aspects of the singing voice. She's amazing.

As the WaPo article mentioned, Sutherland was a big woman with a big voice. In particular, she had a large head, which, I think, helped produce her ringing vocal tone (Pavarotti was another singer with a large head). Really, Sutherland should have gone into the meatier soprano roles -- Wagner and Puccini -- rather than bel canto. Her vocal technique was so good, however, that she became immersed in the bel canto revival of the 1950s. She performed several important roles in Chicago -- unfortunately, a few years too early for me to have seen her. Later in her career her voice became rather woofy -- an occupational hazard for sopranos of a certain dimension -- and she probably retired a couple of years after her "use by" date. Her last role, as Marguerite in Les Huguenots, was a perfect send-off vehicle: one glittering virtuoso aria and then not much else to do over the course of five acts. Still, she was universally respected as both a performer and a mentor to younger singers. She will be missed.

I'm very glad that I was able to hear/see her in a performance of Anna Bolena in 1984. Late enough in her career that it wasn't her best voice - but still extraordinary.

I'm not an opera fan but it was an amazing voice to hear.

JOAN SUTHERLAND

Yesterday was the funeral of soprano Dame Joan Sutherland(1926-2010) whom some have called the operatic voice of the 20th century. Three years ago she said that she “did not want to have anything to do with opera anymore.” Fair enough; she was 80 and had just broken both her legs! Readers of this prose-poem can google all sorts of words of encomium and very little opprobrium about her life. I can hardly add anything to what is known. I am not even an opera buff. I have not read her autobiography published, as it was, in 1997 two years before I finished my 30++year teaching career. Sutherland started to seriously study voice in 1944, the year I was born. Like all babies I, too, was seriously studying voice, of course, in quite a different sense.

Sutherland became a star in 1959 when she sang at the Royal Opera House. 1959 was a big year for me; I joined the Baha’i Faith that year at the age of 15. I could follow my life and Sutherland’s to her death this week and to my own years of late adulthood and life on a pension here in Australia. But I shall take this prose-poem in a different direction; this quasi-eulogy on a person whose voice possessed a crystal-clarity, the finest of diction and was incredible, miraculous.2 The word ‘opera’ comes from the Latin and means ‘work.’ It was invented, writes art critic Kenneth Clark, in the seventeenth century and made into an art form by the Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi(1517-1643). Opera houses were often the largest buildings in a town or city especially in Catholic countries. They came in when churches were going out, Clark continues.1-Ron Price with thanks to 1Kenneth Clark, Civilization, Penguin, NY, 1969, p. 169; and 2 “Joan Sutherland: 1926-2010,” Andrew Patner: The View From Here, 11 October 2010.

People sit and listen to words
they do not understand and to
a plot they do not know---such
an irrational entertainment; it’s
a display of skill and the words
are sung because they are just
too silly, too subtle, too deeply
felt, or too revealing to be said.

There is a very real extension of
human feelings and faculties in a
world where the pursuit of love &
happiness, which had once been so
simple, is now very, very, complex.1

And, Joan, you gave us rock-solid
technique, confidence without any
arrogance, a four-decade career &
you became known, therefore, in a
bel canto style as…..La Stupenda!!

1 Kenneth Clark, op. cit., p. 170.

Ron Price
15 October 2010
-------------------------------------------
I hardly knew you, Joan.
Opera has never been high
on my agenda...You did not
really get going until about
the time I got going back in
the ‘50s…& what a trip you
have had in the last 50 years!

While my own trip has been
taking its incremental story
step-by-step from early and
middle adulthood to the late
years and, who knows, I may
even get to an old age as you
did—surviving as you did to
83!!Both of our careers came
to an end in the 1990s and we
could enjoy final years with so
much to reflect on, eh Joan???

1959 was quite a year for both
of us and there were other years
as well in which we shared some
big events, but I was never in your
league, Joan. You and your voice
and that jaw were bigger than life
while I slid so unobtrusively from
country to country & town to town,
school to school and marriage to….
marriage. I wish you well, Joan, as
you continue your life in the Land of
Lights so different than the lights you
enjoyed on this earthly plain and your
voice, Joan, will you have that voice,
that eternal clear bel canto voice……
praised, as it was, as La Stupenda??!!

Ron Price
16 October 2010