Here is my Monday October 11 suntimes.com and Tuesday October 12, 2010 Chicago Sun-Times obituary of the great operatic soprano, Dame Joan Sutherland.
JOAN SUTHERLAND | 1926-2010
'Incredible' soprano sang for decades
With a technique universally called "rock-solid," a confidence without arrogance in difficult repertoire, and a four-decade career, it was little wonder that the international operatic soprano Joan Sutherland was known from an early date as "La Stupenda."
The last survivor of the great trio of adventurous postwar bel canto sopranos born in the 1920s, along with Maria Callas and Beverly Sills -- and the one with the longest career and most assured trill by an Australian mile -- Miss Sutherland, 83, died Sunday at her home near Geneva, Switzerland, where she had retired from singing 20 years ago. She had been in declining health since a fall in her garden in 2008.
Although her primary U.S. house was the Metropolitan in New York, she performed major roles at Lyric Opera of Chicago over a quarter century, making her debut with the company in 1961 at 34 in Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor opposite both the tenors Richard Tucker and Carlo Bergonzi. She did not return to Lyric for 10 years, but when she did it was for a major 1971 presentation of Rossini's Semiramide with her longtime friend and colleague, mezzo Marilyn Horne. It also marked Lyric's first live opening-night radio broadcast, over WFMT-FM (98.7).
Two other big Chicago engagements followed quickly: Miss Sutherland took the lead role in Lyric's first performances of Donizetti's comedy The Daughter of the Regiment, with an all-star cast in 1973, and a revival of her Lucia, this time opposite her frequent performance partner Luciano Pavarotti in 1975.
Another 10 years passed before her last return in 1985, when Lyric gave her something that even the Met would not: a company première and a new production of a connoisseurs' work by Donizetti, his Anna Bolena. Miss Sutherland turned 59 during the three-week run and sang with undiminished vocal power and ability.
Lyric's general director William Mason and Brian Dickie, general director of Chicago Opera Theater, spoke of her independently with almost the same words. For Mason, she was "one of the greatest singers of the century." For Dickie, "one of the greatest of all" and, invoking Pavarotti's sobriquet for her, "the voice of the century." Mason recalled "her big, beautiful voice married to a flexibility that was unusual for a voice of that size" and referred to her fabled technique as "incredible." Dickie found it "miraculous."
"She was a defining light for my generation in Britain," said the English-born Dickie. "In her early days in the 1950s, she was a member of Covent Garden in London, along with Jon Vickers and Geraint Evans. She sang around town on every kind of gig. Nothing was too small for her. She already was loved by everyone, and she loved everything. Even after her career took off with a whoosh with Zeffirelli's new Lucia at Covent Garden in 1959, she kept coming to Glyndebourne until 1961, including her historic I Puritani [by Bellini] in 1960.
"After that she was in demand globally," Dickie said. "But she never changed. We had a hilariously happy lunch of take-away fish and chips in Aldeburgh a dozen years ago when she was teaching at the Britten-Pears School."
Over the decades, Chicago critics were not alone in finding her voice sometimes stronger than it was beautiful and her technique more impressive than moving, occasionally referring to her sound and characterization as "icy." So it was hardly surprising that one of her greatest accomplishments came in a recording of a work she never appeared in onstage, the 1972 Decca discs of Puccini's Turandot in which she sang the part of the ultimate ice princess opposite Pavarotti with Zubin Mehta conducting and Montserrat Caballé as Liù.
Her powerful voice also fit as a part of the quartet in Georg Solti's famous 1967 Vienna Philharmonic recording of the Verdi Requiem along with Pavarotti, Horne, and bass Martti Talvela.
The Decca label released a statement from London citing Miss Sutherland's astonishing 40 recordings of 33 different operas for the company over 40 years. She had performed the role of Lucia, including its grueling mad scene, 233 times, according to Decca. Her 1960 double-album recital release for the label, The Art of the Prima Donna, has never been out of print, according to the statement. Recordings, too, allowed her to avoid the issue of her often wooden stage presence.
The tight professional and personal relationship she had since 1954 with her husband, conductor, coach, and fellow Australian Richard Bonynge helped to assure her stardom; Bonynge directed her repertoire toward the Italian bel canto to feature her voice and often cut and rearranged works to highlight her roles, even removing death scenes so that her character would remain alive at opera's end, as in their 1964 recording of Semiramide.
This practice put her in marked contrast with her friend Horne, who threw herself into the scholarly revival of 19th century Italian opera spearheaded by University of Chicago musicologist Philip Gossett. Also unlike Horne, diction was never a major focus.
A former secretarial school student with a strong memory and sense of pitch and a big sound, Miss Sutherland moved from her native Australia, where she was born in Sydney in 1926, to London in 1951 to continue vocal studies.
After a decade with Covent Garden, she made her U.S. debut in 1960 in the American première of Handel's Alcina at the Dallas Opera, a company directed by two of the original founders of Lyric. Her Met debut, as Lucia, followed a year later.
[Joan Sutherland, the Australian opera soprano, arrives at the State Department for a dinner celebrating her and the other Kennedy Center honorees, in Washington on December 4, 2004. Sutherland died Sunday at age 83. (AP)]
Always proud of her Australian background, she also was claimed by many other countries. In 1978, she was made a dame of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II. In 2004 she became a Kennedy Center honoree.
Often called an "anti-diva," Miss Sutherland was family-centered and plainspoken. Her hobbies were needlepoint and gardening, and nothing got in the way of her regular appointments with hair stylists to maintain her matronly coiffure.
When she made a public appearance at The Arts Club of Chicago in 1998 to promote her book The Autobiography of Joan Sutherland: A Prima Donna's Progress, she was brash and jocular. She called mezzo Cecilia Bartoli's coloratura "odd" and claimed not to know of soprano June Anderson, who in the 1980s and '90s at Lyric sang many of what had been Miss Sutherland's roles.
She is survived by her husband, their son Adam, and two grandchildren. She had requested a small and private funeral.
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