So here goes.
REMEMBERING JOAN SUTHERLAND
I may sound like a doe-eyed stalker at times, but hear me out: Joan Sutherland is one of the greatest voices that ever walked on earth.
I hear alarm bells ringing, feathers being ruffled and knickers being twisted. From every corner the Callas and Tebaldi queens are up in arms, carrying live recordings and scores like Biblical prophets, pronouncing my doom. “Sutherland is a Clotilde, and should stay that way!” screams one, referring to Joan’s early years as a Covent Garden comprimaria when she played Clotilde to no less than Maria Callas’ Norma. “Sutherland sings gibberish!” screams another, referring to her infamous diction problem which plagued her from the ‘60s, when consonants get ploughed off in order to provide a smooth highway of rounded vowel tones. “Sutherland can’t act!” “Sutherland can’t emote!” “Sutherland is a note machine!”
The list goes on and on. I tell you, the Australian soprano has made a lot of enemies during her 40-year career. Born in 1926 to a musical family in good ole’ Sydney, Joan was lucky to have as a mother an amateur mezzo-soprano who studied with a pupil of Mathilde Marchesi, the doyenne of the mysterious bel canto, an Italian idiom of singing associated with long-breathed phrases (giving rise to rumours of third lung in some err, statuesque singers), ethereal beauty of tone, and limitless assortments of party tricks, namely trills, mordents, gruppetti, acciacature, esclamazio viva, esclamazio languido, portando, filato... the list went on and on, and Sutherland mastered them all. She went on to win a singing competition and went to England on her prize winnings, earning a living as an auxiliary singer at the legendary Covent Garden.
The young Joan Sutherland was shy, awkward and reticent. Studious by nature, her greatest joy seemed to be sitting between acts, catching up on her knitting. Knitting! An utterly un-diva hobby! Then she met Richard Bonynge, pianist extraordinaire, so-so conductor but an amazing coach, who quickly turned a drip into a goddess of singing. Her coaching sessions became stuff of legend. Old-timers would often chuckle when remembering how Joan discovered a sheepish Richard had been transposing her arias a perfect fifth higher, and how one time fearing for her voice, Joan shrieked an F# in altissimo at poor Richard (basically, that’s a note where only dogs would have been able to understand her). Naturally they made a perfect couple: they married just in time for Joan’s legendary Lucia. Yes, The Lucia that had earned the article “The”, with a capital T.
Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, a tragedy of Shakespearean majesty, had long been a province of so-called canaries, insubstantial voices cooing away roulades like Russian marionettes. Although a very dramatic work by nature, its artistic values had only been recently restored by Maria Callas, who turned the famous mad scene into a Rodin sculpture full of intricate musical details. Naturally Joan had a very heavy task at hand, convincing people of her capabilities and also restoring honour to Donizetti’s masterpiece. And she performed the task with flourish, and by the end of the evening her place at the pantheon of song was assured.
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| A painting inspired by Joan Sutherland's mad scene from Lucia di Lammermoor |
Oh, how wonderful it would have been to be in the audience that night! Reports of Joan’s red locks flaming down her shoulders, Lucia’s white dress drenched in the blood of her unfortunate husband, dashing across the stage like a bewildered panther, all the while singing the most difficult music written in the 17th century. Callas was in the audience that night, and she was by all accounts enchanted by her former Clotilde’s massive success in one of the most important make-or-break roles of Italian repertoire.
Since that Lucia another success came in the form of what has been time and again called the most important classical vocal album of the 20th century: The Art of the Prima Donna. Made as a tribute to past pre-recording era divas such as Malibran, Patti and Pasta, the album was a massive hit, making Joan the Lady GaGa of her times. Here was a coloratura soprano, with a voice as massive as the continent from which she hailed, tackling music that had not been sung for one hundred years because of their difficulty, and running away with bloody murder. Even more surprising was Joan’s rendition of the fabled Willow Song from Verdi’s take of Otello: a silvery thread caressing the musical line, echoing the sad call of the mournful wind – Joan became Desdemona.
Early on the voice was silvery: a shimmering timbre full of opulent notes, capable of earth-shattering acuti and impressive locomotion. The speed of her rendition of famous cabalettas was legendary, as if defying laws of physics. And when she lets loose with her famous high Ds and E flats, it was like a meteor flashing across the heavens. Even more important than the fact that she conquered all the important stages five years after The Lucia, she began to unearth lost works like Beatrice di Tenda, Les Huguenots and Emilia di Liverpool, while touring the civilized world with bel canto bread-and-butter works like La sonnambula, I puritani, Semiramide and the queen of them all, Norma. She became La Stupenda, the stupendous one, to the hard-to-please loggione of La Fenice Opera in Venice. Then Massenet’s Esclarmonde happened.
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| Joan Sutherland as Esclarmonde (Met 1976) |
Hearing Esclarmonde, a love story between a Byzantine witch-empress and a Crusader knight, for the first time, I can honestly tell you I did not sleep the night afterwards. How can one sleep when one keeps hearing Esclarmonde summoning her minions, demons of air and of water and of fire with staccati top Bs? How can one sleep when one keeps hearing Esclarmonde and Roland’s extremely erotic love duet, just musical phrases licking off each other, with sexual tension the likes which had never been heard since L’Incoronazione di Poppea? How can one sleep when one keeps hearing Esclarmonde’s desperate rage at Roland when he pulls off her veil, the mark of her powers, in front of a legion of overzealous priests? How can one sleep when one keeps on picturing the confrontation scene between Esclarmonde and the priests who tried to bumrush her, when she overwhelms an entire ensemble of men with a massive D in alt? Not even the artless cover (depending on which version you get, it’s either Joan in full costume as Esclarmonde or just a picture of three gems) could deny that Joan’s Esclarmonde album should receive UNESCO Heritage status. Bellatrix Lestrange who? This Esclarmonde is one far more dangerous witch to cross.
With that Esclarmonde allegations that Sutherland cannot act was laid to rest. Nobody needs to act when one can draw vivid Kubrick-esque images in the audience’ mind just by singing the notes. But La Sutherland was not one to rest on her laurels. “Oh no she didn’t!” screamed the critics when she announced she was donning the iron claws of Turandot.
Now let’s put this into perspective: Turandot, the final work of Puccini (poor thing never did complete it, succumbing to carcinoma larynx) had a reputation of being a voice wrecker. Much like its bel canto sisters, Norma or the three Donizetti Queens; or its Wagnerian cousin, Brünnhilde; or its modern music grand-daughter Marie (in Wozzeck), Turandot could make a soprano famous or shatter her voice beyond all recognition (case in point: Guleghina’s 2009 Metropolitan Opera outing as the Pekingese princess). The issue of diction also came forward: Puccini was all about text, so how can a soprano whose greatest weakness is her consonants, or her lack thereof, could communicate the awesome libretto?
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| The recording session of Zubin Mehta's Turandot, 1972 |
When the result came out, it was like the nerdy guy who wears glasses who one day puts them away and reveals Wang Lee Hom’s eyes. Supported by the two greatest lyric voices of the day, namely Luciano Pavarotti (gasp!) and Montserrat Caballé (even more gasp!), Joan Sutherland took flight and became the greatest Turandot on record. Here was a Turandot who was capable of fulfilling all the demands of the score, but still managed to sound womanly. Her In questa reggia was monumental: I literally saw flashes of white light when Sutherland’s and Pavarotti’s top C’s rang out together. Her riddle scene was full of contempt and sneer, and complete with a chest voice so poisonous I wondered how Pavarotti could have sung his reply. And all the consonants amazingly survived! They floated on the Sutherland cruise and arrived on the port safely! The glorious ending scene was what it truly was: glorious, and the sceptical critics begrudgingly called her interpretation “possibly the best”.
And then the mistakes came. Joan Sutherland, like many other great divas before her and like many other great divas after her, clung on too long. Her Adriana Lecouvreur was the sort of recording people put on at parties just for laughs. She took on Lucrezia Borgia too late, when her voice has turned crone-like as opposed to maternal. Her Anna Bolena was saved only by her extreme commitment to acting, but it was painful to watch. As her fire burned dimmer and dimmer, Joan finally left the stage where she started, on hallowed Covent Garden, on New Year’s Eve of 1990.
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| Joan Sutherland at the Kennedy Center Honors 2004 |
During her retirement years, Joan became a sort of patron saint of vocal exercises. She became chief jury of the globally famous Cardiff Singer of The World competition, where she lamented on younger singers’ lack of technique. She made great stuff of one story of a young soprano who did not know how to breathe between phrases – this, in front of the soprano who brought her lungs all over the stratosphere. She courted controversy when one former secretary spilled the dirt on her, calling her out on racist name-calling against African-American soprano Kathleen ‘The Battle-Axe’ Battle, calling Pavarotti ‘a lazy farm boy’ and the charming American mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade’s attempt at her signature role Amina ‘good-for-nothing’. The fire may be dim, people, but the embers are still glowing!
Then came the accident: Joan fell down in her Swiss home, breaking both legs. Her condition improved, but another ailment came: heart problems. Finally on 11th October 2010 the news came out and shocked the musical world: The Sutherland had sailed away for the last time.
It was hard. She was the Aunt figure, the one you’d expect to be always there. When she passed away I cried and put on The Art of the Prima Donna, the live recording of her debut Lucia, her Esclarmonde and Turandot, the video of her Canadian Opera Company Anna Bolena, charming clips of interviews of her with her husband, and Recording 1957-1962, a record of the young Joan singing random repertoire. It was bittersweet. There were many lonely nights in Manipal when my only company was Joan’s sweet voice, trilling away in Son vergin vezzosa, vanquishing away spineless himbos in Regarde-les ces yeux, contemplating an affair with a war veteran in Bel raggio lusinghier. I’ve heard her giggle in joy, I’ve heard her cry in desperate anguish, I’ve heard her lament her lost love, heartbroken at the altar. I’ve heard her waste away to death so many times, perhaps even more times than her ending happily with the tenor. In a way, Joan was a very close friend: this amazing, amazing voice that has transcended physical limitation to become, simply, music.
Farewell, Stupenda. Maybe I’ll hear your song again, in a better world.
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