Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is with some sadness that I rise to acknowledge the life of Joan Sutherland and record my deepest regret at her death on 11 October 2010. Joan Sutherland was one of the world’s best singers, and it is appropriate that we in this place record our appreciation of her long career at the highest level and tender our profound sympathy to her family in their bereavement.

For Australians, Joan Sutherland is the central figure in the performance of opera. She was central to its development in Australia. She raised the profile of opera and was instrumental in the development of our own opera company. She changed the view of a nation with her extraordinary voice, skill and talent. She well and truly entranced the world. She was in every sense a remarkable artist.

I want to talk a little bit about opera itself in the context of talking about Joan. There probably are not that many people who know the form very well. I was lucky enough to work with the Queensland opera company as its production manager for about six years. My first introduction to that company was as a repetiteur, training singers in their roles. I did not get to work with Joan Sutherland but I did work with a number of other Australians. It is an amazing form, and I want people to understand this about what they see when they see Joan performing on television or on video.

Opera is performed in some of the largest theatres in the world, and they are not amplified. Our Sydney Opera House is quite small. Most of our opera houses in Brisbane and Melbourne seat about 2,000 people. The big ones seat 3,500 or more—even up to 5,000. Opera houses are huge cavernous spaces. A singer stands on the stage, ‘unamplified’, and sings over the top of a chorus of maybe 60 or more singers and an orchestra of anywhere between 60 and 100 players. It is a phenomenal feat for anyone. Because of the size of these opera houses, over many centuries the standard of performance has become incredibly high. Yet every now and again you get a singer like Joan Sutherland who creates another level in that form.

Opera is an incredibly physical form. If you are ever lucky enough to stand close to an opera singer in full flight, when they are filling a 3,500-seat auditorium, you will see that their entire body is involved in the performance. It is incredibly physical. Operas are 2½, three, four or five hours long. They are physical marathons in every sense. The singers with the biggest voices in the world, singing the big roles, usually perform only twice a week because it is so physically demanding. It is not physically possible to perform those roles any more than that. It is an incredible achievement at the best of times.

Joan Sutherland took the form to another level altogether. Singing for anyone requires a natural physical talent. If you want to be good at it, it requires a combination of bone structure and body type, and Joan Sutherland had that. She probably inherited it from her mother, who was also a singer. It is a great advantage but it is, of course, just a start. Then there is the commitment and focus over many years to develop the technique, the facility and the strength in this incredibly physical form to avoid injury from overuse. Most singers with this kind of large voice, again, as I said, perform around only twice a week. It is incredibly demanding. Joan Sutherland did that work. Her technique was miraculous. She had an inhuman capacity to control this phenomenal voice. It was an unusually large and full voice for a coloratura soprano, with great power and warmth and remarkable agility, given its strength and size. She had a trill that other singers would die for, exceptional intonation and pinpoint accuracy in the upper register. She could do all that—and that is technique; and very few will ever match her technical capacity.

More than having the physical talent and the technique, Joan Sutherland knew what to do with it. She is unmatched as a musician, as an interpreter. She had the technique to deliver what was in her mind, but the technique was absolutely her servant. You never saw it; you were never aware of it; it was invisible. It disappeared beneath the phrase. You could not see or hear her think. You could just hear the music. For performers seeking to perform at their best, that ability not to distract, that ability to support the performance itself is what you strive for, and this woman, Joan Sutherland, was the master at it. It was quite remarkable to hear her perform. Her live performance was, for me, the most amazing. She had the extraordinary ability when performing live to take all the time in the world, to give herself space in the phrasing just when the voice needed it and to carry an audience to the absolute limit of their capacity. She did so in a way that was so much a part of a performance that those around her went with her with great ease.

I can only imagine that performances like Joan’s required great courage. I do not mean courage to go on the stage. Stage fright is not the most frightening thing about performance. The Minister for Regional Australia, Regional Development and Local Government, who is here, knows that recently I performed the Rachmaninov second piano concerto with one of my local orchestras. It is a hard piece and I had not performed it for about four years, and probably not for about 10 years before that, so I was doing something I had done when I was young but not for many years. I realised the single thing that I had forgotten about performance is how much courage it takes. Again, I am not talking about courage to go on the stage; I am talking about courage in the moment—to take the leap, to put yourself aside and do what needs to be done in the moment, and to do that minute after minute, second after second, and to move on to the next point. It is a learned skill, this courage.

When I listen to Joan perform and watch her live performances on DVD, I can see the remarkable ability she had to reach beyond the limit of what she was capable of. She was an extraordinarily courageous performer. I doubt that any of us will know what was really going on in her head and I doubt that many of us could understand it. For an artist to achieve that level—the level of discipline and skill and commitment in her daily life—is probably already beyond what most of us can imagine. I would hope that Joan, when she gave a performance that she was proud of and happy with—and I suspect like most performers she found something to be unhappy with—walked off stage and had people around her who were capable of sharing the high five moment with her on a level of genuine understanding. I believe that she found that in her partner, Richard Bonynge; that they were together able to share the heights of Joan’s achievements. It would be a very lonely life to achieve something so much greater than her colleagues if she did not have someone who could truly understand what she achieved in her greatest moments.

I worked in opera in the 1980s. It is a very difficult form. It is almost impossible to get right. It requires so many people’s input at the highest level. I can well and truly tell you that Joan was the pinnacle for us in the opera world as a voice, as an interpreter and for her extraordinary ability to perform. But she was also the pinnacle for what a human being could achieve and strive for. I still wonder how a human being can get to be that good. I have known many great singers. I have worked with Joan Carden, for example, and quite a number of very well known Australian singers and I can imagine the level of work that is required, but with Joan I cannot imagine how a person can actually get to be that good.

I know that the Australian opera would simply have not grown in the way that it did without the presence in our lives of Joan Sutherland. She lifted expectations and she convinced many in our nation that they loved opera—as they should; it is a fine form. Her outstanding contribution was recognised in honours, including a Companion of the Order of Australia in 1975, the Dame of the British Empire in 1979 and the Order of Merit in 1991. She had a career that lasted more than 30 years at the top—and that is 30 years of hours of technical work every day, hours of scales and work to improve her strength and her stamina. In that 30 years she mastered opera’s most demanding roles in Norma, Il Trovatore, La Traviata, Rigoletto, in the most important opera houses of the world. Her most famous role was the lead in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, which she performed 233 times. In one performance in the role in 1959 she was acknowledged with a 19-minute standing ovation.

Joan Sutherland said that her mother was a great influence in her life. Her mother was a very good singer in her own right and, while she was not singing professionally when she was raising Joan, she still used to practise. She kept up her scales and exercises and Joan sat at her knee and learned those from about the age of three. So Joan was well versed in the voice very early. She says that she was not trained by her mother but she acknowledges the extraordinary influence that her mother had on her life.

She also acknowledges the incredible influence of Richard Bonynge, her husband, who encouraged her to develop the upper part of her voice. In fact, he said of her voice that the voice at the top just did not want to stop; it was effortless. It was his influence, working with Joan, that encouraged her to develop that upper repertoire. The extent of her repertoire was immense. She learned 54 leading roles, from Handel to Mozart and Puccini and Verdi. If you have never tried to learn something that complex, the job of even learning the role—it can take several months and it has to be done on time; you have to be ready; you cannot fake it—is one of the extraordinary talents that performers at this level need to have. She had 54 leading roles, which is an extraordinary repertoire for any singer.

She ended her career with final performances at the Sydney Opera House and at Covent Garden in 1990 where she sang, as Nellie Melba did, ‘There is no place like home’. For those who have not heard that performance, it is quite an extraordinary performance.

John Murphy (Reid, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

A magnificent performance.

Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is a magnificent performance. There were many tributes to Joan, as you would expect at this time. The opera director John Copley was one of her many friends and admirers. They had known each other as they grew in the early days, so he knew her quite well. He said—and I suspect that he is absolutely right—that people did not realise just how hard she actually did work to achieve this extraordinary standard.

Again, the thing about Joan Sutherland is, in this unassuming person and this voice that just appeared as if it came from heaven, you did not see the evidence. You did not see the signs of the technique. It was so well hidden in her mastery—an extraordinary thing. Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, who by the way is not a bad singer in her own right—not bad at all, Dame Kiri, a quite extraordinary performer—says that Joan was an inspiration to a generation of performers. One of my favourite quotes about Joan Sutherland comes from Kiri. She says:

She was a bit like the Pied Piper. We followed her to the top of the hill and hopefully we got there too.

It is an amazing thing when artists of the calibre of Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, Pavarotti, and Joan Carden admired this woman so greatly and aspired to a standard that they freely acknowledged they would probably never reach.

It is hard to imagine another Joan. It is hard to imagine another artist emerging with the natural physical talent, the capacity to work, the musicality and the partnerships, and the opportunities that generate the greatest work. It is hard to imagine another one. I hope we get many more so that we can experience the extraordinary magic that was Joan Sutherland. She will, of course, live on. Her voice lives on in the many recordings that she made although I am aware that she did not make an official recording of the Queen of the Night. There is a pirate copy, apparently, but I will not be going into that one. She did not make an official recording of the Queen of the Night and I am very sad about that because that is one that I would love to hear.

She will live on also in the many voices that were inspired by her and in those who marvel at her capacity to strive for standards that most of us cannot imagine. She will also live on forever in the hearts of those who heard her.

Dame Joan is survived by her husband Richard Bonynge and her son Adam and two grandchildren. I thank them for sharing their wife, mother and grandmother with us for a time and I wish them well in this difficult time.

Peter Slipper (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Parramatta for her very insightful and substantial contribution to this debate. We are enormously privileged that the Minister for Regional Australia, Regional Development and Local Government has graced us with his presence in the Main Committee and I call him.

Simon Crean (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Regional Australia, Regional Development and Local Government) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On indulgence: thank you Mr Deputy Speaker and it gives me great pleasure to join with the member for Parramatta and indeed the member for Reid in this tribute to Dame Joan. I thank the member for Parramatta for her heartfelt expressions of not just sympathy but empathy with the great work that Dame Joan did. Knowing the background, as I do, of the member for Parramatta, not just her love of the arts but her competence in performing them, it was great to be in the chamber listening to that tribute.

Lyndon Terracini, Opera Australia’s Artistic Director, put it simply: Dame Joan was Australia’s greatest opera singer. Dame Joan was also a great ambassador for Australia. She made an extraordinary contribution to the performing arts and opera in particular, both here and internationally. Her international success and her mentoring of young artists and musicians helped Australians believe that our creative talent could hold its own anywhere. Her dedication to delivering great performances to countless audiences in this country made Australians confident that we could nurture and develop a rich cultural life in our cities and towns.

Dame Joan had a unique and great talent as a singer. The member for Parramatta has taken us in great detail to that. But in marking her passing I want to speak about more than her talent—stupendous though that was. Joan Sutherland, growing up in the Great Depression, worked extraordinarily hard to become a singer. She had no overnight success. She developed a discipline and dedication to preparation and rehearsal which have become legend. Perhaps most impressively, she was prepared to work so hard at a time when the prospect of making a career as an opera singer in Australia could only have been described as a crazy dream.

It was a time when most Australian artists went overseas to prove themselves. So she did in 1951, after winning competitions here. When she became an international star with her renowned 1959 performances of Lucia Di Lammermoor it was a tribute to her determination and professionalism as well as to her artistry. She was soon in demand in the great opera houses around the world, winning audiences for works from the 18th and 19th century operas in which she could use the full strength and range of her voice for bel canto roles. She also recorded full operas and arias so she could be heard by many more people. The reviews spoke of her dramatic coloratura soprano, a combination of gleaming tone, huge range and infallible command of florid passages.

Her return to perform in Australia at the height of her international success marked the beginning of a golden era in Australian opera. Thanks to the multitude of recordings, including many of her live Australian performances, we will never forget her sublime voice—the one that Luciano Pavarotti described as ‘the voice of the century’.

Fortunately, Australian audiences could and did hear this remarkable voice because she returned year after year to her home country to perform. Opera Australia describes her as a true company member, always a star but also a team player. She gave her time generously to her chosen art form and took a real interest in the development of young singers in particular. Over the last few days many of her colleagues have told of her personal kindness and professional support as a fellow singer and musician.

Without Joan Sutherland and the excitement that she generated in the 70s and 80s with her incredible voice, there might not be an Opera Australia today. Tours and appearances by Joan meant that opera became more popular in Australia than every before. Dame Joan took on the responsibilities as well as the privileges that came with being a true diva. Audiences expected much of her and she knew that people invested a great deal of money to hear this world star. She took every performance seriously so that she could meet those expectations and she was renowned for her commitment to careful study of the score for every performance, whether it was her first or 100th performance in a role.

She sang at the first ever opera in the Sydney Domain in 1982—a free event that gave Australians an opportunity to participate in opera outside the main stage and formality of a theatre. During the first act of La Traviata it started to rain but Dame Joan was not going to let the audience down, so she went on with the second act with an umbrella and sang despite the downfall.

With the ABC television broadcasts of Australian opera performances, Dame Joan Sutherland was probably better known to Australians than many popular music stars—and even her famed predecessor, Dame Nellie Melba. A 1982 television simulcast from the Sydney Opera House of Dame Joan live in concert with Luciano Pavarotti was viewed by six million Australians and it redefined the ABC’s attitude to the arts on television.

This parliament is deeply saddened at the news of the passing of Dame Joan and offers condolences to her husband, Richard Bonynge, who is also a great Australian artist and musician, and to her son, Adam Bonynge, and their family. Dame Joan had a wonderful partnership with her husband. Their shared passion for opera and music meant that they could also share the highs and lows of an international career in a highly demanding art form. Mr Bonynge, a champion of the repertoire that Dame Joan made famous, gave her confidence and trust.

In 1961 she was made Australian of the Year, in 1975 she was honoured as a Companion of the Order of Australia, in 1979 she was made a Dame of the British Empire and in 1991 she received an Order of Merit. These are fitting honours for a woman known for her integrity, her sincerity and her dedication to her art form. She was also generous in helping others through benefit performances for bushfire appeals and a gala performance at Covent Garden for Cyclone Tracy victims.

I expect that many Australians will watch and listen to the recordings of her performances to remember her voice and stage presence now and for many years to come. I thank the members of Opera Australia, and many others, who have shared their stories of Dame Joan’s life. It seems very hard to find anyone who says a bad word about her—such was her commitment and generosity as a member of the national opera company.

John Murphy (Reid, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On indulgence: I too join with the member for Parramatta and the Minister for the Arts in expressing my sympathy to Dame Joan’s husband, Richard Bonynge, and their son, Adam, and their family. As the Minister for Arts and the member for Parramatta pointed out, Dame Joan Sutherland had the voice of the century. There was no doubt about that. Pavarotti, a great authority himself as one of the world’s greatest tenors, delivered that great accolade to her. It was very fitting that when she first made her name in singing Lucia di Lammermoor in 1959 in Venice in the toughest environment that any opera singer could visit—an Italian audience—she received a long, thunderous applause and she was given the magnificent title ‘La Stupenda’, which stuck with her all her life.

I was very privileged to meet Dame Joan Sutherland on one occasion in 1976 when my music teacher, the late Austin Goldberg, who had studied with her at the Sydney Conservatorium in the 1950s, said, ‘Johnny, you have to come and hear the voice of the century.’ On that occasion I heard her sing an opera that you do not hear people talk about so much—Delibes’ Lakme. Lakme is a very difficult opera with a famous aria called the ‘Bell Song’. One is truly up in the stratosphere singing the high Ds and the high E flats in that most demanding role. For the life of me, I cannot think of anyone who has been able to achieve the recognition that she received for singing that magnificent opera. The hairs on the back of my neck were standing on end that particular night when I saw her.

Mr Goldberg took me backstage and introduced me to her and her husband, Richard Bonynge. It is something that I will never forget, because she was a very humble and gracious lady. You almost got the feeling that she was so honoured that someone would think so much of the performances that she gave. She signed my program, as did Richard Bonynge, and I will never forget it.

The minister made reference to La Traviata in 1982. I was in the domain on that wet night in 1982, as I was for subsequent performances she gave, such as The Tales of Hoffmann, and I estimate that there would have been something like 100,000 people who had brought a picnic to the Domain. It is a great place for concerts in the summer and as part of the Sydney Festival. I heard that magnificent voice there on a number of occasions and she gave so much joy and happiness to so many people in Sydney.

Just up the road from my electorate office in Burwood Road, Burwood is St Paul’s Anglican Church. It is a magnificent church that is famous for many things, probably it is most famous because Don Bradman got married there. The Joan Sutherland Musical Society have been holding concerts in St Paul’s for a number of years in honour of Dame Joan. Until recent years, she has attended those concerts. I did not have the opportunity to attend those concerts in her honour when she attended but I do know that the Anglican minister of that church, Father John Kohler, was just so delighted that she would come all the way back from Switzerland to Australia to go to those humble concerts in St Paul’s Anglican Church in Burwood. To the society’s credit they are going to put on a tribute concert to Dame Joan next month, and I hope to get there.

As both the minister and the member for Parramatta have pointed out, Dame Joan sang in all the great opera houses around the world: the Met, La Scala, Covent Garden and, of course, Sydney Opera House, where I had the privilege to hear her. Honestly, she gave so much joy to so many, and every time she sang one of the great arias the audience would just clap and clap and clap. There was no doubt about the uniqueness, clarity and purity of that great voice.

Some of the great recordings I have listened to are Rigoletto, Norma, Lucia di Lammermoor, Lakme, which I have mentioned, The Tales of Hoffmann and La Traviata. I was listening to the ABC last Saturday afternoon, which was doing a tribute to her, and they mentioned that she recorded something like 41 operas. It is a wonderful legacy that she leaves for all of us because, although she may have gone, we can still hear that great voice. I think it is very noteworthy that she developed that great voice through the hard work and efforts of her husband, Richard Bonynge, who himself was a great classical pianist and who became a celebrated conductor. He tricked Joan. He took her from a soprano to a coloratura. He transposed some of those great arias. He put them up a semi tone or a tone until she did not realise she was singing a high D or a high E flat, which is impossible for most mortals on this planet.

Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

She had an F sharp.

John Murphy (Reid, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

She had an F sharp? I could believe that because her voice was absolutely extraordinary. I think it is wonderful that, all those years ago, the Labor government gave her the recognition she so deserved by opening the Dame Joan Sutherland Centre in Penrith. The Labor party has had many a launch of its state and federal campaigns there and there have been some incredible musical events. She will be remembered out in Sydney’s west but she will always be remembered in Sydney, across Australia and internationally with the theatre at the Sydney Opera House, which is to be named after her. That is a decision taken by Premier Keneally and I applaud her for that.

It was a great privilege to hear Dame Joan sing. It was a great honour for me to meet her with my music teacher who was studying at the conservatorium, as I said earlier, in the 50s. But for him I would not have had that opportunity because she did not often get the chance to sing in Australia. The demands of Europe, North America and South America, where she sang so much, did not give her the opportunity to come back to Australia as often as she would have liked, I am sure, to perform. I want to thank her for all the joy and happiness that she has given to me and so many Australians and to so many people internationally. Vale, Dame Joan. Vale, La Stupenda.

Peter Slipper (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The member for Reid is more fortunate than I was because my music teacher told me she did not want to see me anymore because of the lack of quality of my music. I would like to say that a very good friend of mine at Red Hill, Mrs Margaret Kelly, who was a good friend of Dame Joan’s, told me how humble Dame Joan was, which of course verifies what the member for Reid has just said. She would run into her in Canberra in a department store and she would say, ‘Hi, remember me, I’m Joan Bonynge.’ She never used her title or anything like that. I think that she was a wonderful Australian and it is so sad that we have lost her.