Joan Sutherland(1926–2010)

Joan Alston Sutherland was born at 70 Queen Street, Woollahra, in Sydney's eastern suburbs on 7 November 1926, the second of two daughters of William McDonald Sutherland, a Sydney tailor born in Pictou, Nova Scotia of Scottish parents from Sutherland and Banff, and Muriel Alston, an Australian mezzo-soprano who had given up a concert career on her marriage and taught singing from the front parlour. Joan grew up in a house full of singing: she stood at the piano while her mother taught, learned to vocalise alongside the pupils, and at sixteen had a soprano voice that startled the woman teaching her.

She studied formally at the New South Wales Conservatorium of Music under Aida Dickens from 1944, paid the fees by working as a typist at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, and won the Mobil Quest, Australia's leading vocal competition, in 1949. The prize was a season at His Majesty's Theatre in Melbourne and an introduction to the Australian musical establishment. She left for London on a P&O liner in 1951, took up a scholarship at the Royal College of Music, and was auditioned at Covent Garden the following year by the music director Rafael Kubelík. She made her Royal Opera debut on 28 October 1952 as the First Lady in Mozart's Magic Flute, and remained on contract at Covent Garden for the next decade, working her way through the medium-soprano repertoire under the watchful eye of Joan Ingpen, the company's casting director, who believed her voice could go further.

She met the Australian pianist and conductor Richard Bonynge in Sydney in 1947 and again in London in 1954; they married that year and stayed married for the remaining fifty-six years of her life. Bonynge was the figure who pushed her, against the cautious advice of her teachers, into the high-coloratura repertoire of Donizetti and Bellini that her teachers thought was beyond a voice as large as hers. He was right. On 17 February 1959 at Covent Garden she sang the title role in Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor in a Franco Zeffirelli production conducted by Tullio Serafin. The mad scene drew a sustained twelve-minute ovation. The reviews the next morning placed her at the top of her profession overnight. She was thirty-two.

At La Fenice in Venice in 1960 the Italian press christened her La Stupenda, the stunning one; the name followed her for the rest of her career. Through the 1960s and 1970s she sang the major bel canto repertoire at La Scala, the Vienna State Opera, the Met, the Paris Opera, the Bolshoi: Norma, Anna Bolena, I Puritani, Maria Stuarda, Lucrezia Borgia, Beatrice di Tenda, La Sonnambula, Esclarmonde. Her recorded discography with Bonynge as conductor runs to over two hundred discs. She partnered Luciano Pavarotti at the Met in 1972 in La Fille du Régiment, the production that made him an international name. She and Marilyn Horne shared the Norma duets that are the canonical recording of the bel canto soprano-mezzo partnership.

She gave her farewell performance at the Sydney Opera House in Les Huguenots on 2 October 1990 at sixty-three; the audience stood for half an hour. She was made Officer of the Order of Australia (1975), Dame Commander of the British Empire (1979), and Member of the Order of Merit by Queen Elizabeth II in 1991, the highest civil award in the British Crown's gift. She and Bonynge retired to Les Avants near Montreux in Switzerland, where she gardened, read and managed the recordings catalogue. She died at Les Avants on 10 October 2010, aged eighty-three, and her ashes were interred at the Royal Botanic Garden in Sydney. The Sutherland name today carries her memory as the surname of the largest soprano voice of the second half of the twentieth century, the Australian girl who carried Donizetti, Bellini and Handel out of the dustiest part of the operatic repertoire and onto every major stage in the world.