Searching for the Great Australian Opera

 

Americans seek perpetually for the Great American Novel. Perhaps the equivalent Down Under is the search for the Great Australian Opera.

The first to have been composed and produced in that place was Isaac Nathan’s Don John of Austria, premièred in Sydney in 1846, and recently revived by Alexander Briger. Briger is the nephew of conductor Sir Charles Mackerras, both of them descendants of Nathan.  

I’ve recently been listening to Richard Meale’s Voss, which strikes me as a strong contender as GAO.

But currently, I’m bowled over by the so-far unstaged Sappho of Peggy Glanville-Hicks, who not only wrote the music, but also created the libretto from a play by Lawrence Durrell. It was commissioned by San Francisco Opera in the early 1960s, but was never performed by them. Two years ago it was recorded professionally in Lisbon ‒ the brainchild of young Australian conductor, Jennifer Condon (above), who assembled a fine group of singers with the Gulbenkian Orchestra.

Time for a full production, Opera Australia?

Nellie Melba and The Star Spangled Banner

As we all know, a vital ability in life is to respond creatively to an unforeseen threat quickly and decisively.

The great Australian diva, Nellie Melba, was set to sing Rosina in The Barber of Seville in San Francisco in 1898. Nothing unusual about that. It was one of her regular and best roles.

The problem was that the opera is set in Spain and, at that moment, Spain was threatening to invade and lay claim to Cuba. War appeared imminent and anti-Spanish feeling in the USA was running high. At the performance, although Melba herself was treated courteously by the audience, the barber, Figaro, was roundly booed.

What to do?

It so happens that in Act 2 there is a singing lesson where the composer, Rossini, allows Rosina to perform a song of her own choosing “ad libitum”. In San Francisco, the piano was pushed on stage, and Melba, a fine pianist, accompanied herself singing one of America’s favourite songs of the day, Stephen Foster’s “Old Folks at Home”. And, when the applause had died down a little, she followed up immediately with “The Star Spangled Banner”.

A local reporter noted: “People rose in their seats and cheered themselves hoarse.” The audience wept – the diva with them. Problem solved.

Sadly there are no recordings by her of those songs, nor of The Barber of Seville, so here she is singing (dazzlingly) the Jewel Song from Gounod’s Faust in 1905: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxrgX729kZA