To Lucia

From Sun Aria To Lucia Di Lammermoor

We are used to Russell Braddon writing about war and war heroes— first with his own experiences as a Japanese POW in “Naked Island” — but he goes into his latest literary job with the gusto and expertise of a veteran who has spent his entire life amongst the crotchets and quavers in some conservatorium of music. This biography of Australia’s “Joan Sutherland” proves his versatility no less than that of the opera star.

LIKE Sutherland and her husband, Richard Bonynge, Braddon is an expatriate Sydneysider and an essential Australianism in the book and the people it concerns does much to bring it down out of the rarefied atmosphere of art and make it the very human story that it is.

Music, and particularly the sort of music Joan Sutherland makes, is the entire existence of the team of Sutherland and Bonynge but the story makes it clear that they engage in it because it is their life and something they want to do superlatively well, rather than because they consider themselves God’s gift to man.

Apart from a voice, few women could have been endowed with fewer of the attributes of a great opera star than Sutherland. The book soon makes it abundantly clear that being able to hit the right notes is only part of the business of becoming a prima donna.

When Joan Sutherland arrived in the United Kingdom in 1951 (on the proceeds of an Australian musical award) she weighed 16 stone, was plain, dowdy with no dress sense; was completely devoid of stage craft; suffered from acute sinus infection, was prone to colds, had incipient rheumatism, a frightful Australian accent and bad teeth.

In the next nine years she con quered every one of these disabilities, to more or less degree, except the Australian accent which is still with her to the extent that she refuses to speak lines on the stage even when the original libretto demands it.

There is almost as much space given in this story to the troubles over Joan’s teeth, which she finally overcame at the cost of £7OO Stg., and the terrifying ordeals and opera tions resulting from her sinus trouble, as to her high notes.

To write this book Braddon spent two years in the company of Suther land and her husband. He is able to describe intimately her triumphs, disappointments, work and more work, in and out of the great opera houses of Europe and the United States; her final break through at Covent Garden, 1959, in Lucia di Lammermoor; and her happy, if tempestuous, domestic life with husband, small son and international friends.

Even readers who don’t know one end of a scale from the other will find much to interest them in this story of a woman with a great gift, high courage and the Australian habit of usually doing what her husband tells her. With 16 black and white photographs. (JOAN SUTHERLAND. Published by Wm. Collins. 28/-.)