Singer Joan Sutherland dies at 83

The year 1948 saw her first professional performance. Her career saw a decade of steady growth and intensive training. She used to sing every note to her fullest. Her singing was founded on amazing technique. Indeed, at the start of her career her voice was so naturally large that it appeared that Ms. Sutherland is destined to become a Wagnerian dramatic soprano. Richard Bonynge, the Sydney-born conductor was her vocal coach; to whom she married later.

“I don’t talk about my career, but of ours,” Ms. Sutherland said in a 1961 interview with The New York Times. “I think of us as a duo.”

At the beginning she had “a big, rather wild voice” that was not heavy enough for Wagner, she told. After hearing the “Wagner sung as it should be,” she realized the fact.

She became an international sensation after her performance in “Lucia di Lammermoor” at Covent Garden in London, directed by Franco Zeffirelli and conducted by the Italian maestro Tullio Serafin.

The year 1960, saw Ms. Sutherland’s American debut in the title role of Handel’s “Alcina” at the Dallas Opera. Harold C. Schonberg wrote in The New York Times that other sopranos might have more powerful or a sweeter tone, but “there is none around who has the combination of technique, vocal security, clarity and finesse that Miss Sutherland can summon.”

Sometimes, she was also criticized for delivering dramatically vapid performances. With height of 5-foot-9, she was a large woman, with long arms and large hands, and a long, wide face. 

Her mother was a fine mezzo-soprano. She was also the principal teacher of Ms. Sutherland throughout her adolescence. In 1951, following the winning a prestigious vocal competition, she and her mother moved to London. There Ms. Sutherland got her enrollment at the opera school of the Royal Conservatory. After three unsuccessful auditions, she got admission in the Royal Opera at Covent Garden. There she made her debut as the First Lady in Mozart’s “Zauberflöte.”

In 1952, she sang a small role in Bellini’s “Norma.” “I lusted to sing Norma after being in those performances with Callas,” Ms. Sutherland told in an interview in 1998. “But I knew that I could not sing it the way she did. It was 10 years before I sang the role. During that time I studied it, sang bits of it, and worked with Richard. But I had to evolve my own way to sing it, and I would have wrecked my voice to ribbons, had I tried to sing it like her.”

“I love all those demented old dames of the old operas,” she said in a 1961 Times profile. “All right, so they’re loony. The music’s wonderful.”

In 2004 she was honoured a Kennedy Center for her outstanding achievement throughout her career. In 2008, when she was gardening at her home in Switzerland, she fell down and broke legs.

Other sopranos were more musically probing and dramatically brilliant. Unlike, other Ms. Sutherland was a glorious vocalist. The renowned Brazilian soprano Bidú Sayão, after hearing her debut in “Beatrice di Tenda,” praised the beauty of her voice, and said, “If there is perfection in singing, this is it.”