Sutherland before Lucia: The 1948-1958 Recordings

Perhaps the most gratifying feature of Hans Christian Andersen's much-loved story of the ugly duckling is not that an unsatisfactory duck is transformed into a beautiful swan but that it has been a swan all along. All that was needed was the right set of circumstances for its real identity to be recognized. That archetypal pattern, which underlies many a fairy tale, is enormously appealing, and the appeal may be even greater when the pattern appears in actual events, as it does in the career of Joan Sutherland.

When I was about twelve, I was attracted to opera by seeing Sutherland on television, singing the Mad Scene from Thomas's Hamlet, and not long after that I eagerly read Russell Braddon's Joan Sutherland, the first biography of the singer.¹ Braddon approached his task novelistically, fabricating conversations and supplying the thoughts of many participants. Like many young readers (and lots of older ones, too), I was not concerned with the niceties of scholarship but with the unfolding story of repeated transformations that took place because others recognized a potential the singer did not see in herself. She began to sing by copying the vocal exercises sung by her mother, a mezzo-soprano, and believed herself a mezzo as well. Her first teacher had to convince her that she was really a soprano, after which she won several important competitions in Australia, setting her sights on a career as a dramatic soprano. Then, after she went to London for further study, the near-fanatic determination of her husband Richard Bonynge—including the trick of making her vocalize in keys higher than she realized—enabled him to transform her once more, persuading the reluctant soprano that she ought to be singing the bel canto repertoire. She auditioned repeatedly to secure a place at Covent Garden, whose representatives did not know what to make of her because of the variety of music she sang at those auditions. Then, after years of being assigned a bewildering variety of roles, she was finally given a new production of Lucia di Lammermoor. On opening night, 17 February 1959, she triumphed beyond anyone's wildest expectation, then set off on the conquest of the world's opera houses singing Lucia and other heroines of Donizetti and Bellini.

Subsequent biographies and Sutherland's own autobiography have helped to demythologize this singer's rise to fame, of course. It is evident that the quality of her voice and her potential to become a major singer were recognized by many people along the way. Press reviews of her roles were consistently enthusiastic, often singling out her contribution to an otherwise unsatisfactory performance, and she certainly had champions at Covent Garden. Edward Greenfield's brief book on Sutherland is particularly valuable for putting the 1959 Lucia in perspective, pointing out that it was the culmination of many years' development and that the idea of Lucia as a "perfect vehicle" for Sutherland "was first tentatively put forward in conversations between David Webster and Lord Harewood" around 1955.²

Signed by Decca immediately after her triumph in Lucia, Sutherland began making records for that company at once and continued to record steadily with them until near the end of her long career. Those commercial recordings have been supplemented by any number of noncommercial ones that preserve post-Lucia appearances in such roles as Alcina, Rodelinda, Elvira, Beatrice di Tenda, Amina, Semiramide, Norma, Haydn's Eurydice, and Marguerite de Valois. Although Sutherland's career after 1959 has been thoroughly documented in sound, listeners who (like me) became acquainted with Sutherland only after her emergence as an international star have had very few opportunities to hear what she sounded like before those fateful Lucias. She had made only a handful of commercial recordings; however, recent issues have included a significant number of noncommercial, pre-Lucia items that give us a much more detailed look at the beginnings of her career. These early recordings help to explain both the enthusiasm and the occasional puzzlement she generated during the years in which the foundation of her international career was...