La Stupenda -- the voice of the century

Dame Joan Sutherland died the other day.  You can find obituaries here, here and here.

Here are a couple of videos of Sutherland.  The first is the mad scene from Luccia di Lammermoor, sung at the Royal Opera House in 1959.  This is the production that launched Sutherland onto the international scene.  It's just the sound, rather than the stage action, but it's the voice that matters!

Incidentally, this is an aria that was also closely associated with that other Australian super star: Dame Nellie Melba.



And here's something from a bit later -- the bell aria from Lakme.




Addendum

Since putting this post together this morning, I've heard a couple of tribute comments in the news.  Perhaps the most cognitively dissonant one was Julia Gillard's description of Sutherland as a fine example of so-called Australian values.

This phrase is so hackneyed as to be practically meaningless.  Paradoxically, it's also one of the most ideologically-loaded phrases in the lexicon, much like Stalin praising Shostakovitch for being a good Communist.  To talk of Australian values in this way is to commit oneself to a dialogue of calculated vacuousness.

Is this really the highest winding-up praise the PM's back room boys and girls can come up with in drafting some comments about one of the greatest artists this country has ever produced?  I think it represents the harsh problem of a narrowly-defined national identity politics.

Sutherland was undoubtedly in a strange position in relation to her homeland.  A similar conundrum plagued Percy Grainger: how to identify as an Australian when one left in youth, never to return in any permanent way?  This is not to dismiss any sense of Australianness that Grainger and Sutherland expressed; it's just that they express a more cosmopolitan aspect of what this might mean.

So when Gillard spoke, there was barely a word about Sutherland's extraordinary artistry in the summing up.  Just narrow and robotic Orstrayan valyews, which had been absent hitherto.  Would Gillard have said the same thing if the death of the week were a footballer or cricketer?

Sportsmen can be had by the bushel for two dollars a throw.

Truly great artists come but once in a generation.