Outside the world of academe, Marjorie was not forgotten. She continued to give the occasional public lecture and people in cities and towns across the Midwest paid readily to hear her talks such as ‘My Life as A Singer’ or ‘Interpretation of Wagner, My Personal Experiences’. These brought in useful fees ($500 each time) to supplement Marjorie’s earnings from Southern Illinois University.
Marjorie also sang occasionally, generally just one or two items at Democratic conventions, women’s forums and charity fund-raising concerts. She even maintained a loose connection with the Met, appearing three times as an interval guest during Saturday matinee broadcasts. Her first appearance coincided with the twenty-fifth anniversary of her Met debut. Between the acts of a splendid performance of Massenet’s Manon with Victoria de los Angeles and Jussi Björling, Milton Cross, now in his twenty-eighth year as host of these broadcasts, chatted with Marjorie about her years at the Met. She returned on her fifty-fifth birthday and joined the Met’s assistant general manager, Francis Robinson, to talk about Salome, the opera being broadcast that afternoon with Brenda Lewis in the title role. Her last guest spot was on 30 December 1967, when Robinson interviewed her at length about her life and career.
Each time she was heard in these broadcasts a new batch of fan mail would arrive. Mostly it was handwritten notes on decorated paper from older opera fans, reminding Marjorie of past glories and assuring her she was not forgotten. Sometimes a letter would come from an aging polio victim or a young person newly stricken with some debilitating disease, seeking comfort. Occasionally small gifts were enclosed; often there were desperate pleas for money, for help with a singing career or just an autograph. Replying to letters was not one of Marjorie’s strengths, so she was selective about the letters she replied to and let Tom answer the rest on her behalf. None were ever thrown away; instead they were added to the many hundreds of pieces of fan mail Marjorie had collected over the years.
Marjorie was also invited to appear on the Met stage during the Farewell Gala Concert before the company moved out of the old Metropolitan Opera House. This historic event took place on 16 April 1966, with 4000 people paying $200 each to hear excerpts from opera sung by the current stars of the Met and then watch a cavalcade of former stars entering one by one in alphabetical order. When Marjorie’s turn came Tom wheeled her on, shepherded by Rudolf Bing, and the audience exploded. Lotte Lehmann, whose entry was next, had to wait several minutes, and did so gracefully out of respect for Marjorie—and because she knew that when her name was called the same reception awaited her.
Of the great Wagnerians of the 1930s and early 1940s only Marjorie, Lehmann and Alexander Kipnis were present. Melchior had been dismissed by Bing in 1950 and reluctantly declined his invitation to attend; Kirsten Flagstad and Friedrich Schorr were both dead. Many other old friends and colleagues were there; Tom Prideaux, writing in Life magazine, described the entry of these old timers with an apposite turn of phrase: ‘The audience roared their approval as each star came on stage, looking like parched plants drinking in the rain’.1 It might be said that this was actually the last time Marjorie sang at the Met, for she, all the other former stars and the current stars joined the audience in singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ at the end of the evening.
Marjorie and Tom were back in New York the following September as guests of the company on the opening night of the new Metropolitan Opera House in the Lincoln Centre and to watch the premiere of a new opera commissioned for the occasion—Samuel Barber’s Anthony and Cleopatra with Leontyne Price, a soprano Marjorie regarded highly. Marjorie’s name was also perpetuated in the new house by the provision of facilities for patrons in wheelchairs, financed in her name by a fund set up by a group of her grateful students. Marjorie was also invited to be the guest of honour at the unveiling of a bust of Wagner at the Met in 1969 and again in 1976 when her portrait (in costume as Salome) was hung in the gallery of great singers on the opera house concourse.2
Between these visits Marjorie and Tom occasionally attended performances at the Met as members of the audience. Cyril (still living in New York) went more often and was Marjorie’s eyes and ears on what was happening there. In 1961 he heard Joan Sutherland singing Lucia di Lammermoor in her first series of appearances with the company. ‘I wish you could have been there, Marge,’ Cyril wrote, ‘she’s spectacular and has the finest technique of this age or any other’.3 He also heard Birgit Nilsson many times and reported on her performances in detail. He was less impressed with her and undoubtedly less objective. ‘She’s cold,’ he wrote, ‘even colder than Flagstad and she’s got none of your warmth and pathos’.4
In January 1965 Marjorie also made her last visit to the White House to attend a reception for distinguished American women, hosted by Mrs Lyndon B. Johnson, where she added another President to her list of acquaintances and renewed her friendship with Greer Garson.
The following year she and Tom visited Australia, which was essentially a private visit to enable Marjorie to see her now aging brothers and sister, but the press got word of it. Marjorie was accorded a civic welcome in Sydney and taken on a guided tour of the construction site of the Sydney Opera House. She was also persuaded by EMI Australia to make a recording of ‘Waltzing Matilda’ with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. That recording was issued on a seven-inch, 45 rpm disc, but its only distinction is that it is in stereophonic sound, the sole example we have of Marjorie recorded in that mode.
Marjorie postponed her return to America at the end of this visit by a few days to sing at one of the Music for the People concerts held in the Myer Music Bowl in Melbourne’s Kings Domain Gardens. The invitation came from the organiser and conductor of the concerts, Hector Crawford, who as a very young man in 1939 had conducted one of Marjorie’s concerts in Melbourne. A vast audience and many more listening on radio and watching on television witnessed Marjorie’s final appearance in her homeland. She sang Sieglinde’s aria ‘Du bist du Lenz’ from Die Walküre and ‘My Ain Folk’, substituting (as she had done in 1939) one line for ‘at home in dear Australia with my ain folk’. She also sang ‘Annie Laurie’ and finished with ‘Waltzing Matilda’. It was an occasion of greater sentimental than musical excellence, but after the concert Crawford told the press, ‘I think today meant more to me and the orchestra than any of the dozens of other concerts we have given’. Marjorie and Tom returned home via Europe and stopped off in Milan to attend a performance of Don Giovanni at La Scala with Joan Sutherland singing Donna Anna. As Richard Bonynge recalls in his foreword, after the performance the Bonynges and the Kings enjoyed a memorable evening together.
Marjorie was never niggardly in praising singers she liked or begrudging about their success and she had enormous respect and admiration for Sutherland, but one aspect of the younger Australian singer’s career might have prompted a twinge of envy. By 1966 Sutherland was on the way to becoming the most recorded soprano in history and Marjorie’s own recordings (apart from the little seven-inch disc) had long disappeared from circulation. Amends were made when the Austrian Preiser company released an LP in their Lebendige Vergangenheit (Living Past) series. The disc offered excellent transfers of the best of Marjorie’s Paris recordings from 1933 and 1934 and enabled a whole new generation of opera lovers to discover her voice and her remarkable Ortrud, Brünnhilde and Salome. Reviewers in hi-fi magazines around the world waxed lyrical about her startlingly youthful and vocally resplendent Immolation Scene and the Salome finale, where her voice and personality seemed to leap out of modern loudspeakers.
By 1973, the year Marjorie and Tom each turned sixty-six, the pressure of maintaining two houses and travelling back and forth between Hot Springs and Carbondale was taking its toll on them both. Tom did the 300-mile trip most often, returning to Harmony Hills to deal with farm issues, while Marjorie stayed on in Carbondale in the care of Clara Weekes and the assistant Southern Illinois University provided for her. Compounding the problem, Tom’s health had also become an issue. As far back as 1955, he had been diagnosed with ‘heart problems’ and the situation had steadily deteriorated to the point where going on long and exhausting road journeys on his own was risky. The opportunity to change this lifestyle presented itself in the spring of that year. John Hughes, Dean of the Division of Fine Arts at the University of Arkansas, approached Marjorie with a plan to establish an opera school at his university in Little Rock.
The Arkansas state capital was a mere thirty miles north of Harmony Hills on Highway 7 South. Hughes also made a generous offer of $3000 per semester for a nine-hour week increasing to $6000 for an eighteen-hour week, the choice of hours being entirely Marjorie’s. Hughes also offered a flat fee of $1800 for the summer workshops and suggested that, if Marjorie wished, she could also conduct her regular classes at Harmony Hills and the students would come to her. There was less responsibility in this post as well. Blanche Thebom was being appointed head of the new opera school and all the leadership and management functions Marjorie performed at SIU would be Thebom’s responsibility. It was too good a deal to turn down and solved Marjorie and Tom’s domestic dilemma.
In April Marjorie wrote to Phil Olsson explaining that she wished to retire from SIU on 1 September. The news naturally came as a disappointment to Marjorie’s colleagues and students, but there was acceptance that she had given so much for so long to SIU and had earned the right to put her own and Tom’s interests first. SIU organised a series of events to celebrate her achievements and mark her retirement. The University of Southern Illinois Press produced a new edition of Interrupted Melody and there was a gala showing of the film in Shryock Auditorium—the proceeds from both going to the School of Music Scholarship Fund. There were receptions for Marjorie and gatherings of students and colleagues to present her with parting gifts and to make their tearful farewells. Others have stepped into Marjorie’s place at SIU in the years since, but none has been quite able to, as the old expression goes, ‘fill her shoes’.
Marjorie joined the faculty of the University of Arkansas in November 1973 amid much local publicity. She was photographed with Dean Hughes and Blanche Thebom and the university proudly boasted that they now had the services of two former Metropolitan Opera divas. Thebom told the press that she was delighted to be working with Marjorie and that she looked forward to an active and growing alliance.5
Students came to Harmony Hills and received the same personal attention, the same practical instruction and the same encouragement that dozens of others had in New Orleans and Carbondale. The University of Arkansas supported the seventeenth and final summer workshop at Harmony Hills in 1973 and continued to send her students until 1977. Marjorie also began teaching at the Garland County Community College in Hot Springs in 1974—a less prestigious establishment, but perhaps one that better suited her depleted energy and Tom’s rapidly dwindling capacity to be her physical mainstay.
In 1974 Marjorie and Tom decided to sell off most of Harmony Hills, retaining a 40-acre block separated from the remainder by the highway. On that site they planned and built a smaller, modern-style and more wheelchair-friendly house. The rest of the property became ‘The Harmony Hills Riding Stables’. The planned move into a smaller house meant that there would be no space to store the many boxes in which Marjorie had kept letters, contracts, programs, newspaper clippings, scrap books, photographs and all the other memorabilia and detritus from her career. Marjorie decided to contact Southern Illinois University and offer the whole collection to them.
The Dean of Library Affairs at SIU accepted readily, so all the dusty boxes were brought up from the cellar at Harmony Hills and Marjorie set about going through them. Anything that she believed should not be made public (including her correspondence with Charles Buttrose) was removed and probably burned. What remained was still a treasure trove, documenting all aspects of her life and career and giving invaluable insight into performing standards and conditions in Australia, Europe and the United States in the pre-war, wartime and post-war eras. Ken Duckett, Curator of Special Collections at the time, made several trips to Harmony Hills and brought back car loads of material. The whole collection was eventually catalogued, and as ‘The Marjorie Lawrence Papers’ it is now one of SIU’s most important archival collections.
As Tom’s health declined and periods of hospitalisation were needed, his sister Doris moved to the area to help out. Doris proved a stalwart support for her brother and sister-in-law for the rest of their lives. The new house proved a delight for both Marjorie and Tom. Vast expanses of glass gave them wonderful views of the Ouachita Mountains and level floors allowed Marjorie ease of movement. The potted banana palms were transported over from the old house and graced the patio of the new establishment, which meant that the fried bananas they both loved could remain on the menu. The living room doubled as a studio and old and new students continued to arrive, Marjorie helping to arrange performance experience for them in concerts and church services in Hot Springs.
After the trip to Australia in 1966, Marjorie had resigned herself to the fact that she would probably never see her homeland again. That saddened her, because, although she was accepted as ‘a distinguished American woman’, a part of her remained resolutely and proudly Australian. Half a lifetime of absence probably coloured her memories and nurtured her fondness for Australia, but what she felt was sincere, intense and indestructible. Marjorie was also one of those expatriate ‘Aussies’ who recognised how much of their success (and survival) could be credited to their native resourcefulness, their dry sense of humour, their lack of pretentiousness and to that fighting spirit that has always distinguished Australians on the battlefield, on the sporting field and in the world’s opera houses.6
In 1976 the opportunity to see Australia one last time unexpectedly presented itself. Marjorie was contacted by the producers of the Australian version of This Is Your Life asking her to travel to Australia to appear as a guest on the program they were planning to honour Harold Blair. The request came at a time when Tom was not well, so Marjorie declined, offering instead to videotape a message to the tenor in her new living room for inclusion in the program. The producers accepted that and a crew duly arrived and the short video was made.
The producers of the program then contacted Tom and said they wanted to make a program honouring Marjorie. The 1955 American version pre-dated the arrival of television in Australia and the producers said they felt she would be an ideal candidate for their program. With Tom’s connivance, a devious scheme was devised. Marjorie was told she was needed in Australia to appear in a documentary about Blair’s life. Tom was feeling better by then and seemed very keen to go, so Marjorie agreed. A week later Blair died suddenly, so Marjorie stopped packing and called the trip off. The producers in Australia panicked and cabled Marjorie that she was still needed, now to take part in a memorial program for the tenor. Marjorie procrastinated. She admitted to Tom that she longed to see Australia again, but feared the trip would be too arduous for him. Tom finally got impatient with her and in Marjorie’s words ‘bludgeoned’ her into going.
Marjorie and Tom landed at Sydney Airport on a frosty morning to find a barrage of reporters and photographers awaiting them. To Tom she whispered, ‘Well, the buggers haven’t forgotten me yet!’ At the Wentworth Hotel the program’s host, Mike Willesee, was waiting for her and pronounced those famous words: ‘Marjorie Lawrence, this is your life’, to which Marjorie responded: ‘Gee whiz!’
In the days leading up to the filming of the program, Marjorie and Tom went to the races at Randwick and were special guests at the opening performance of Opera Australia’s winter season in the Sydney Opera House. When Tom wheeled Marjorie into the Opera Theatre a spotlight was swung onto her and the audience rose to give her a standing ovation.
If the Australian version of Marjorie’s This Is Your Life lacked the parade of celebrities that distinguished the American version, time was to blame—Melchior, Tibbett and Johnson were all dead. Guests in the studio included Sir Hubert Opperman, who reminded Marjorie about the bicycle he had given her in 1939, pianist Isador Goodman and a navy veteran, Geoff Waye, who had been one of the patients Marjorie sang to in the Australian General Hospital in Darwin in 1944. Lena and Allan were there and Cyril sent a video message from New York. Brothers Ted and Lindsay were too frail to take part. Raeschelle Potter sent a moving video message from the Vienna Staatsoper and the surprise guest at the end of the program was Francis Robinson, who made it abundantly clear to Marjorie’s fellow countrymen and women, just how much she had been loved and appreciated at the Met.
While they were in Sydney, Marjorie and Tom recorded an hour-long radio program about Marjorie’s life and career, loosely based on the lecture she had been delivering for years, ‘My Life as a Singer’, complete with a few long-practised inaccuracies. It is the only audio document we have of Tom speaking and the most extensive to survive of Marjorie. We can listen to that ‘southern drawl’ Marjorie found so attractive when she first met Tom and Marjorie’s voice is still projected with such clarity that one suspects the technicians would have set the microphone well back from her chair. While in Sydney Marjorie was also invited to return in 1977 to conduct a series of master classes at the state conservatorium of music, a request she felt unable to fulfil when the time came.
No visit to Australia would have been complete without a trip to Melbourne and a visit to Deans Marsh and Winchelsea. At Marjorie’s request, Lena’s husband drove them to the Bambra Cemetery and Marjorie paid her respects for the last time at the graves of her parents, the visit cut short by teeming rain. Lena celebrated her seventy-fourth birthday while Marjorie was in Melbourne and forty family members gathered to celebrate the occasion with a barbeque at the seaside town of Anglesea. The weather stayed fine, everyone enjoyed mountains of sizzling lamb chops, succulent steaks and fat-spitting sausages washed down with cold beer and scalding tea. Marjorie led everyone in singing ‘Happy Birthday’ and any passer-by who might have witnessed the party would have concluded it was an Aussie-style gathering of a typical Australian family. For one memorable afternoon on the shores of Bass Strait where the waves roll in from the Tasman and the dense forests of the Otway Ranges spill down to the sea, Marjorie truly was ‘back among her ain folk’.
Marjorie and Tom again returned to the United States via Europe and stopped over in Paris for two weeks. Old friends made them welcome, but their number was now few. They attended a performance at the Opéra, Marjorie wearing the jewelled miniature of her Legion d’honneur insignia. Marjorie might well have wondered as she listened to a whole new generation of singers, first in Sydney then in Paris, if she would ever again have the opportunity to sing in public, but a few weeks after they reached home, such an opportunity did present itself—and it was no ordinary opportunity.
In 1976 UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund, celebrated its thirtieth anniversary and the Australian Government’s contribution to the festivities was a gala concert held in the General Assembly Hall of the United Nations building in New York. This was the first time such an event had been held in that resplendent chamber and Australian theatrical icon Sir Robert Helpmann was charged with organising it. Invitations to take part were issued to and accepted by many distinguished Australian performers, including Joan Sutherland and Richard Bonynge, June Bronhill, Rolf Harris and Marjorie.
Zoe Caldwell and Cyril Ritchard compered and Marjorie opened the concert with what Ritchard described as the song most Australians recognise as their true national anthem. Tom, looking frail but dapper in black tie and ruffled shirt, wheeled Marjorie out amid a welcoming roar from the audience. Then he retired, reluctantly but proudly handing over the woman he had loved for thirty-seven years to the public for one last time and leaving her centre stage where she belonged. In a shimmering gown, her ‘diamonds’ and her trademark smile flashing, Marjorie mustered all the vocal resources that remained to her in her seventieth year as the orchestra struck up the opening bars of ‘Waltzing Matilda’. As Richard Bonynge recalls in his foreword, by the end of the song, the entire audience was moved to tears by Marjorie’s courage, by memories of glories past and echoes of a once great voice, and the spirited performance she had just given.
After the concert a lavish reception was held, hosted by the Secretary General of the United Nations and the Australian Ambassador to the UN. Marjorie was photographed with Joan Sutherland, both divas glowing as only great divas can and obviously touched to be once more in each other’s company. It was a great night for all Australians and for UNICEF, which benefited by $100,000, but more importantly it was an historic occasion. It was one of those precious occasions when two great musical ambassadors from the same nation—a generation apart in age and art—came together in public to create history.7
Shortly before the UN concert Marjorie had been informed that she had been nominated for an imperial honour. Some, including Tom, thought this was long overdue. As far back as 1949, Tom had petitioned the Australian Government to recommend Marjorie for an award. At the time a Labor government was in power in Australia and Arthur Calwell wrote back to say it was not his party’s policy to recommend people for imperial honours. Tom next approached the Victorian Liberal government, but got no further with Melbourne than he had with Canberra.
Just who recommended Marjorie for the award she finally received is unclear, but it would seem likely that the process was begun when Marjorie and Tom were in Sydney for the Australian This Is Your Life program. The result was that Marjorie’s name was published in the 1977 New Year Honours list among those to become Commanders in the Order of the British Empire, in recognition of her illustrious career in music. Marjorie was given several options for accepting the award, including attending an investiture at Buckingham Palace, but chose to travel to Washington and to receive it from the Australian Ambassador to the United States, Allan Renouf.
The academic world also honoured Marjorie with three awards. In 1969 the University of Ohio bestowed on her an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters and at the same time she accepted a fellowship from the British Royal Society for the Encouragement of the Arts. Soon after Marjorie got her CBE, Southern Illinois University conferred an Honorary Doctorate of Music on her. Marjorie was not a snob, but it might well have given her satisfaction that, by the end of her life, she too had ‘more letters than a crossword’ after her name.
During 1978 Marjorie continued to teach a small number of students, and the local community in Hot Springs, who had been happy to adopt her as their local celebrity, now revered her as their local legend. The mayor of Hot Springs designated a day in September as ‘Marjorie Lawrence Day’ and the plan was to celebrate her life and work on that day each year with a concert, but Marjorie wasn’t around for the second. Her last appearance in public was at a Christmas concert in the Hot Springs Convention Centre. Marjorie had prepared the singers—students and former students—to appear with the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra. Those who saw Marjorie and spoke with her that evening recall that she seemed in fine form, giving last-minute instructions backstage, then applauding louder than anyone else after each performance.
A week into the new year, Marjorie complained of feeling, in own her words, ‘not too hot’. Tom and their local doctor conferred and it was decided that as a precaution Marjorie should be admitted to St Vincent’s Infirmary in Little Rock for a complete medical check-up. In recent years Marjorie had been prone to minor ailments like anyone else, but her general health had been good for her age and activity had kept her mentally alert. Nothing specific was found when she was examined in the infirmary, but as the days passed her condition deteriorated. Tom and the Little Rock doctors who attended her reached the conclusion that her life was coming to its natural end. Their prognosis was right. With Tom and his sister Doris at her bedside, Marjorie died at 3 am on Saturday 13 January 1979, a month short of her seventy-third birthday. The official cause of death was heart failure.
News of Marjorie’s death was cabled around the world and obituaries appeared in newspapers across America and Australia. Most featured portraits of her in her glamorous concert gowns; a few found space to include photos of her in her major roles. Her singing was praised and memorable incidents—like riding Grane into the funeral pyre at the Met—were recalled, but Marjorie’s illness, her comeback and the film of Interrupted Melody dominated these columns.
Marjorie’s body was brought back to Hot Springs and lay in state in the Gross Mortuary to allow friends, acquaintances, former and current students to pay their last respects. The following day her funeral was held in St Luke’s Episcopal Church in Hot Springs. The church was packed and hundreds more gathered in the street outside. A choir made up of Marjorie’s students provided the music. After the service a cortege proceeded to Greenwood Cemetery at Hot Springs, where Marjorie was laid to rest. Later an impressive memorial in the shape of a classical temple was erected over her plot and the empty one beside it, reserved for Tom. Inscribed on the stone are the words: ‘God, love and music. These have I lived for’—a variation on the first line of Tosca’s aria ‘Vissi d’arte’. Memorial services for Marjorie were conducted in various other places, including Dean’s Marsh on the anniversary of her death.
Tom stayed on in the new house at Harmony Hills, his loneliness and frailty alleviated by help from his devoted sister and a few of Marjorie’s former friends and students who remained faithful to him to the end. Congestive heart failure took his life six years after his beloved wife. Unlike Marjorie’s, Tom’s funeral was poorly attended. On 8 April 1985 he was laid to rest beside Marjorie.8
In the years since Marjorie’s death her face and name have never slipped completely off the radar. The reissue of the Preiser LP as a CD brought it to the attention of many new listeners and the occasional reissue on CD of all those broadcasts from the Met and the Teatro Colón revealed the glory of Marjorie’s voice to people who had never before heard of her. In 2001 the Marjorie Lawrence International Vocal Competition was established in Washington by James McCully, a former student of Marjorie’s, with Sutherland and Bonynge as its honorary chairpersons. Marjorie’s name was added to the ‘Walk of Fame’ in Hot Springs, a commemorative plaque was placed on the old Lawrence house in Deans Marsh and the road between Deans Marsh and Winchelsea was renamed ‘The Marjorie Lawrence Way’ in her honour.
To celebrate the centenary of Marjorie’s birth in 2007 events were held in the United States and in Australia, culminating in the presentation of the ‘Marjorie Lawrence Centennial Celebration Award’ to Deborah Voigt in the Kennedy Centre in Washington. It was an appropriate choice of recipient, with Voigt now singing most of the roles Marjorie sang at the Met in her day.
With Marjorie’s death now more than thirty years in the past, we can look back on her life with the benefit of hindsight and place her art in context and perspective. Of her character I hope the picture is clear. No biographer can trawl the recesses of their subject’s mind and explore their personality from the inside. All we can do is present the outward manifestations of that personality through the subject’s words, writings, actions and reactions, and report the effects these had on others. I hope that what has been recounted about Marjorie in this and the previous chapters is sufficient to support my own conviction that she was a person of exceptional courage, blessed with an indomitable spirit and the capacity to be a life-enhancing force. Richard Bonynge’s comment that he and Dame Joan Sutherland felt privileged to share a tiny part in her life would be echoed by a legion of others in Australia and the United States. My only regret is that I was not one of them.
In discussing her art, subjectivity enters, but in my view the conclusions are just as clear. The 1930s at the Metropolitan Opera have been described as a golden age in the history of Wagner performance. In truth if we were transported back into the stalls of the Met during one of those performances caught on disc (of Die Walküre perhaps, with Marjorie, Flagstad, Melchior and Schorr, or Lohengrin with Lehmann, Marjorie and Melchior), what we would see would probably strike us as anything but golden: the stage cluttered, costumes mismatched and the singers resorting to stock poses and gestures, but in one regard the term ‘golden’ would seem entirely apt, perhaps even inadequate. The voices we would be listening to would be of a magnificence probably not heard before nor since in this repertoire. This was truly an age of Wagnerian vocal giants, one of those rare moments when a group of extraordinary artists appear on the scene at the same time and coalesce to produce performances without parallel.
Back in our seat at the Met, we would be watching and listening to mostly Germans, Norwegians, Danes and Swedes, progeny of races issuing from the fountainhead of Wagner’s music dramas. That a young Paris-trained woman from a rural community in far-off Australia should have been accepted into that fraternity is remarkable. That she could muster the voice and the artistry to be acknowledged as an equal among these titans is even more so. Marjorie’s life is littered with tantalising and frustrating ‘might-have-beens’, but they should not be allowed to overshadow her achievements. For a few short years she was a glittering adornment to the operatic stage—a true ‘star’, an ambassador for her nation and a dutiful servant of her art.
The title of this chapter is the opening of Wotan’s moving farewell to his daughter, Brünnhilde, in the final scene of Die Walküre. ‘Leb’ wohl, du kühnes, herrliches Kind’, the ruler of the gods sings—‘Farewell, thou valiant, glorious child’. A more fitting epitaph would be hard to find for Marjorie Lawrence.