I first heard the glorious voice of Marjorie Lawrence just before my fourteenth birthday in September 1944 in Sydney. I can still hear her incomparable sound in Dido’s ‘Lament’ as if it were yesterday. Five years later Joan and I adored her Sydney concerts—she gave at least six in June and July 1949.
Her sublime final scene from Götterdämmerung, her ‘O don fatale’, her ‘Divinités du Styx’ remain with me forever. If only I had heard her Valentine in Les Huguenots at the Opéra in Paris in 1936!
She came to La Scala in 1966 to see Joan as Donna Anna and we spent a memorable evening after the opera. We later had the indescribable pleasure of being in the same concert together for the United Nations in New York in 1976. Marjorie sang ‘Waltzing Matilda’ from her wheelchair and the entire audience was in tears. How privileged we were to share even a tiny part in her life.
In our opinion the voice of Marjorie Lawrence was the only Wagnerian comparable to Kirsten Flagstad and certainly one of the three greatest ever to come from Australia.
Bravo to Richard Davis for the long-awaited biography, which restores a great singer to her rightful place in operatic history.
Joan Sutherland, OM, AC, DBE Richard Bonynge, AC, CBE