Yvonne Minton

Mozart - La clemenza di Tito, K.621 - Act 1

Berlioz - La damnation de Faust, Op. 24 - Part 4, Scène 15

Wagner - Tristan und Isolde, WWV 90 - Act I, Scene 3

Mahler - Des Knaben Wunderhorn - Songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn

Strauss - Der Rosenkavalier, Op. 59, TrV 227 - Act III

Elgar - The Dream of Gerontius, Op. 38 - Part 2

Berg - Lulu - Yvonne Minton delivers a Tragic Gräfin Geschwitz (video)

Tippett - The Knot Garden - Act 1

Boulez - Le Marteau sans maître - III, L'Artisanat furieux

Marvellous Minton

DeccaWhy is it that Yvonne Minton, one of the greatest of all Australian singers, now has such a low level of awareness, even among music-lovers?

Is it because she was contemporary with another operatic Australian who had superstar status, Joan Sutherland? Is it because, although she made a continuous stream of first-rate recordings, her leading conductors—Georg Solti, Pierre Boulez, Daniel Barenboim, Leonard Bernstein, Istvan Kertesz, Carlos Kleiber, Colin Davis and others—were always treated as more marketable commodities by the opera and record companies? Is it because she has always been a very private person, often described as ‘shy’? Is it because there has been a distinct lack of tantrums and salacious gossip?

In Germany and the USA, where she established herself foremost in Cologne and Chicago, she was treated as the star she was from day one. The founding editor of the ‘industry bible’, Opera magazine’s Harold Rosenthal, never had any doubts about her qualities, publishing glowing reviews from the start and writing an adulatory summing up of her career to date in 1977. And Andrew Porter in the New Yorker saluted three ‘dashing female mezzos’ of that generation—Janet Baker, Marilyn Horne and Yvonne Minton.

Growing up in Sydney

Born at Dulwich Hill in the inner-west of Sydney on 4 December 1938, Yvonne Minton grew up in the nearby suburb of Earlwood, her father Robert (Bob) Minton a factory worker, and her mother Violet (née Dean) a seamstress-tailor and dressmaker. At school, Yvonne had her first music lessons from Bernadette Quinn and sang the Lord’s Prayer at school assemblies when Quinn was not available. Without ever having seen one, she told her school friends that she would become an opera singer—and was mocked by them for her pretension. Showing early promise, she started dedicated singing lessons at thirteen with a local teacher, the English-born Marjorie Walker. Yvonne stayed with Walker for many years, all through her time at the Conservatorium in Sydney, leading up to her move to London. ‘I’m not really sure what I learned from her,’ Yvonne said, ‘but I must have learned something.’

Little seems to be known about Marjorie Walker, who may have been a pupil and teacher at the Royal Academy of Music in London before and during the First World War—‘a promising young soprano’, singing Leïla’s cavatina from Bizet’s Les pêcheurs de perles in a student concert at the Queen’s Hall in 1911, and winner of the Ridley Prentice Prize for ‘best teaching by a sub-professor’ at the Academy in 1915. Brought up a Presbyterian, Yvonne sang regularly in the choir at St Stephen’s Church, Macquarie Street, in central Sydney.

Minton herself was to become a regular prize-winner at competitions in Sydney, her usual calling card being Erda’s Warning , ‘Weiche, Wotan, weiche!’, from Wagner’s Das Rheingold, a role which ironically she was never to sing professionally, her voice rising gradually from contralto to mezzo-soprano. She was often taken to these events by her father, who loved music and played the piano by ear. Her dominance can be judged from the fact that Yvonne won four different prizes at the Fairfield Eisteddfod in 1958—for modern art song, for sacred solo, for composition, and also the local Municipal Council’s vocal scholarship for women.

That same year, aged eighteen, Yvonne was awarded the Elsa Stralia Scholarship, the prize enabling her to study at the Sydney Conservatorium for three years. Because she already had an established singing teacher outside the Con, she concentrated her studies there on composition, on piano with Raymond Fisher and on stagecraft. The teacher for this last was the actor John McCallum, husband of the celebrated Googie Withers. It was McCallum who introduced her to the basics of stage acting. During this period she was trained in shorthand and typing and sustained herself through secretarial work, together with occasional appearances in oratorio and broadcasts.

However, her major breakthrough came in April 1960, when, having again sung Erda’s Warning, she was awarded the prestigious Shell Aria competition at the National Eisteddfod in Canberra. The adjudicator was Henry Portnoj (himself teacher of Nance Grant, John Shaw, Clifford Grant and others). Together with some accumulated savings, the £1,000 prize enabled Yvonne to travel to London to further her vocal education and to try her luck as a full professional.

In August she went on to sing Elgar’s Sea Pictures with the Canberra Chamber Orchestra: ‘Miss Minton has a contralto voice of great beauty and possesses good control over her whole range,’ reported the Canberra Times. And at the end of August, Minton sang in a rare performance, broadcast by the ABC, of Honegger’s oratorio King David at Sydney Town Hall, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra conducted by the Russian Nicolai Malko. Shortly before embarking on the long sea journey to England, Yvonne sang as guest soloist at a Service of Witness at the Warrimoo Citizens Hall, an event designed to promote the Presbyterian Church in New South Wales. Up to the time she left Australia, Yvonne had imbibed her experience of professional singing and singers mostly from the radio, never having seen an opera.

London and Covent Garden

As with so many other aspiring young Australian singers before her, for Yvonne the early months, even years, in London were difficult. She found an agent and took what she was to describe as ‘bread and butter jobs in Wales’ organised by her first British agent, Norman McCann, singing in Messiah and Elijah and giving occasional recitals for music clubs. Meanwhile, she took lessons with the Irish baritone Henry Cummings and with the established English soprano, Joan Cross. An experienced hand at competitions, Yvonne entered and won the Kathleen Ferrier Prize at ’s-Hertogenbosch in the Netherlands in September 1961.

One of her early performances came on Vic Oliver’s long-established weekly programme on BBC radio, Variety Playhouse. An Austrian-born immigrant, Oliver was a violinist and comedian, and each program featured an up-and-coming opera singer. The Saturday evening show of 2 February 1962 featured ‘the first broadcast of Yvonne Minton’, and she was heard by Christopher Raeburn from the Decca record company, who was sufficiently impressed that he arranged for her to be given an audition, at which she recorded Schumann’s song cycle Frauenliebe und –leben. This was made in April 1962, her coach and piano accompanist Paul Hamburger, Raeburn the producer. It remains unpublished. Nevertheless, the recording by Decca was to become the unexpected catalyst for much in Yvonne’s future. Because of that audition, the following June, she was called in to participate in her first recording to be published—Carmen. Recalling the events years later, the then young Decca recording producer John Culshaw wrote in his memoirs:

Apart from the pleasure of working with [conductor] Thomas Schippers, about the only pleasure I obtained from this wretched Carmen was that at the casting stage we could not find a suitable girl for the small mezzo part of Mercedes. It was then that I remembered Yvonne Minton, the shy young lady from Australia who had so impressed Decca during her audition more than a year before that we had arranged an experimental recording session for her. I had not seen her since then, but called her on the off-chance and offered her the small part … She jumped at the chance.

Undoubtedly Culshaw underestimated the effect that the Decca audition and its subsequent Carmen recording had on her career. Both Raeburn and Culshaw were to go on to record Yvonne in a high-profile series of recordings for Decca that paralleled her growing opera and concert career and reputation. Indeed, her next project was as Clotilda in the July 1964 recording of Bellini’s Norma with Joan Sutherland in the title role, Marilyn Horne as Adalgisa and Richard Bonynge the conductor.

On 30 January 1964, Yvonne made her debut on the opera stage in London, singing the title role in a small opera company’s performance of Benjamin Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia at the City Lit in London. John Warrack in Opera magazine was impressed:

Yvonne Minton’s Lucretia did not dodge any problems and the role bristles with them … [she] understood how much can be done by voice alone, and possesses the equipment to make her effects very well.

An excellent start for a singer who had never stood on an opera stage before. As a consequence, she was asked to audition at Covent Garden. She sang, as always, Erda’s Warning, heard by Georg Solti. Offered a junior contract, she turned it down on the basis that she was too inexperienced.

Yvonne’s next appearance in an opera was on 12 November 1964, this time in a leading role—as the art collector Maggie Dempster in the young Nicholas Maw’s comic opera, One Man Show. This took place as the first event for the opening of the newly-built Jeannetta Cochrane Theatre of the Central School of Arts and Crafts in Southampton Row, the performances alternately conducted by Norman Del Mar and Myer Fredman. The Stage commended Minton for her ‘vivid creation of the sexy art patron.’

The following March Yvonne took part in two productions at St Pancras Town Hall: the first was in another leading role in a new opera, this time a much darker piece, as Emma Bunting in Phyllis Tate’s The Lodger, based on the notorious murderer of the 1880s, ‘Jack the Ripper’, the English Chamber Orchestra conducted, as in One Man Show, by Myer Fredman—‘Yvonne Minton … succeeded in creating a convincing and finely-sung dramatic character,’ wrote Opera; the second was a ground-breaking production of one of Monteverdi’s great masterpieces of the seventeenth century, Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria, its first British performance. Minton was Penelope’s nurse, Eurycleia, the conductor Frederick Marshall. Among the cast was an aspiring young tenor, Roger Norrington, who had also earlier sung in One Man Show. She was back at St Pancras Town Hall in June in her first Russian role—as Ratmir in Glinka’s Ruslan and Ludmila. Arthur Jacobs in Opera was impressed:

Yvonne Minton … sang her slow aria in the final act with a beauty and control of tone which was quite spellbinding.

It seems that it was her performance in the Maw opera that led to a second audition at Covent Garden and her acceptance of a contract there. In 1965 two things happened in Yvonne’s life that were to have a profound influence on her future: first, she became engaged to a young Scotsman, Bill Barclay, whom she had first met at the Presbyterian Church in Ealing (near where she was living). Barclay was from Carluke in Lanarkshire, south-east of Glasgow. A scientist by education, who became a long-term manager at the Metal Box Company in the south of England, Bill’s passion was music. They married in August.

And second, Yvonne made her debut at Covent Garden. The immediate consequence was that she undertook three modest roles in swift succession there, but this was the beginning of a relationship with the Royal Opera House which was to extend over three decades and 142 performances.

Georg Solti

Decca

Her house debut was on 26 March 1965, just days after completing her stint at St Pancras Town Hall: in her first role at Covent Garden, she was ‘a seductive Lola’ in Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana according to The Stage, with Gwyneth Jones as Santuzza, Carlo Cossutta as Turiddu, the conductor Bryan Balkwill; this was followed on 12 April by Puccini’s Suor Angelica, part of an evening including the three works grouped as Il trittico and conducted by John Pritchard—with Joan Carlyle in the title role, Yvonne’s compatriot Sylvia Fisher as the Princess, and Minton as the Mistress of Discipline; in contrast to her first two roles, both from the Italian repertoire, the third opened on 28 June, Minton as the Third Naked Virgin in Schoenberg’s Moses and Aaron. This production was directed by the young Peter Hall and was conducted by a man who was to have such a massive impact on Minton’s subsequent career, Georg Solti. It caused a furore, described by The Stage as ‘the most remarkable and controversial work ever to be seen on the Covent Garden stage.’ At the heart of the controversy was the Calf of Gold scene, with its ‘butcher-shops, buckets of gore and its near-naked sexual frenzies.’¹

In July 1965, aside from a series of near-naked performances in Covent Garden’s Schoenberg shocker, Yvonne also sang in the title role of an ‘elegant revival of Rinaldo’ in the Handel Opera Society’s season at Sadler’s Wells, the first of many trouser-roles. The Stage thought her singing

… quite excellent … her steadiness in tone in long sustained phrases, and the feeling of there being more in reserve, gave the listener confidence in her ability, while her movements had an eighteenth-century grace which fitted exactly into the mood of Douglas Craig’s production.

That same month (on the 19th), Yvonne made her debut at the BBC Prom Concerts at the Royal Albert Hall—the first of twenty-four appearances stretching over three decades—again singing Schoenberg’s Third Naked Virgin under Solti. At the end of July she appeared with the New Opera Company, again at Sadler’s Wells, in the first British performance of Prokofiev’s The Fiery Angel. Minton was both the Hostess of the Inn and the Mother Superior, the lead role (Renata) taken triumphantly by fellow-Australian Marie Collier, the conductor Leon Lovett.

She appeared in her second BBC Prom of the season on 14 August, singing a variety of arias from operettas by Gilbert and Sullivan together with tenor Richard Lewis, Australian baritone John Cameron and bass Owen Brannigan. Sir Malcolm Sargent conducted, the event televised live on BBC1. September 16 brought a Commonwealth Arts Festival in London, and Yvonne sang together with Sydney-born soprano Elaine Blighton and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra under Sargent in the opening event at the Royal Festival Hall (also broadcast live on BBC1).

On 23 September she sang her first, somewhat modest, Wagnerian role at Covent Garden—as a Valkyrie, Schwertleite in Die Walküre (with Gwyneth Jones the Sieglinde and Amy Shuard Brünnhilde). This Walküre was part of the controversial evolving Ring cycle conducted by Georg Solti. Some audience members, an anti-Solti clique, queued for tickets specifically so that they could boo the conductor. However, the assembled Valkyries were singled out for special praise, including as they did several young and promising members of the Covent Garden company, including Anne Evans, Ann Howard, Rae Woodland, Elizabeth Bainbridge and Yvonne Minton.

Wagner was to become one of the composers central to Yvonne’s blossoming career, not only at Covent Garden, but also at Cologne, Bayreuth, San Francisco, Munich and elsewhere.

On 28 September 1965, Yvonne continued the run of role debuts over that spring and summer, making her first and only appearance for many years at Glyndebourne—in a television broadcast for the BBC2 of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, with Janet Baker as Dido, Thomas Hemsley as Aeneas and Minton as the Sorceress. This was a one-off, the production (conducted by John Pritchard) going on to be incorporated in the full repertoire the following season, but without Yvonne.

The very busy year 1965 was completed for Minton with a step up to a larger role at Covent Garden—as Marina in Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov—with the great Bulgarian bass Boris Christoff as the Tsar, Alberto Remedios as Dimitri, John Lanigan as Shuisky and Michael Langdon as Varlaam. The conductor was the outstanding English Russianist of the period, Edward Downes, who was to become both coach and good friend to Yvonne.

1966 opened with a television broadcast in January for BBC1 featuring the great baritone Tito Gobbi in Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi conducted by Edward Downes—Minton as La Ciesca. This was followed by a Cambridge University Opera Society performance of Gluck’s Orfeo in February, Yvonne in the title role, and she returned to Covent Garden in March with a continuation of the series of small to middling roles that might well have gone on to define her operatic career: as Nicklaus in Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann, ‘a first-rate impersonation,’ wrote Opera, the conductor James Loughran; the following month she was entrusted with another similar-sized role, this time as Annina, the intriguing accomplice of the tricky Valzacchi, in Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, a new production by Luchino Visconti. Act 3 was televised live on BBC2. It was to be a much greater role in that opera which would form the backbone of her operatic career as a star performer—Octavian—but that young aristocrat was at the time the vocal property of the English mezzo, Josephine Veasey, the Marschallin by Sena Jurinac. The conductor, Georg Solti, went on to record that cast in extracts from the opera for Decca, but already he had presided over three productions in which Minton had sung and must have come to the decision that she was capable of greater things.²

Yvonne Minton, 1971. Photo by Decca/Mike Evans (left). Yvonne Minton, The Essential Classics, ABC Classics, 2003 (right)

Finding Mahler

In the meantime, there came another important stepping stone for Yvonne—her first Mahler. The Royal Ballet had commissioned from its leading choreographer, Kenneth MacMillan, an unlikely subject—to turn Mahler’s dark orchestral song cycle, Das Lied von der Erde, into an extended one-act ballet. This was premièred by John Cranko’s company in Stuttgart in 1965 before being presented as The Song of the Earth at Covent Garden on 19 May 1966 with the young Anthony Dowell as the Messenger of Death, Donald MacLeary as The Man and Marcia Haydée as the principal ballerina. It divided the reviewers, the dance critic of The Stage, Eric Johns, hearing the music for the first time, pronounced that 

… there was sheer magic in the Mahler sound from the orchestra pit and in the voices of the singers, but when Mr MacMillan’s team of dancers took the stage in drab practice-costumes, they broke in upon me like intruders … I failed to discover much connection between the visual and the aural components of this work.     

The singers were Yvonne Minton and Vilem Pribyl, who both stood at the side of the stage. The conductor was Hans Swarowsky. The Song of the Earth was to become a great modern classic of the Royal Ballet, chosen as recently as 2007 by prima ballerina Darcey Bussell for her televised farewell performance. Of course, although Minton was highly praised for her stage-side performances, it would have been difficult at that time to foresee the extent to which she would become such a sought-after singer of Mahler’s music.

From the composer’s early death at 50 in 1911 until the early 1960s, Mahler’s work substantially fell from favour and out of the concert repertoire, performances becoming few and far between. His music’s public survival during those decades was dependent on the advocacy of a handful of conductors, several of whom had worked closely with the composer. The catalyst for the irresistible rise in popularity of Mahler’s music came with the passionate advocacy of a younger generation of conductors who performed and recorded complete cycles of symphonies and songs in the 1960s—including Leonard Bernstein, Bernard Haitink, Rafael Kubelik and Pierre Boulez. They were followed in short order by the Hungarian-born Georg Solti, whose major contribution to the growth of Mahler-mania came in the 1970s with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and Solti’s chosen mezzo-soprano in both symphonies and song cycles was Yvonne Minton.

While still a student in Sydney, Minton had become familiar with the classic recording from 1952 of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde by Kathleen Ferrier and Julius Patzak with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Walter. Minton recalled in particular ‘… [Ferrier’s] warmth of tone and clear, simple use of text,’ adding: ‘I used to listen to her singing Das Lied von der Erde long before I attempted it myself and I fell in love with it.’

That summer of 1966 in London, Yvonne reverted to bit-parts at Covent Garden—as Second Lady in Peter Hall’s production of The Magic Flute and as a Flower Maiden in Parsifal, both conducted by Solti. She sang at the English Bach Festival in Oxford in July, and at the Proms in August she took a lead role in Handel’s Solomon, conducted by Charles Mackerras, returning later in the month to sing Schoenberg and Webern, the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Pierre Boulez. Boulez was another conductor who would go on to have a profound influence on Yvonne’s artistic growth and reputation. The Edinburgh Festival opened in August 1966 with Mahler’s massive Eighth Symphony, the Scottish National Orchestra conducted by Alexander Gibson. For Minton, this marked a swift return to a composer who was to become such a major part of her burgeoning career. Then in September, at another Prom, she sang in Delius’s A Mass of Life, Sir Malcolm Sargent conducting.

In October, the new season at Covent Garden brought more Wagner, Yvonne making her debut as the Rhinemaiden Wellgunde in both Das Rheingold and Götterdämmerung under Solti. In the following season, she added the role of Second Norn in Götterdämmerung. And in December 1966 she made her debut in Berlioz at Covent Garden—as the boy apprentice Ascanio in Benvenuto Cellini—with tenor Nicolai Gedda as Cellini, John Pritchard conducting and John Dexter the producer. It was the first time that the opera had been performed at Covent Garden for over 100 years. Over the years, Minton was to become celebrated for her performances in Berlioz.³

Then in March 1967 Yvonne reprised the role which had been her introduction to the Royal Opera House stage—as Lola in Cavalleria rusticana—The Stage reporting that she was ‘all that could be desired in the way of coquettish allure.’  That same month, Minton was Olga in a BBC2 television production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, with Margaret Price as Tatiana, John Shirley-Quirk as Onegin, David Lloyd-Jones conducting. Operareported: ‘Yvonne Minton, looking almost too aristocratically beautiful, was a luscious Olga.’

These were followed in May by a return to Mercédès in Carmen—the role she had previously sung in the recording studio for Decca four years before—now with Josephine Veasey in the title role, Jon Vickers as Don José, Mackerras conducting; and that same month, she took on the difficult role of Helen in the revival of Michael Tippett’s King Priam. Four years later, Yvonne sang in the premiere of Tippett’s The Knot Garden. King Priam was followed by her debut, again with Solti, in two small parts in Richard Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten—Solo Voice and Voice from Above. The summer of 1967 brought further performances at the Proms—as the Angel in Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius under Sir Adrian Boult and in a concert of chunks of Monteverdi operas with Raymond Leppard. She was to record the Dream of Gerontius for Decca five years later under the baton of Benjamin Britten. In September Yvonne sang Stravinsky at Usher Hall in the Edinburgh Festival—the European première of the Requiem Canticles and Le chant du rossignol—with the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Boulez.

Yvonne Minton as Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier (Covent Garden,1968)

Decca

Yvonne Minton as Sesto in La clemenza di Tito (Covent Garden, 1974)

Photo by Reg Wilson

Stepping up to major roles

It was the next season at Covent Garden, 1967/68, that brought a further decisive step up in Yvonne Minton’s operatic career. Her experience singing in smallish roles for both John Pritchard and Georg Solti led both of them to believe that she was ready. With Pritchard she sang the pageboy Cherubino in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro (with Geraint Evans as Figaro, Elisabeth Söderström the Countess and Tito Gobbi the Count);⁴ and with Solti in March, she was promoted to sing the title role of Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier (with Lisa Della Casa the Marschallin and Michael Langdon Baron Ochs). The Stage headlined her ‘noble, warm Octavian’, going on to single out her ‘nobility of manner and warm depth of tone’, noting ‘the sense of innate breeding she brought to the character.’ With both of these major trouser-roles, Yvonne has paid tribute to two members of Covent Garden’s team who coached her—John Copley and Ande Anderson.

In May, she went on to make her debut at Covent Garden as Meg Page in Verdi’s Falstaff—with Geraint Evans as the fat knight, Istvan Kertesz the conductor. Kertesz was yet another top-flight conductor who had a major influence on Yvonne’s career, recruiting her to his company at Cologne Opera. Kertesz was, according to Yvonne, ‘a wonderful singer’s conductor, who was exacting but built you up.’ Opera reported, ‘The new Meg … [took] an altogether fresh look at this seemingly rather uninteresting role.’

In the middle of 1968, Yvonne made her first return trip to Australia in seven years. Reviewing her own career to date for the Australian Women’s Weekly, she paid particular tribute to the positive contribution that Covent Garden had made in her development as an artist:

Covent Garden is excellent in the way it handles its singers. You are never pushed into trying anything for which you are not ready. Some performers prefer to make a big splash and retire early. I want a long singing life. Covent Garden is recognised as having some of the best training facilities for singers in the world. I have been taught languages, roles, acting, and stage techniques by their special instructors.

Yvonne was back in London in time for the Prom season in July, singing Brahms’s Alto Rhapsody with Sir Adrian Boult, Stravinsky with Boulez, and Berlioz’s L’enfance du Christ with Sir Colin Davis. December saw more Stravinsky—his ‘burlesque’ Renard—the London Sinfonietta conducted by David Atherton at the Queen Elizabeth Hall.

In January 1969 she was back at Covent Garden making her role debut there as Dorabella in Così fan tutte(with Elisabeth Söderström as Fiordiligi, Mackerras conducting), Minton’s ‘tone as ravishing as her appearance,’ according to Opera. Next at Covent Garden she reprised her roles in the Royal Ballet’s The Song of the Earth, in Benvenuto Cellini, and made her debut in a minor role, as Second Maid in Strauss’s Elektra, before taking on her next title role, another one in ‘trousers’ – as Orfeo in Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, with Pilar Lorengar her Euridice, Solti conducting. The Stage reported that

… potentially, Yvonne Minton is a first-class Orfeo, acting with marvellous conviction and singing with an even, velvet-like quality.

That qualifying ‘potentially’, The Stage went on, was because ‘she lacked the power and sheer dramatic intensity needed to breathe life into the character.’ Back at the Proms, she extended her reputation in Berlioz, singing Beatrice in Beatrice and Benedict with Sir Colin Davis, a role she was to repeat eight years later (in 1977) with Daniel Barenboim and L’Orchestre de Paris at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris.

As noted, Minton had joined Istvan Kertesz’s Cologne Opera company, making a spectacular debut there in the dazzling role of Sesto in Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito in September 1969. Hard on its heels, the following month the company brought three productions to Sadler’s Wells in London, opening with their Tito conducted by Kertesz (with Janet Coster as Vitellia, Lucia Popp as Servilia). ‘Yvonne Minton was especially successful in her interpretation of the unhappy Sesto,’ wrote The Stage: ‘Her singing had warmth and an easy fluency for the florid passages.’ ‘Magnificent,’ said Opera. This Tito was the first time that Minton performed in a production by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, a director she came to admire greatly.

Yvonne Minton with Mirella Freni (recording Le nozze di Figaro,1970)

Philips

Her entry into opera in Germany was quite unlike her appearance at Covent Garden. In London, starting at the bottom, she was offered small parts which gradually improved until she graduated to starring roles. However, in Cologne she was a star performer from day one. By December, again under Kertesz in Cologne, she was again the pageboy Cherubino in Le nozze di Figaro.   

In December 1969 she built on her growing artistic relationship with Pierre Boulez, making her debut at Covent Garden in the role of Geneviève in a famous production (by Vaclav Kaslik) of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande. ‘Yvonne Minton was a youthful Geneviève,’ Opera reported, ‘… her full, warm voice did full justice to the letter-reading scene.’

February 1970 brought a return to Boris Godunov as Marina, again with Christoff as the Tsar, but this time with the Russian conductor Gennadi Rozhdestvensky. After more Megs in Falstaff, Yvonne took on another rather minor role, again with Solti, as the Page to Herodias in Strauss’s Salome, ‘beautifully sung by Yvonne Minton,’ said Opera magazine, ‘[who] left one in no doubts as to the kind of woman [Herodias] was.’ A special gala to celebrate the retirement of Covent Garden’s director, Sir David Webster, took place in June. Yvonne was a featured artist (among many others), ‘magnificent as Sextus,’ reported Opera.

Following her success in Cologne, Yvonne ventured further afield, this time with Georg Solti to Chicago. Solti had been appointed musical director of the Chicago Symphony and at the heart of his work there were the symphonies and songs of Gustav Mahler—with Yvonne Minton a key component in this plan. Finding a way to express the success of their first season together making music in the city, the Chicago Tribune’s critic, Thomas Willis wrote in April 1970:

The men sitting next to me had driven all the way from Schenectady to hear the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Mahler concert last night. They clapped their hands practically raw for Yvonne Minton’s Songs of a Wayfarer. After the first movement of the sixth symphony, one said: ‘This has to be the world’s greatest orchestra.’

Homing in on Minton’s contribution to the occasion, Willis went on:

She has the melting velvet quality which some of us remember as the private property of Kathleen Ferrier … Miss Minton has the freshness and warmth to enfold us in the experience. The joy streaked with pain which lies at the heart of even the most cheerful Mahler still eludes her from time to time. But this will come. Next year, why not Das Lied von der Erde?

Back at the Proms in London in August 1970, Yvonne made a rare excursion from her usual territory, making an appearance with one of the emerging generation of ‘historically informed performance practice’ ensembles, the Monteverdi Orchestra (later renamed the English Baroque Soloists) conducted by their founder John Eliot Gardiner. She sang Phèdre in Rameau’s Hippolye et Aricie and the alto aria in Bach’s Cantata 34, ‘O ewiges Feuer, O Ursprung der Liebe’.

In late September, Minton made her American opera debut at the Lyric Opera in Chicago, as Octavian (‘… unrivalled in my experience,’ wrote Willis in the Chicago Tribune) in Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s production of Der Rosenkavalier from Cologne, conducted by Christoph von Dohnanyi. She repeated the role in Cologne in December, Helga Dernesch her Marschallin, Lucia Popp Sophie. 1970 finished for Yvonne with another difficult-to-learn role at Covent Garden—Thea in the première of Michael Tippett’s The Knot Garden (with Colin Davis conducting) —an enormous undertaking for a single performance. At least it was broadcast at the time by the BBC, the off-air tapes surviving, plus a televised broadcast of extracts on BBC2 in March 1975.

February 1971 saw Yvonne making her debut at Covent Garden as Tatiana’s sister Olga in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin (Ileana Cotrubas the Tatiana, Solti the conductor, Peter Hall the director), and that same month she appeared in a concert performance of Così fan tutte at the Royal Festival Hall, the occasion organised in preparation for Otto Klemperer’s recording for EMI of the opera. Klemperer’s interpretation widely regarded as far too slow.

Yvonne and Bill had waited before starting a family until Yvonne’s career was securely established and this was the year that their first child was born, a son, Malcolm Alexander. Performances that year were fewer and further between. Nevertheless, in June in Cologne Minton made her debut in another role that was to become important in her career—as Brangäne in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde—Yvonne having signed a contract with Cologne committing herself to twenty evenings a season over the coming two years, and Cologne Opera took their Clemenza di Tito production to the Flanders Festival in August, Yvonne as usual as Sesto. That July saw Yvonne’s sole appearance at Covent Garden since the Onegin in February—essentially the Vienna 1762 version of Gluck’s Orfeo, the edition prepared by conductor Charles Mackerras. Opera noted:

Yvonne Minton does not possess the rich, contralto-like tones of some of her great predecessors as Orpheus, but her very beautiful singing and her charming stage presence were to be admired.

Aside from her many performances of the work (in English) in the context of MacMillan’s ballet, Minton’s Das Lied von der Erde in concert came first, not in Chicago with Solti, but at the Proms in London in July with George Shirley the tenor and the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Sir Colin Davis. Her performance in Chicago with tenor Rene Kollo and the Chicago Symphony under Solti came some ten months later (in May 1972), hailed by local music critic Thomas Willis:

It was wonderful in every sense of the word … marvellous, amazing and a trifle strange. This was a performance of a magnificence heard so seldom in the concert hall … Not only did [Minton] have an assurance beyond that of her previous appearances, she brought a variety and sweep of vocal color which mark her as unique among the mezzo-sopranos of our time.

Extracts from the performance of Das Lied von der Erde were televised on BBC1 in November 1972.

Scene from Der Rosenkavalier, Sydney, 1972

Australian Women’s Weekly, 12 April 1972

Rosenkavalier in Australia

For the second time since leaving Australia for London back in 1960, Yvonne returned there in March 1972, this time together with husband Bill and baby Malcolm. Aside from introducing her London family to her Sydney family, the trip had an important musical purpose—the first staged performance of Der Rosenkavalier in Australia. The brainchild of the then musical director of the Australian Opera, Edward Downes, this was to be a lavish production with no expense spared, which would be presented in Melbourne (Princess Theatre), Adelaide (Her Majesty’s), Canberra (Canberra Theatre) and Sydney (Elizabethan Theatre, Newtown), running in all from 4 March to October 7. At the première in Melbourne, Rosemary Gordon was the Marschallin, Glenys Fowles was Sophie and Neil Warren-Smith was Baron Ochs, and Minton sang Octavian at the performances in Melbourne and Sydney. It was to be the only production of Rosenkavalier in which Yvonne sang the role in English. Opera reported from Australia:

Her Octavian is justly becoming world-renowned. Her mezzo is youthful and fresh, darkly ardent in the lower register, shining and golden at the top. Tall and slim with handsome, boyish good looks, she makes a charming transvestite and a most dashing Viennese noble; and she is a born comedian.

In the period between the Melbourne and Sydney performances of Rosenkavalier, Yvonne returned to London, singing Dorabella at Covent Garden in April. ‘Yvonne Minton was a really beautiful Dorabella,’ said Opera: ‘To be blunt, the only real Mozart singer on the stage … in fact she was the only member of the cast consistent in using appoggiaturas.’ She also made her debut at the State Opera in Vienna in June as Octavian, and that same month brought a repeat of her Dorabella in Cologne with a starry cast—Julia Varady as Fiordiligi and Julia Popp as Despina, the conductor Kertesz and the designer Ponnelle; and a repeat of her Octavian that month at the same house with Christa Ludwig the Marschallin. In July Yvonne sang one of the great mezzo roles, Dalila, in Saint-Säens Samson et Dalila at the Israel Festival in Caesarea, with Jon Vickers as Samson, Zubin Mehta conducting.

There was more work to come with Edward Downes in November at Covent Garden—Minton was Marfa in a single revival of Mussorgsky’s rarely-performed Khovanschina—and the following month she was Marguérite in a winter-season Prom performance at the Royal Albert Hall of Berlioz’s La damnation de Faust conducted by Boulez.

Yvonne Minton as Dalila in Samson et Dalila (Caesarea, Israel, 1972)

Istvan Kertesz

 

In March 1973 Yvonne made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York—again as Octavian—with Leonie Rysanek the Marschallin, Judith Blegen as Sophie and Walter Berry as Baron Ochs, conducted as in Chicago by Dohnanyi. Operareported from New York: ‘Miss Minton’s young-sounding, right-on-pitch voice, unusually free of vibrato, is housed in a youthful, boyish figure, giving her all the attributes needed for the part of Octavian.’ This was not her first appearance in New York—she had earlier performed in concert there with the New York Philharmonic and with the Cleveland Orchestra. In 1976 she was to repeat the role again, making her debut at the Opéra in Paris. Late in 1973, Yvonne made her debut with the San Francisco Opera as Brangäne in Tristan und Isolde, with Birgit Nilsson as Isolde, Jess Thomas as Tristan, Silvio Varviso conducting. In November Yvonne made a very rare cancellation—from Rosenkavalierin Chicago—due to her pregnancy. And Bill and Yvonne’s second child, Alison, was born.

Tragically, one of Yvonne’s most important mentors, the Hungarian-born conductor Istvan Kertesz, drowned while swimming off the coast of Israel in April 1973. He was just 43 but in his relatively brief professional career he had risen swiftly to the top, leaving a major body of work on record.

Yvonne repeated her Brangäne in March 1974, this time in Amsterdam with Berit Lindholm the Isolde and Michael Gielen conducting; at Covent Garden in April , she had made her house debut as her already-celebrated Sesto in La clemenza di Tito (‘… surely her greatest performance’, wrote The Stage); she was to repeat this in a performance at the Proms on 3 September; and in May she sang Mahler’s Rückert Lieder with Boulez in Düsseldorf. Minton had sung in a televised broadcast performance of these songs in a 2nd House anthology for BBC2 in January, a programme which included Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, and three months later she was back on BBC2 in a programme devoted to the music of Ravel, singing ‘Asie’ from his cycle Shéhérazade with the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Boulez.

Yvonne Minton with husand Bill and baby Malcolm

The Australian Women's Weekly, 19 January 1972

Endnotes

1. Major works by Schoenberg came throughout Minton’s career; she was to follow Moses and Aaronwith performances of Gurrelieder and Pierrot Lunaire

2. After Rosenkavalier, the other Strauss operas that Minton sang major roles in were: Die Frau ohne Schatten,Elektra,Salome and Ariadne auf Naxos

3. Berlioz: in L’enfance du Christ,Beatrice and Benedict,La damnation de Faust,Les nuits d’été and The Trojans

4. Minton’s major Mozart roles: Cherubino in Le nozze di Figaro, Sesto in La clemenza di Tito, Dorabella in Così fan tutte and the alto part in his Requiem

An Australian at Bayreuth

Brangäne in Tristan und Isolde (Bayreuth, 1976). Photo by Siegfried Lauterwasser.July 1974 brought another major step in Minton’s career—her debut at Bayreuth, where she sang Brangäne in Tristan und Isolde conducted by Carlos Kleiber, the director August Everding, with Swedish soprano Catarina Ligendza as Isolde and Helge Brilioth as Tristan. She was to wait five more years (until 1979) before finally repeating the role at Covent Garden. In its 98 years since opening, Minton was only the third Australian to perform with the company—following soprano/mezzo Norma Gadsden in 1936–37 and tenor Kenneth Neate in 1963.

Back at the Proms in London in August, she sang the Wood-Dove in Schoenberg’s Gurre-Lieder, with Jess Thomas as Waldemar, Boulez conducting the BBC Symphony; on 1 September she was at the Proms with Das Lied von der Erde, Norman Del Mar conducting; by November Yvonne was singing at the Royal Festival Hall in London—first in Mahler’s Third Symphony with Boulez and his BBC orchestra; then in Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen with Daniel Barenboim conducting the London Philharmonic. Also in November she repeated her Brangäne, this time in San Francisco, with the same cast as in Amsterdam. In December she sang in Berlioz’s L’enfance du Christ at the Albert Hall, the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Neville Marriner, and that same month she returned to Covent Garden as Geneviève in Pelléas et Mélisande, this time with Colin Davis.

1974 may well have been Yvonne’s busiest (and most successful) year to date, but there was to be no respite: on 1 January 1975 she was in Mahler’s Second Symphony (the Resurrection), again at the Royal Festival Hall, the orchestra now the New Philharmonia conducted by Zubin Mehta. At Covent Garden in February 1975, Yvonne reprised Sesto and also King Priam in May, just one performance of each. In July she was awarded honorary membership of the Royal Academy of Music in London, after which she returned to Bayreuth for a second season singing Brangäne, Carlos Kleiber again the conductor. She was invited back as Brangäne in the following two seasons, with Horst Stein the conductor in 1977.

The singing of Mahler continued with the Rückert Lieder at the Royal Festival Hall in October with the Royal Philharmonic under Sir Charles Groves (the cycle repeated with Minton at the same venue in March 1976 with Michael Gielen conducting the BBC Symphony) and Das Klagende Lied a month later (same venue) with the BBC Symphony under Boulez (repeated at the Proms in September 1976, this time the original version, including Waldmärchen). In November, Minton took part in a special Youth and Music gala concert for young people at the Royal Festival Hall, televised on BBC2, where she sang Lieder by Hugo Wolf, her piano accompanist Georg Solti.

discogs

discogs

She returned to Cologne for the winter season 1975, repeating both her Dorabella in Cosi and Octavian in Rosenkavalier (the latter with Sena Jurinac and Lucia Popp), and taking the latter role on to the Opéra in Paris in January 1976 (Christa Ludwig the Marschallin, Horst Stein conducting). Reporting from Paris for Opera, Charles Pitt was generally critical of a disjointed production, but wrote that

Yvonne Minton’s fine Octavian took the tiring tessitura easily in her stride and skilfully managed the changing moods of impetuosity, tenderness and anger with a youthful, if sometimes cool, timbre.

Yvonne sang Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été with the Berlin Philharmonic in Berlin in October 1975, Miklos Erdelyi the conductor and the same month she sang Brahms’s Alto Rhapsody in Düsseldorf under Willem van Otterloo. In April 1976, Minton sang Elgar’s Sea Pictures with the London Philharmonic under Daniel Barenboim at the Royal Festival Hall in London, recording the song cycle for EMI at Abbey Road Studios with the same forces.

Having learned it with great difficulty, that same month she sang Pierre Boulez’s Le marteau sans maître, the composer conducting, at Basel. She had been in a BBC television broadcast of it with Boulez in October 1968 and had studio-recorded it with him in 1973 for CBS. She toured in Germany with the BBC Northern Symphony Orchestra under Raymond Leppard in late April and May, singing Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder,⁵ following this with a performance of Nuits d’été under Aldo Ceccato in Hamburg also in May. In June, she was back in London, taking part in Beethoven’s Choral Symphony under André Previn at the Royal Festival Hall, but by October, Minton was back in Stuttgart, this time with the Radio Symphony Orchestra singing the Nuits d’été under Elgar Howarth.

Minton escalated her commitment to Bayreuth in the summer of 1976 by taking on Fricka in Das Rheingold and Die Walküre and Waltraute in Götterdämmerung, repeating her Waltraute the following year.⁶ This centenary Ring cycle was to become one of Bayreuth’s most celebrated, with Gwyneth Jones as Brünnhilde, Jess Thomas Siegfried, New Zealander Donald McIntyre as Wotan, Pierre Boulez the conductor and Patrice Chéreau the director. Reviewing the 1977 Bayreuth season, The Stage opined: ‘Surpassing all other performances was the gloriously sung Götterdämmerung Waltraute of Yvonne Minton.’

In September 1976 she finally graduated to the role of Waltraute in Covent Garden’s Götterdämmerung, Colin Davis the conductor—‘Yvonne Minton was best of all as an intense Waltraute,’ according to The Stage. Opera added: ‘Miss Minton fully deserved the ovation she received, the longest and warmest of the evening.’ The following month, she sang at the opening of the refurbished Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Centre in New York in a performance of Mahler’s Third Symphony with the New York Philharmonic under Boulez. The acoustics of the hall were said to have been significantly improved.

December 1976 brought a new and challenging leading role for Yvonne at Covent Garden—as The Composer (‘superb singing’ said The Stage) in Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos. Heather Harper was the Prima Donna/Ariadne and Edo de Waart conducted.

Yvonne Minton

Decca

Yvonne Minton sings Mahler, Decca Eloquence

Starring in Austria and Germany

Returned to Cologne in the early spring of 1977, Yvonne sang Octavian (with Sena Jurinac under Janowski), Sesto (under Georg Fischer) and Dorabella (with Margaret Price under Fischer), then Orfeo to Lucia Popp’s Euridice with Jesus Lopez-Cobos conducting, the producer Ponnelle.

While several Australians had performed extensively in Vienna in earlier years (Frances Saville in Mahler’s company at the Court Opera in the 1900s being the most prominent), only tenor Kenneth Neate had made a substantial career in Germany before Minton. In April, Minton performed a radical departure from her unusual repertoire at a 25th anniversary gala concert of the Rundfunkorchester in Munich with Heinz Wallberg conducting—the brilliant rondo ‘Nacqui all’affano from Rossini’s La Cenerentola, Eboli’s aria ‘O don fatale’ from Verdi’s Don Carlos and the final duet from Der Rosenkavalier (with Lilian Sukis).

In June 1977 Minton spoke-sang Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire with an all-star ensemble⁷ under Boulez in Paris (a performance recorded that same month by CBS) and also Béatrice in Berlioz’s Béatrice et Bénédict with the Orchestre de Paris under Barenboim at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées (Gerald English the co-lead) and Yvonne’s gradually widening experience of Berlioz took another important step forward in September with the lead role, Dido, in The Trojans at Carthage (Part 2 of the composer’s magnum opus) conducted by Colin Davis, a revival of Covent Garden’s 1969 production, but just one performance.

There was a gala evening organised by the Australian Musical Association to celebrate the Queen’s Silver Jubilee on 3 July at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in London, Yvonne sharing the billing with Joan Carden, Geoffrey Chard, Charles Mackerras and others. The music of Grainger, Malcolm Williamson and Mackerras was featured.

Later that same month, she sang The Composer in Ariadne auf Naxos again, this time at the Munich Festival, Wolfgang Sawallisch the conductor, and returned to Salzburg and then Stuttgart in Der Rosenkavalier. In the autumn she was also Dalila in Samson et Dalila in Munich. A return to the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in October brought Mahler’s Rückert Lieder and Berg’s Seven Early Songs under Boulez, and the following month Minton was back in Cologne as Orfeo. In December 1977 Minton returned to the Met in New York as Octavian—this time having Gwyneth Jones as the Marschallin and Reri Grist as Sophie, the conductor Leopold Hager, repeating the role at the Opéra in Paris in February 1978 and Vienna in July, then Salzburg. Also in Salzburg that August, Yvonne gave her only performance with Karl Böhm conducting, singing the Kindertotenlieder cycle.  

Photo by Clive Barda 

The founding editor of Opera magazine, Harold Rosenthal, who had reviewed so many of her performances, wrote a substantial feature article on Yvonne’s career to date in September 1977. Perhaps the most controversial aspect of it was Minton’s outspoken remarks concerning contemporary producers. By this stage, she had worked with many of the leading names of the period—including Peter Hall, August Everding, Götz Friedrich, Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, John Copley and Patrice Chéreau—and issued this warning barrage:

One can’t speak to some of them, they have such an exaggerated idea of themselves. They receive far too much money to spend on the production, often scrapping a costume on which thousands of pounds might have been spent because they don’t like it or because they have a new idea. I truly believe that unless a producer can convince me that his is the only way of doing something, I must be able to talk and discuss a part with him … If only we artists would stick together and protest when we are asked to do the impossible! But we don’t, and often I find I am complaining on my own, while some of my colleagues seem afraid to.

One can only add that, speaking of producers, since the 1970s for singers things have got a great deal worse. Rosenthal also explored with Yvonne her approach to a new role:

I first get the whole role recorded as if it were a play; I listen to it, I love words. Then, when I have mastered the text I turn to the music.

Prima le parole, poi la musica! This process must have been particularly important in Yvonne’s preparation for her next major role—that of Judith in Bartok’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle in Cologne in March 1978. Her mentor in Cologne, Istvan Kertesz, who was one of the greatest conductors of that strange opera, had tragically died five years before, his place taken by John Pritchard. However, much of the preparation for Bluebeard was done by Jeffrey Tate. For Opera, Albin Haenseroth wrote: ‘Yvonne Minton enraptured the audience with her sensitively and beautifully sung Judith.’

April brought a Mahler 3 with the Südwestrundfunk Orchestra under Michael Gielen in Baden-Baden, Das Lied von der Erde in Hanover with the NDR Orchestra under Bernhard Klee and the Nuits d’étéin a concert at La Scala Milan under Georges Prêtre. In May, at the specific request of the conductor, Minton sang in Mahler’s Fourth Symphony at the Royal Festival Hall in London, the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Claudio Abbado. She warned him in advance that the part lay (in part) too high for her, but he pressed on and all went well. That month in Vienna she gave a recital with John Constable at the piano, singing Schubert, Schumann, Berg and Mahler, and she returned to Cologne to sing Dorabella and Sesto under Pritchard and Judith in Duke Bluebeard’s Castle.

At Salzburg also in May she repeated her by now celebrated Octavian, again under Dohnanyi, the Marschallin now Gundula Janowitz. At the Edinburgh Festival in September, Yvonne sang Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde with Hermann Winkler (tenor) and the BBC Symphony under Boulez, having previously performed it with the same forces at the Proms in London. Minton returned to the Lyric Opera in Chicago in October, this time singing her first Massenet, as Charlotte in Werther (with Alfredo Kraus in the title role, Reynald Giovaninetti conducting). The Chicago Tribune reported:

Minton rose from a rather slow start to some exceptional singing of the Air des Lettres and the Air des Larmes in the third act. Here she floated a creamy, vibrant mezzo-soprano that underlined the emotions of this crucial scene with genuine intimacy and intensity.

Returned to London, Yvonne sang Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde at the Proms in September with the BBC Symphony under Boulez. In December, she gave another Nuits d’été, this time in Aachen with the State Orchestra under Gabriel Chmura.

In Cologne in December 1978/January 1979, Yvonne repeated the role of The Composer in Ariadne auf Naxos, this time with Anna Tomova-Sintov as the Prima Donna, Pritchard conducting and Ponnelle the producer. In February 1979, Yvonne took on another major challenge—as Countess Geschwitz in Alban Berg’s Lulu at the Opéra in Paris—a ‘powerful performance’ said Edward Greenfield of Yvonne in The Guardian. In fact, this was an historic event for world opera—the first performance of the complete version of Berg’s masterpiece. Canadian soprano Teresa Stratas was in the title role, with Patrice Chéreau the director and Pierre Boulez conducting ‘with flawless authority’, according to The Stage. The production was repeated at La Scala in Milan in May.

Gustav Maher, 1907

Photo by Moritz Nähr/Wikimedia

Wagner in 1871

Photo by Franz Hanfstaengl/Wikimedia

Minton had two more major roles, both of them Wagnerian, ahead of her at Covent Garden—Kundry in Parsifal (debut 11 April 1979) and Brangäne in Tristan und Isolde (debut 16 May 1980). The latter she had already sung extensively at Bayreuth, but Kundry was in some ways the crowning glory of her career at the house—‘intensely alive in maniacal wildness, allurement and eventual submission, even when silent,’ wrote Anthony Merryn in The Stage. Peter Hofmann sang the title role, Kurt Moll was Gurnemanz, Norman Bailey Amfortas and Georg Solti conducted. It was directed by leading Shakespearean producer Terry Hands.

April brought Ravel’s Shéhérazade at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam (with the great house orchestra under Bernard Haitink). In May Minton sang again with the Orchestre de Paris under Barenboim—Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust—this time at the Royal Festival Hall in London. Edward Greenfield in The Guardian revelled in her ‘golden tone’ as Marguérite.

June saw Minton in Paris again with the Orchestre de Paris under Barenboim singing extracts from Lulu in concert, in Vienna with the Wiener Symphoniker under Horst Stein singing the Rückert Lieder, and Dortmund in July brought Nuits d’été with the Dortmund Philharmonic under Janowski. In July, Yvonne returned to Salzburg with the Cologne productions of Ariadne auf Naxos, Der Rosenkavalier and La clemenza di Tito.

Minton made another return trip to Australia in September 1979, this time to give a series of recitals and broadcasts for the ABC. She sang at the School of Music in Canberra on 15 September, Geoffrey Parsons her accompanist, and Yvonne put on show her recently-honed skills in the singing of Berg, in response to which John Small in the Canberra Times wrote:

The dramatic force of the Minton voice in the right context is almost overpowering. It was particularly effective in seven early songs by Alban Berg, where it gave dramatic ballast to the intensely chromatic music and the hothouse lyricism of the texts.

Returned to London in October, she was to have given a further series of performances as Octavian in Visconti’s production of Rosenkavalier (Söderström the Marschallin, Yvonne Kenny as Sophie, Gustav Kuhn the conductor). However, the house was in dispute with the musicians’ union over pay and the whole series was cancelled. In December the Everding production of Rosenkavalier from Cologne was given at the State Opera in Hamburg with Christa Ludwig the Marschallin, Karl Ridderbusch as Baron Ochs, Heinz Fricke conducting. On the 3rd of the month, Yvonne gave a recital with John Constable at the Tonhalle in Düsseldorf singing three Haydn songs, Schumann’s Liederkries Op 39, Tchaikovsky songs and four Mahler songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn. And on the 20th she was in concert with the Munich Philharmonic conducted by Walter Weller singing Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder.

Minton was given a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in the New Year Honours of 1980. The Australian Women’s Weekly took the opportunity to sum up Yvonne’s career to date:

Now an international star, she’s reached her original goal: to sing leading roles at Covent Garden and at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. In constant demand for guest appearances in opera houses, in recording studios and on concert platforms on both sides of the Atlantic, she is admired by fellow musicians, by critics and by music lovers.  

February 1980 saw Yvonne at the Grand Théâtre in Geneva with Ariadne auf Naxos, Pritchard conducting, followed in March by a Liederabend in Cologne accompanied by John Constable, where she sang Schubert, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Mahler (four songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn). In April she brought her Brangäne, honed at Bayreuth, to Cologne and the following month to Covent Garden (Jon Vickers the Tristan, Zubin Mehta conducting), appearing in the same opera in Mannheim in July with Ingrid Bjoner as Isolde and Jean Cox as Tristan, then at the National Theatre in Munich, this time with Hildegard Behrens as Isolde, René Kollo as Tristan, and Wolfgang Sawallisch conducting.

In London in June, she had replaced an indisposed Julia Hamari with the Philharmonia Orchestra under Lorin Maazel in Das Lied von der Erde at the Royal Festival Hall. And in September she brought her Rheingold and Walküre Fricka, similarly developed at Bayreuth, to Covent Garden—her Fricka a ‘formidable assumption’, according to the Financial Times. That same month Minton returned to the State Opera in Vienna as Octavian with Anna Tomowa-Sintow the Marschallin.

At a Gürzenich Orchestra concert in Cologne in October, Minton sang in Mahler’s Third Symphony (Yuri Ahronovitch conducting), and December brought Mahler’s Third again, this time at the Royal Festival Hall, the Royal Philharmonic conducted by Antal Dorati, and that same month she was at the Chatelet in Paris singing Mahler’s Rückert Lieder with the Orchestre Colonne under Sylvain Cambreling, while in November she had sung in a 75th birthday performance for Michael Tippett of his King Priam at the Royal Festival Hall (David Atherton conducting the London Sinfonietta, the cast including most of the leading British singers of the day) .

In January 1981, Minton was Brangäne in a concert performance of Act 1 of Tristan und Isolde in Munich with the Bayerischer Rundfunk Orchestra under Leonard Bernstein. Peter Hofmann as Tristan, Hildegard Behrens Isolde, Hans Sotin King Mark. That same month, she returned to Vienna as Octavian, and on the 25th she sang Brahms’s Alto Rhapsody with the Radio Symphony Orchestra in Berlin under Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos. In February she performed in Das Lied von der Erde, first in Darmstadt with Siegfried Jerusalem and the orchestra of the State Theatre under Hans Drewanz, then in a concert at the Opéra in Paris with Jon Vickers, Boulez conducting (repeated the following February). In March she sang Berg’s Seven Early Songs with the Radio Symphony in Stuttgart under Gary Bertini, and in the Te Deum in Chicago in Daniel Barenboim’s Bruckner cycle with the Chicago Symphony, Jessye Norman the soprano. April brought Bach’s St Matthew Passion in Hamburg.

The following month, Minton was again Brangäne, this time in Act 2 of Tristan und Isolde in Munich under Leonard Bernstein. May brought another Mahler 3, this time with Claudio Abbado and the London Symphony Orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall in London, a return to Vienna in Der Rosenkavalier under Dohnanyi, Berlioz’s Les nuits d’étè at the Tivoli Concert Hall in Copenhagen (under John Frandsen), and performances of Mozart’s Requiem in Duisberg and Cologne with Edith Mathis, Francisco Araiza, Kurt Moll and the WDR orchestra under Gary Bertini.

In September she opened in her third and fourth productions at the Lyric Opera in Chicago—first as Dalila in Samson et Dalila—‘a very pleasant change from all those trouser roles,’ Minton told the Chicago Tribune, adding that ‘she [was] approaching semi-retirement.’ Samson was Carlo Cossutta, Michel Plasson the conductor. Opera reported that Minton made a ‘strikingly beautiful Dalila … [with] a lovely, seductive mezzo that was especially alluring in her two major arias.’

Then in October in Chicago, came a reprise of The Composer in Ariadne auf Naxos (Marek Janowski conducting). October 1981 also brought a return to Cologne (for their Mozart Cycle) in their long-standing Ponnelle production of La clemenza di Tito. In November Minton was back in Munich for Act 3 of Tristan und Isolde under Bernstein,⁸ and that same month Yvonne sang in a performance of Beethoven’s Choral Symphony at the Royal Albert Hall in London with the Boston Symphony Orchestra on tour with their conductor Seiji Ozawa.

Yvonne Minton with John Vickers as Parsifal (rehearsal, Geneva, 1982)

Photo by Odette Weil

Yvonne Minton as Kundry in Parsifal(rehearsal, Geneva, 1982)

Photo by Odette Weil

The coming crisis

At this point, there seemed to be few intimations of the lengthy crisis to come, but by 1982 at 43, her career was beginning to slow down. January/February 1982 saw Yvonne in Geneva again—as Kundry in a new production by Rolf Liebermann of Parsifal—with Siegfred Jerusalem and Jon Vickers alternating as Parsifal, Horst Stein conducting. March brought a concert performance of Samson und Dalila in Hamburg with Carlo Cossutta again as Samson, Yvonne as Dalila, followed by Parsifal at the State Opera in the same city.

Minton gave a rare solo recital in April at the Opéra in Paris, singing Schubert, Strauss, Schumann, Berg, Barber and Britten. In May Yvonne sang Brangäne in a one-off performance under Colin Davis of Tristan und Isolde at Covent Garden, Yvonne ‘not in her best voice,’ Opera reported, while William Mann in The Times was significantly more positive in his assessment of her performance, praising her ‘burnished radiance … that made the passage [Brangäne’s aubade] so memorable.’ Unusually this was a Prom-style event there, celebrating the 25th anniversary of Jon Vickers’s debut at the house, while at the same time marking Gwyneth Jones’s first London appearance as Isolde. Another Covent Garden ‘one-off’ that year was the return in June of La clemenza di Tito, The Stage noting:

The one remaining member from that [previous 1974] occasion, Yvonne Minton, was again outstanding. Her singing of Sesto was throughout beautifully controlled and phrased, firm and even through the whole range. The combination of high musicality and feeling in her ‘Parto, parto’ aria, with its clarinet obbligato, will be long remembered.

However, Minton’s great supporter Harold Rosenthal in Operamagazine told another story altogether:

Yvonne Minton was in sad vocal form; she is going through a bad vocal period and has serious intonation problems.

This performance marked the Covent Garden debut of another conductor who was to become a Minton favourite, Jeffrey Tate. For Yvonne, Covent Garden in 1982 was seemingly filled with single performances of roles she had sung previously in the house. At least September brought three Ring Cycles at Covent Garden under Colin Davis, Yvonne again as Fricka. These were followed in October by a series of performances of Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina conducted by Evgeny Svetlanov, Minton ‘splendidly back in form after recent mishaps as the dark, fated Marfa,’ according to Nicholas Kenyon in The Times. In November Minton was back in Germany, this time at the BASF festival in Ludwigshafen, singing Das Lied von der Erde with the Rheinland-Pfalz State Philharmonic under Christoph Eschenbach.

January 1983 saw her last performances as Octavian at Covent Garden, with Gwyneth Jones the Marschallin and the young Yvonne Kenny as Sophie, Andrew Davis conducting. ‘Yvonne Minton was in beautiful voice and a delight throughout,’ wrote Peter Stadlen in the Daily Telegraph. In February, Minton was in Liverpool with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra in a Wagner concert conducted by the orchestra’s newly-appointed conductor, Marek Janowski—Yvonne singing Kundry and Sieglinde, the latter surely a unique occasion.  

In March 1983, there was Berlioz’s La damnation de Faust at Bonn (with Kenneth Riegel as Faust and Minton as Margarethe, conducted by Carlos Paita), but Yvonne ‘created no more than a faint shadow of a Marguérite,’ according to Opera. In September Yvonne sang Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder under Hanns-Martin Schneidt with the Wuppertal Symphony Orchestra. These songs she repeated in Geneva with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande in February 1984. In October 1983 there was one last role (before an extended break) that she had not brought to Covent Garden before—as Charlotte in Werther (she had previously made her debut in the role at Chicago). She was ‘still one of our greatest mezzos,’ according to The Stage. However, after Werther there was silence at Covent Garden. It was to be ten years before Yvonne Minton was to reappear at the house.

May 1984 brought a Liederabend in Münster with John Constable, Minton singing Brahms, the Wesendonck Lieder, Strauss, Rachmaninov and some light songs by Copland, Ravel and Britten. The programme was repeated later that month in Paris and in Nice, repeated in July 1985 in a concert at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. In June 1984 Yvonne was Prince Orlofsky in Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus in Liège and at the Liceu in Barcelona.

Engagements fulfilled in 1985 remained fewer and farther between. In late August, Minton sang Berg’s Seven Early Songs at the Tonhalle in Düsseldorf, the orchestra conducted by Bernhard Klee. However, in October Minton was again singing in Berg’s Lulu, this time at the Grand Theatre in Geneva, Jeffrey Tate conducting the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande. Andrew Clark in Opera reported:

Yvonne Minton’s Geschwitz was in a class of its own because her voice has such luxury quality: I had forgotten, since last hearing her as Kundry here in 1982, how rich, glowing and full-toned her singing can be.

However, it seems that her health in relation to her vocal equipment was frequently deserting her. This was an artist who not so long before had boasted that she had never had to cancel a single performance through ill-health. Yet here she was—seriously ‘indisposed’. Part of the problem seems to have stemmed from chronic lack of sleep. Certainly Yvonne believed that shifting menopausal hormone balances in her body had a profound influence on her voice. And she had always found difficulty in dealing with the effects of jet-lag—an occupational hazard for this first generation of jet-set artists. By now she was down to just two hours a night. She found that, for the first time in her career, she was unable to support her voice. ‘For someone who felt relaxed and generally free when singing, it was a total shock,’ she said.

It took a long time to rebuild her capabilities and her self-confidence to the point where she could re-enter her profession. ‘I had two choices,’ she said. ‘Either stop and retire or retrain my body and mind.’ She chose the latter option, in the meantime becoming a singing teacher.

There were several engagements planned and booked for Yvonne in the coming years. One that she went ahead with was as Waltraute in Götterdämmerung at the Liceu in Barcelona in November 1986, conducted by Pinchas Steinberg, repeating the role in September 1987 at the Bruckner Festival in Linz. Also in September 1987, Minton sang Das Lied von der Erde at the Aarhus Festival in Denmark, the Aarhus orchestra conducted by Norman del Mar. In 1987 she returned to Australia not to sing, but to teach masterclasses at the School of Music in Canberra.

In January 1988 it was Götterdämmerung again, this time at the Teatro Regio in Turin, Zoltán Peskó the conductor. In mid-year Minton returned to Australia—this time in a new guise—as a jury member at the Queen Elizabeth Singing Contest in Sydney, an experience she was to repeat in Europe. September brought Mahler’s Third Symphony in Stuttgart, the Stuttgart Philharmonic conducted by Wolf-Dieter Hauschild. In May 1989, Minton was Fricka in Die Walküre in Lisbon with Jeannine Altmeyer as Brünnhilde, Wolfgang Rennert conducting. ‘Yvonne Minton’s magnificent Kundry was no virago, but a handsome, mature woman, understandably embittered by the fickleness of her (younger) husband,’ reported John Millerchip in Opera.

In March 1990, Minton gave her last performances in Parsifal at the State Theatre in Bern with Ian Caley in the title role, Roderick Brydon the conductor. ‘As Kundry, Yvonne Minton gave every sign of being back at the height of her powers,’ wrote Andrew Clark in Opera. At the Maggio Musicale in Florence in June 1990, Minton was the widow Leokadja Begbick in Kurt Weill’s Mahagonny with Catherine Malfitano as Jenny Hill, Jan Latham-Koenig the conductor, Graham Vick the director. Patrick O’Connor in the Kurt Weill Newsletter reported:

Yvonne Minton, looking like the young Rita Hayworth, emerges to create the strongest, most searingly-sung, subtly-acted Leokadja Begbick, all the more terrifying for being attractive.

By July 1990, Yvonne and her family were back in Australia, this time as tourists, starting in Darwin, then Kakadu, Alice Springs, Ayres Rock (as it was still called), Cairns, the Whitsundays and Sydney.

Then in May/June 1991 with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in a Berlioz Festival at the Sydney Opera House; and that August she sang for the first time the major role of Klytemnestra in Strauss’s Elektra at the Festival Theatre in Adelaide, with Marilyn Zschau in the title role, film director Bruce Beresford the producer and Richard Armstrong the conductor. It was broadcast (recorded live) on ABC television and simultaneously on Classic FM radio in January. Elizabeth Silsbury reported for Opera:

Yvonne Minton was noticeably less at home with Strauss’s demands for precision of pitch, but made up for [that] by employing an impressive range of vocal colours. 

March 1992 saw her as Marguérite in concert performances of La damnation de Faust at the Town Hall in Wellington, New Zealand, with Donald McIntyre as Méphistophélès. In November 1992 she was back with the Lyric Opera in Chicago (after a gap of many years)—as Geneviève in Pelléas et Mélisande, this time with Teresa Stratas as Mélisande, Jerry Hadley as Pelléas, James Conlon the conductor.

She returned to Covent Garden in March 1993 in a series of performances of Pelléas et Mélisande—as Geneviève again—this time in the Vienna State Opera’s production, with Frederica von Stade as Mélisande, François Le Roux as Pelléas, Claudio Abbado conducting. That November she undertook the widow Kabanicha in Janáček’s Katya Kabanova at the Bastille Opera in Paris.

Perhaps realising that she was coming towards the end of an outstanding performing career, in July 1994 Yvonne took the small role of Larina in Eugene Onegin at Glyndebourne (performed at the inauguration of the new opera house there), a production they took to the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall on 18 August. Elena Prokina was Tatiana, Andrew Davis conducting, Graham Vick the director. The following day, she sang in her last Prom concert, simultaneously broadcast on television by the BBC. It was a special tribute to the founder of the Proms, Sir Henry Wood, marking the centenary of his birth, and Yvonne participated with many friends and colleagues singing Vaughan Williams’s Serenade to Music, Andrew Davis again the conductor. That autumn she was for the first time in her career Ortrud in Lohengrin at Nancy (‘serious miscasting,’ said Opera) and also at the Théâtre du Rhin in Strasbourg.

Photo by Katie Vandyck 

Minton’s career was now moving towards its close, and in April 1995 she gave a Celebrity Recital (for charity) at Amersham School in Buckinghamshire, where she sang (for the first time since her recording audition for Decca in 1962) Schumann’s Frauenliebe und Leben song cycle. Two of her pupils shared the concert with her—Tamara Leckie and Florence Millon.

For Yvonne, there was to be one last production at Covent Garden—Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler, which opened on 16 November 1995. She had recently sung in a concert performance of the composer’s Cardillac in Paris. In Mathis, Minton took the role of the Countess von Helfenstein, while Alan Titus was Mathis, the young Finn Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted and Peter Sellars was the director. The Stage noted that Yvonne was ‘quietly moving as the Countess.’ Her final appearance at Covent Garden, the house which had provided Minton with her artistic home since 1965, was on 6 December 1995.

However, there was to be one final new opera role for Yvonne: Madame de Croissy in Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites at the Opéra de Nantes in March 1996, Valentin Reymond conducting. In May, Minton was Geneviève again in Pelléas et Mélisande, this last time in Rotterdam with the Rotterdam Philharmonic conducted by Mark Elder, Sellars the director.

Late in 1996, Yvonne flew back to Sydney to be in Earlwood with her ailing mother Violet, who died in February aged 89. In September 1997, Yvonne mourned the death of Georg Solti, who had done so much to further her career at Covent Garden and in Chicago.

In the years following, her performing career having drawn to a close, Minton taught at Trinity College in London and at Marseilles, while she gave masterclasses at Estoril in Portugal. And increasingly she became a judge in singing competitions.  

While Yvonne’s singing career had started in Australia seemingly bounded by one single aria. Erda’s Warning from Wagner’s Die Walküre, over the years it blossomed into admired major roles in a wide range of different composers’ work—but particularly as a front-line singer of Mozart, Berlioz, Wagner, Mahler, Richard Strauss, Elgar, Schoenberg, Berg, Tippett and Boulez.

Quite a career. Happy birthday!

Endnotes

5. Kindertotenlieder tour: Stuttgart, Aschaffenburg, Oosterpoort, Oberhausen, Kortrijk (Belgium) and Wilhelmshaven

6. At Bayreuth, Norma Gadsden had previously sung Waltraute in 1937 (with Frida Leider as Brünnhilde, Max Lorenz as Siegmund and Siegfried, Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting)

7. Pierrot Lunaire ensemble: Pinchas Zukerman (viola), Lynn Harrell (cello), Michel Debost (flute), Antony Pay (clarinets), Daniel Barenboim (piano)

8. Bernstein’s Tristan und Isolde recorded by Philips in Munich in 1981