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.
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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’été in 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 Opera magazine 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
