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. Opera reported: ‘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. Opera reported 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 Rosenkavalier in 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 Aaron with 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
