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Elsie Morison, soprano – obituary
Elsie Morison, who has died aged 91, was an Australian soprano who enjoyed great success at Sadler’s Wells, Covent Garden, Glyndebourne and the Proms; yet at the peak of her career she gave it all up to share in the life of her husband, the conductor Rafael Kubelík.
Elsie Morison’s voice was clean and unaffected, blessed with a rare purity of tone that even today dazzles listeners hearing it on recordings. From her first public appearance in Britain – at the Albert Hall in 1948, as Galatea in Handel’s Acis and Galatea – she was attracting glowing reviews.
She joined Sadler’s Wells that year, appearing in repertoire as diverse as Falstaff (as Nanetta), Rimsky-Korsakov’s Snow Maiden (the title role), and Carmen (as Mercedes), but by 1953 had moved to Covent Garden, making her debut there as a glorious Mimi in La bohème.
She sang Anne Truelove in the first British staging of Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress at the Edinburgh Festival in 1953, reprising the role at Glyndebourne, where she also appeared in Don Giovanni and Fidelio. She created the title role in Arwel Hughes’s Menna for Welsh National Opera – singing in Welsh – in 1953, and in January 1958 sang the lead role in the first British staging of Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmelites with Sylvia Fisher and Joan Sutherland under Kubelík.
Her first meeting with Kubelík, soon after his appointment as musical director at Covent Garden in 1955, was not a success. He had asked all the company’s soloists to re-audition and her audition was the morning after a concert in Edinburgh. She slept badly on the overnight train and gave a poor account of herself. Sir David Webster, the company’s general manager, was so convinced, however, that she was perfect for the part of Marenka in Smetana’s The Bartered Bride that a few weeks later he sent her to Amsterdam, where Kubelík was conducting at the Concertgebow, to try again.
This time her flight was delayed by a snow storm and when she arrived Kubelík had gone for a post-rehearsal lunch with members of the orchestra, forcing her to wait for several hours. Yet once the conductor heard her sing, he sent a telegram to Webster: “We have our Marenka.”
The performances, which marked Kubelík’s debut at Covent Garden and in which Peter Pears sang Vasek, were a triumph, with one critic describing how Elsie Morison was able to “make Marenka at once appealing and spirited – her voice is right in type, weight and timbre for the part”.
Kubelík went on to choose her to sing Pamina in a production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute the following year to mark the bicentenary of the composer’s birth. She also reprised her role in La bohème for him, with one critic noting that her “Mimi was exquisitely sung and acted; to pathos, charm and radiant purity of tone she can now add real dramatic strength at moments of climax”.
There was no suggestion of romance at this time, and in 1958 Kubelík left Covent Garden to run the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, in Munich. Meanwhile, Elsie Morison continued her singing career, including forays into lieder, of which she made a special study in Berlin in 1960, and Gilbert and Sullivan, with her last two Proms (1961 and 1962) featuring excerpts from their operettas.
Kubelík’s first wife, Ludmila Bertova, a violinist, died in 1961 and the following year Elsie Morison met him again at a social event in London. They were married in 1963 and almost immediately she began scaling back her engagements; within five years she had retired from public life, telling Gramophone in 1968 that she now only sang “when it makes me happy”.
Elsie Jean Morison was born in Ballarat, north-west of Melbourne, on August 15 1924, to a family descended from Scottish immigrants. Her father, Alexander, died when she was 18 months old. Until the age of 17 young Elsie was intent on pursuing a career as a pianist, but her mother (also Elsie), herself a singing teacher, was always encouraging her vocal technique.
She attended Clarendon Presbyterian Ladies’ College, Ballarat, from where she went to the Albert Street Conservatorium in Melbourne. Here she came under the influence of Clive Carey, a visiting professor from London, who urged her to seek tuition in Britain. Her first major appearance was in Handel’s Messiah at Melbourne Town Hall in 1944.
She won the Dame Nellie Melba scholarship in 1945, while the townspeople of Ballarat formed a committee to raise money to support her studies. Aged 21, she set sail for Britain in 1946 on a troop ship carrying only a handful of civilians.
At the Royal College of Music she resumed her studies with Carey, winning the Queen’s prize in 1947. For her Proms debut in 1949 she sang an aria from Haydn’s Creation with the London Symphony Orchestra under Sir Malcolm Sargent. Four years later she sang in a performance of Britten’s Spring Symphony to mark the Coronation.
She returned to Ballarat in December 1968 to make her farewell performance at her former school with her mother in the audience. The very last notes that Elsie Morison sang in public were an English rendering of Dvorák’s Songs My Mother Taught Me, conducted by her husband. The school opened the Elsie Morison Creative Arts Centre in 1985.
The couple bought land at Kastanienbaum, near Lucerne, where they built their home; they also had a retreat in the Californian desert. After the Velvet Revolution they paid an emotional visit to the Czech Republic – Kubelík having defected from what was then Czechoslovakia in 1948. He died in 1996.
Elsie Morison was previously married to Kenneth Stevenson, a fellow student who became a bass at Covent Garden; that marriage was dissolved. She was appointed Member of the Order of Australia in 1999 and is survived by her stepson.
Elsie Morison, born August 15 1924, died April 5 2016