Australian soprano

Born: August 15, 1924;

Died: April 5, 2016

ELSIE Morison, who has died aged 91, was one of Australia’s most gifted sopranos, acclaimed in the early years of the Edinburgh Festival, where she sang the starring role of Anne Trulove in the British premiere of Stravinsky’s masterpiece, The Rake’s Progress, given by Glyndebourne at the King’s Theatre in 1953.

Though John Christie, the company’s founder, complained that the opera’s overture was not suitable for public performance, Carl Ebert’s production was a success both in Edinburgh, where it received five performances alongside Mozart’s Idomeneo and Rossini’s Cenerentola, and the following year at Glyndebourne itself.

Yet, up to a point, it was Edinburgh that made her reputation. As her portrayal of the neo-Mozartian Anne Trulove revealed, she was not only an accomplished and touching but increasingly sought-after lyric soprano.

Born and trained in Melbourne, she had made her British debut in 1948 performing in Handel’s Acis and Galatea with Sadler’s Wells Opera (now English National Opera) in London before appearing as Mimi in Covent Garden’s long-established production of La Boheme. With her memorable beauty of voice, she was on her way to stardom.

The major role of Sister Blanche in the British premiere of Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites at Covent Garden in 1958 was her next hit, with Rafael Kubelik, the company’s recently appointed music director, as conductor.

But, auditioing for Marenka, the heroine of Smetana’s Bartered Bride, also at Covent Garden, she had been turned down by him. It was a failure she attributed to over-tiredness after singing in Edinburgh.

But Sir David Webster, the company’s general manager, believing Kubelik’s judgment to have been wrong, talked him into giving her a second audition, this time at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, where the Czech-born maestro immediately admitted his error. She was given the romantic role, later to be one of the triumphs of her career, and Kubelik wired Webster saying, “We have our Marenka.”

He also, though he did not yet know it, had his future wife. A few years later (his first wife having died in the interim) they were married. After performing together around the world, she returned to the Edinburgh Festival in 1966 to sing Mahler’s Fourth Symphony with Kubelik, by then her husband, and the Philharmonia Orchestra at the Usher Hall, and also recorded the work with him.

But suddenly, at what seemed the height of her success and after a Covent Garden appearance in Beethoven’s Fidelio conducted by Otto Klemperer, came silence.

Still in her early forties, she had decided that her and Kubelik’s frequently divergent careers were keeping them unhappily apart. Henceforward they would stay together, with her sacrificing her singer’s life to become his inseparable companion, personal adviser, and muse.

Bidding farewell to her public career, she performed Dvorak’s Songs My Mother Taught Me back home in Melbourne with Kubelik conducting, and in the presence of her own mother. It was a predictably emotional occasion.

By 1996 Kubelik had died in his early eighties, though not before he had triumphantly returned to his native Prague to conduct the Czech Philharmonic after 42 years of exile.

After his death - and after he had composed three requiems and several operas in addition to his work as conductor - she continued to tour the world from their home in Switzerland, visiting places they had known.

As a critic, I had once interviewed them - a smiling, devoted couple - in London in their room at the Savoy Hotel, but the subject of her abandoned career was not a talking point.

Nevertheless it was easy to deduce that she was his protector and life enhancer. His career had faltered after short, unproductive stints with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and New York Metropolitan Opera as well as at Covent Garden where he was undermined by the vindictive Sir Thomas Beecham - but in the end he found enduring happiness for 18 years with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. Elsie Morison was with him all the way.

CONRAD WILSON