Joan Sutherland Turns From Stage to Page

Dame Joan Sutherland says she hasn’t sung a proper note since she retired, but she’s still in tune with the profession she left eight years ago.

Dame Joan, the tall Australian coloratura, made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in 1961 as Lucia di Lammermoor after seven years at London’s Royal Opera in Covent Garden. She retired in 1990, at age 64, as one of the century’s greatest coloratura sopranos.

“Agents say you can start out as a guest artist and perform in New York and the next day in Paris,” the soprano says. “It’s not the way to have a singing career at all. It’s hard on your body, and you leave your brains behind when you do those long trips.”

Dame Joan is evidence that young voices need a stable environment and time to develop, and her belief is very much a focus in her autobiography, “A Prima Donna’s Progress,” published by Regnery in January. She says she wrote it as much for aspiring singers as for opera lovers.

The title she chose, along with reviews from her early years, traces the development of her voice. The evolution is one she hopes will help today’s young singers.

“I’m serious about young singers making sure they develop their techniques before they’re on stage too much, so if something goes wrong they know how to get around problems,” she says. “Too many are singing now with natural voices and not working to develop and solidify their techniques. They force their voices and don’t support them properly with their breathing. Then they get a wobble.

“Nobody plays in the World Cup or at Wimbledon if they haven’t developed their technique beyond their natural skill.”

Early on, Dame Joan tried to sing like the great Wagnerian soprano Kirsten Flagstad. Why? Like dramatic sopranos, she had volume. Many coloraturas who sing high, fast notes have small voices.

She used to sing coloratura bursts around the house--”I thought it was me just faking away.” Then her husband got into the act and tricked her into the real thing.

“I have relative pitch,” she says. “He started playing scales for me to sing in a higher key. I was singing higher than I thought I was. It felt a bit more difficult, but it gradually got into my voice. He proved to me I was able to sustain complete arias and roles in that area of the voice.”

Today, she just hums, whether she’s alone or with her husband, Richard Bonynge, a conductor. They have a house in Switzerland and an apartment in Australia. Bonynge conducts three months a year at the Sydney Opera House. Their son, Adam, and his family also live in Sydney.

Dame Joan says that while Adam had a voice, “he was clever enough to sing flat so he could go to soccer practice instead of choir practice.”

Of her own voice, she says, “I haven’t sung properly since the night I retired. It’s naughty, in a way. It was time to retire. One can’t sing in the same way at 70 as one did when one was 25, believe me.”

The book is one of her contributions to young singers. She also judges voice competitions to atone for the fact that she never wanted to teach or give master classes when she retired. In a master class, a retired diva spends 30 minutes with a voice student. To Dame Joan, it’s of little use.

“To get results,” she says, “you have to be breathing down their necks all the time, saying, ‘Let’s go back and try again.’ ”

When she can, she travels with Bonynge, where she tunes in to her profession. “I enjoy hearing singers more now than when I was singing myself. Then I was usually feeling a bit tired.”

In the book and in person, Dame Joan doesn’t do a reprise about the good old days. She does, however, believe that more performers sang on pitch more often in her glory days.

“Now I’m amazed at some singers who are fairly consistently off pitch and they’re still engaged,” she says. “At Covent Garden Opera, when I was coming up, we had good singers even in small roles.”

How to cope with someone off pitch? “You just try and stick to your vocal line and hope for the best,” she says. “But I was lucky. I sang with pretty good voices, I must say.

“And I didn’t have many problems with nastiness or unpleasantness in my theater life. I found everybody was so busy doing what they were supposed to be doing there was no time for bitchery.

“I can snap from time to time. I can get irritated. But not terribly much. I’m a reasonably placid soul, I think.”

This placid soul has never regretted taking her last bow.

“You can’t do things with the panache you had. This was beginning to worry me. I thought, ‘This is not good enough. I’d rather stop.’ ”