The New Zealand Opera Company: Notes Towards a History1

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 48, 1 January 2016, Page 37

The New Zealand Opera Company: Notes Towards a Historyl

DOUG MUNRO

In its time, the New Zealand Opera Company was arguably New Zealand's most significant cultural endeavour, after the National Orchestra. Founded in 1954 by my father Donald Munro (1913-2012), it effectively lasted until 1971 - a mere 17 years. Or should we say that it lasted for as many as 17 years? Opera companies do have a high attrition rate, and for every one that survives many more fall by the wayside. In parallel to this, most of the operas composed fail to gain traction and enter the repertoire. Opera is a terribly expensive art form, and the financial futures of the companies that stage them are seldom secure. 2 For example, at the time of the New Zealand Opera Company's founding, there were seven professional opera companies in Britain. Of those, Covent Garden, Glyndebourne, and the Welsh National Opera are still with us; Sadler's Wells was transformed into English National Opera, one of the two full-scale professional companies in London today, while Carl Rosa, the English Opera Group, and Intimate Opera have gone under. 3

Likewise, the New Zealand Opera Company did not live happily ever after, and a theme of my forthcoming history of the company will be - not failure - but rise, fall, and lingering demise. Everything to do with the Opera Company has departed and gone, or nearly so - both people and structures. The Opera Centre in the Wellington suburb of Thorndon was demolished for freeway development. Its second home, the Regal Theatre in Karori (where I went to watch movies as a young boy), is now a bridge club. Of the original Board of Directors, only my mother is still alive. Of the subsequent directors, very few are still with us; and the surviving singers are well into retirement. So there is an element of urgency in writing a book on the Opera Company whilst the remaining people involved in the enterprise are still with us, and able to recount their experiences.

Many cultural organisations in New Zealand have had books written about them - but not the Opera Company. There are monographs on the National Opera of Wellington, and Perkel Opera; on the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra,

the New Zealand Youth Orchestra, and the Alex Lindsay String Orchestra; on Downstage and Christchurch's Little Theatre; on the Music Federation of New Zealand, and others. There is a history of opera in Auckland and another on the Dunedin Opera Company.

However, surprisingly little has been written on the New Zealand Opera Company. My father gets mentioned in over 40 books and journal articles, always in connection with the Opera Company, but mostly in passing. I have written a couple of short journal articles on the Opera Company. 4 There is a 15page chapter on it in the late Adrienne Simpson's history of professional opera in New Zealand. 5 (Dad was most upset at this abbreviated treatment, expecting that the NZOC in general, and he in particular, would be the centrepiece.) Two of the singers, Geoffrey de Lautour and Corinne Bridge-Opie, devote space to the Opera Company in their respective autobiographies. 6 There is little else of substance, apart from a three-part radio programme in the 19905, Bravo! A Tribute to the New Zealand Opera Company, produced by Maxine Rose and presented by Adrienne Simpson on the Concert FM station. 7 Bravo! is useful, especially for the interviews of people no longer alive, but Simpson didn't make use of either the Opera Company records or the Munro papers in the Turnbull Library. There is also Phyllis Brusey's autobiography, half of which concerns the Opera Company. She presents her point of view, but without awareness that her chairing of its Board contributed to the company's demise. 8 So there is scope for a book-length study of the Opera Company, both to add to the public record and, in places, to correct the record.

It might be thought that I have advantages as the historian of the Opera Company, and I suppose I do. I am a trained historian, although the two theses I have written are in fields far removed. I grew up with the Opera Company. It was founded when I was six years old, and having an opera company in the house was almost like having another sibling - a pervasive and pleasant presence for both my younger brother lan and myself. Opera props were all around the house in Karori, and I enjoyed smearing my face with actor's makeup and dressing up in the costumes. Some props were made in the house. Singers were put up at our house, and I enjoyed their company. Quite simply, the household revolved around the Opera Company. Later, when lan and I were teenagers, we surreptitiously tuned into Mum and Dad's conversations about the Opera Company, getting a glimpse of what was happening behind the scenes and sundry other shenanigans. We were in the boys' chorus in both Tosca and Carmen, and on one occasion I sang the shepherd boy's solo in Tosca. (I still uncomfortably remember the tricky entry to the second verse that I nearly fluffed.) But I wouldn't put too much emphasis on my association with the Opera Company. Although intensely interested in the company as a child, the

intervention of sport, girls, motor cars, and the other passions of lusty youth re-ordered my priorities. The family moved to Adelaide in 1967, so I was geographically distant as well. I knew the Opera Company from the perspectives of a child and early-teenager, and as a member of the Munro household. Furthermore, my association with the company centred on the singers, not the Board of Directors and the decision-making. It is also the case, as I have discovered during the course of my research, that Munro family folklore is sometimes quite mistaken. That became evident from consulting the extensive manuscript sources relating to the Opera Company. The Turnbull Library holdings include the surviving records of the New Zealand Opera Company (MS-Group-0061) and the surviving papers of Donald Munro (MS-Group-0606). There are also the private papers of people associated with the company or on the fringes - including Fred Turnovsky, Phyllis Brusey, Geoffrey de Lautour, David Farquhar, Owen Jensen, Ngaio Marsh, and Edith Campion - plus a selection of relevant sound recordings and oral history interviews. One of the latter includes my father being interviewed by John Mansfield Thomson in the early 1980 s, which I'll bring up later on. 9 It is also the case that people broke the copyright laws of the day and tape-recorded radio productions directly from air, and thus we have an idea of the quality and standards of the Company productions.

It is a boon that the Opera Company papers and the Munro papers contain extensive scrapbooks of newspaper clippings, which has saved me weeks of laborious research. At the same time, there are missing records. Most of the financial records relate to the period after 1971, when the company was no longer producing operas. This creates obvious difficulties; we know the costs of some of the productions, but not the box office receipts. There are no tax returns. And little of the company's correspondence has survived, which you might think would create an insuperable obstacle. To be sure, it does not help at all. But the saving grace is the bound volumes containing the minutes of the Board of Directors, which give a running account of the decision-making process. The minutes have the added virtue of containing some financial data, which alleviates the lack of financial records. The awful thing, though, is that the volume containing the minutes for the years 1965 through to 1968 is missing - God knows where. Those were important years. Porgy and Bess was produced in 1965; Dad dramatically resigned from the Opera Company in 1966; 1967 and 1968 were years of considerable turmoil, including a disastrous warehouse fire in 1967 that engulfed props and costumes. 10 However, the other minute books are there, and will enable me to write the sort of book I always had in mind. My aim is not to write a series of production histories, although there will necessarily be some of that. There will, for example, be a separate chapter on the extraordinary story of The Unicorn for Christmas , which was performed in

Wellington in late 1962 and again, as a Royal Performance, in Auckland. 11 1 cannot imagine anything more tedious than a one-after-another sequence of production histories, just as the history of a sports club comprising blow-by-blow accounts of every match would be found wanting. Such a strategy would leave out more than it would reveal. The real importance lies in what went on between productions, and what went on behind the scenes during productions. Why, for example, was the Opera Company founded, and in what circumstances? This is where my father enters the picture. He had gone from Dunedin to England in 1939 to study singing and solo performing at the Royal College of Music, where he met and married my mother, Jean McCartney. He did not intend to return to New Zealand, but two things happened. First, my brother and I came along in 1947 and 1949. He did not want us to go to a London council school, but neither could he afford to send us to a nearby prep school, although he pre-enrolled us there, more in hope than expectation. Equally, he wasn't getting enough work in England. There were too many lyric baritones floating around, and the competition for work was stiff in the austerity years following World War Two.

He was persuaded to return by Fred Page, the Professor of Music at Victoria University College, who proclaimed, 'New Zealand needs you, Donald.' He went back to Dunedin and was gifted the flourishing practice of his former teacher, but it was death to the soul. To make matters worse, very little solo performing was on offer. His voice and career were in limbo. Page then persuaded him to come to Wellington, on the same grounds: 'We need you'. Even there, the opportunities were limited. There were some recitals, some broadcasting, and the occasional oratorio; and he did some teaching. It didn't add up to a living wage. I remember these as years when my parents were very hard up, and my mother's income from her job with the Alex Lindsay String Orchestra was crucial to the domestic economy.

Dad had never thought of starting an opera company; he considered himself a lieder- rather than an opera-singer. But then something else happened. In 1953 he went to the Auckland Festival to sing in Layton Ring's production of Pergolesi's operetta La Serva Padrona. Directly afterwards, the production toured the North Island under the auspices of the Community Arts Service of the Workers Educational Association (CAS). Such was the spontaneous audience enthusiasm at its various small ports of call, that Dad saw this as a way to make a living. I have a photo of him from that time, standing at the shores of Lake Taupo on a cold winter's day. He is deep in thought, and I have sometimes wondered whether this was the moment he decided upon an opera company of his own. That is taking imagination and licence too far, of course, but it was around this time that he made the decision. In subsequent years he was praised for finding

work for singers. However, he was the first to admit that he also had to create work for himself.

The venture had rocky beginnings. Far from having his idea received enthusiastically, Dad was considered a presumptuous upstart. One would think that his vision would be embraced in supposedly culture-starved Wellington, but it was met with almost universal disapproval: 'Who does he think he is?' was the reaction. One of the few to offer initial support was Douglas Lilburn, who realised the sacrifices involved in 'creating something out of nothing'. 12 Many years later Dad explained, with uncharacteristic understatement, 'I wasn't getting support from ... quarters where I might have expected it'. 13

The Wellington branch of the CAS was leery about sponsoring his venture. The ambivalence was not because of a prejudice against opera, but because word had got back that Dad had a blazing row in Auckland with a visiting tenor, Andrew Gold. To put it bluntly, the Wellington CAS wondered whether Dad was a fit and proper person to have on their books. 14 It was fortunate that the Opera Company got the green light. Quite simply, without the support of the CAS the company would not have got off the ground. It would never have been able to routinely tour to the smaller centres, and this was its lifeblood in the early years.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The first Opera Company productions were in October 1954 - of Pergolesi's La Serva Padrona (with the same cast as the Auckland production of the previous year) and Menotti's The Telephone. It came at a critical juncture in New Zealand artistic history. There is the perception that 1950 s New Zealand was a cultural wilderness revolving around rugby, beer and racing. Actually, a lot of artistic activity was going on in the major centres, and in some of the regional centres, and there were the YC radio stations for those inclined to classical music. The National Orchestra had been formed in 1946 and the Lindsay String Orchestra in 1948. But apart from these two professional orchestras, it was all amateur endeavour. And then 'the three wise men' came along. That is to say, in 1953, Poul Gnatt founded the New Zealand Ballet, and the following year Dick and Edith Campion started the New Zealand Players and Donald Munro his company. So we had, in short order, three national, professional touring companies in separate disciplines of the arts - ballet, repertory and opera. (In the case of opera, some impetus would have been provided by the 1949 tour of 10 opera productions by J. C. Williamson's Italian company, and the National Opera of Australia's 1954 tour, which brought six productions.)

It sounds better than it actually was. These three companies started from very small beginnings - although the New Zealand Players could rapidly expand, thanks to being bankrolled by the Hannah Shoes empire. But it was different for opera and ballet. Poul Gnatt drove taxis by night to fund his enterprise, 15 and

Dad worked in wool stores and abattoirs to get his moving. (He never worked on the wharves, as is sometimes claimed.) He started in the smallest possible way, with the two one-act operettas, and each year moved onto something bigger. The increments were sizable, and in its fourth year (1957) the Opera Company staged its first three-act grand opera, Menotti's The Consul. Between times, the company went on piano tours to the smaller centres. Touring was a tough grind and not for the faint-hearted. 16 The Opera Company was Dad's creation, but he always relied on considerable amounts of help and goodwill from others. Wellington accountant Fred Burns kept the company's books on a gratis basis and became a member of the original Board of Directors. John Malcolm of the Department of Internal Affairs opened doors and smoothed the ways for government funding; he too was a member of the original Board of Directors. The pianist David Galbraith made many of the props for the early productions when staying with the Munros. Another person to lend a helping hand was Molly Cummins, a former singing pupil, who provided secretarial services free of charge.

Dad was also in demand as a singing adjudicator at competitions up and down the country, which took him away from home in the school holidays. This, combined with the piano tours, resulted in his being away from home an awful lot. My brother and I hated it. So did our mother, who deserves a medal for coping with two fractious boys. What the adjudicating meant, apart from additional income, was that Dad could double as a talent scout. He knew which singers were in the pipeline, to the advantage of the Opera Company. It should be added that the company got many of its sopranos and mezzos from Sister Mary Leo's stable in Auckland. 17 At this point, I'll break the narrative flow and discuss Dad's outlook on opera. The first concerns imitation. I've mentioned that I want to talk about the ways things worked - and why. To a certain extent, the early Opera Company had little choice in the way it operated. There were piano tours because they were the 'bread and butter', a financial necessity. There was no viable alternative. The company began on a small scale, again because there was no alternative. But in other respects, where there was an element of choice, my father did certain things because he was a copier rather than an innovator.

Take the first season in 1954. His first opera was La Serva Padrona, double billed with Menotti's The Telephone , the same operettas that were staged the year before in Auckland. This was sensible because he could use the same singers and props, but it was also part of a pattern of copying. He modelled his company on the Intimate Opera in England - small-scale contemporary opera designed to be accompanied by piano alone. It made sense to do this, at least initially, but he didn't think beyond what he already knew. It might be thought that introducing

New Zealand audiences to Menotti was an innovation, but that was not quite so. He already knew Menotti from his days in London, and Menotti operas were in vogue at the time. In the 19605, he made no particular attempt to go beyond the established classical repertoire. Later, at the University of Adelaide, he kept on producing the operas he knew, the notable exception being Idomeneo, and even then, because he was a Mozart fan. He was in the same groove all the time. His creativity lay in musical interpretation rather than trailblazing. He was not one to strike out in new directions, with the exception of A Unicorn for Christmas.

Related to this was his view that opera was entertainment and nothing more - although not entertainment in a trivial sense. He once said to me, 'lf you don't feel uplifted at the end of an opera, you might as well not have gone'. Drama and spectacle were part of staging successful entertainment. But the point is that Dad was not one to seek deeper meanings or moral reckonings in the plots of the various operas, nor consider how the content of the librettos might reflect the ethical and political dimensions of their time and place. He was simply not that sort of person. He was somewhat typical of his generation, in that he equated a good memory and rote learning with intelligence. A retentive memory is especially important for opera singers trying to learn their lines, but memory is not the same thing as understanding, or reasoning, or perceptiveness, or problem solving, or thinking in the abstract. I had an animated discussion with Dad on this very point in 1981, and he was unyielding in his certainty that a good memory was the hallmark of cognition and intelligence. 18

To give an example: he sang the role of the Count in Mozart's Marriage of Figaro more than any other role. He was 'the perfect Count' in the view of Honor McKellar (who sang the role of Cherubino), but he'd never thought seriously about the meanings in the plot until in the late 1960 s when he happened to read the relevant chapter in Spike Hughes' Famous Mozart Operas. He said to me, 'You know, Doug, there are things in Figaro that you'd never have thought of'. Neither had he thought of these things himself. He was interested in the mechanics of opera rather than its wider implications. Dad could interpret the music and especially the role, but not the overall libretto. He did not see the incongruity in the way that A Unicorn for Christmas was billed as indigenous New Zealand opera, yet the setting was a baronial castle with scenes from Tudor and Victorian England. To him, setting Ngaio Marsh's play The Wyvern and the Unicorn to music would simply make good entertainment. To continue with this theme, a few years ago, I mentioned to Dad a letter to the paper about the Opera Company's 1957 production of Menotti's grim Cold War opera, The Consul, which the letter-writer deplored as 'an attack on socialism [and on] any country moving towards that goal'. 19 Dad was utterly astonished. Nothing could have been further from his mind, he assured me: 'We put it on

because it was good dramatic entertainment'. The idea that opera might have political import or a social message was quite foreign to him. In justice to Dad, Menotti always maintained that The Consul was not specifically directed against the Eastern Bloc but was 'intended as a universal statement against political repression and inhuman bureaucracy', wherever it might occur. 20 By 1957, the Opera Company was no longer essentially a one-man show. Grim financial lessons had been learned from The Consul. It was a critical success, but the company had to be given a grant of £7OO to cover productions losses. 21 At that point, Dad realised that he couldn't carry on as before. He needed a businessman's expertise and he approached Fred Turnovsky (1916-1994) to join the Board of Directors. Turnovsky had fled Nazi persecution in war-torn Czechoslovakia. He and his wife Lotte washed up in New Zealand, and he started his own business

- Tatra Leather Goods. Realising that there was a shortage of watch straps, he made 10,000 from local leather, and never looked back. He was also a leading light in the Wellington Chamber Music Society. My mother warned against the idea of Turnovsky joining the Board, and so did Alex Lindsay, who described Turnovsky as 'poison', but Dad disregarded their advice. The dynamics of Board meetings changed right away. Turnovsky and John Malcolm were repeatedly at loggerheads, and Turnovsky was vocal in expressing various dissatisfactions. In particular, he wanted a change in the allocation of the Opera Company's notional shares. The company was a non-profit-making limited liability company with a capital of £IOO. Mum and Dad held 51% of those shares between them. Turnovsky wanted to revise this arrangement, with the capital increased to £l2O and divided equally between the directors - that is, £ls per director. 22 In retrospect, this can be seen as Turnovsky's way of effectively controlling the company. If he could control the other Board members, which he did through his force of personality, then he could run the company. And this is how it panned out. I asked Dad why he agreed to such a readjustment. He replied that 'it was important to Fred'.

I suppose you could say that up until that point it had been Donald Munro's opera company. He founded it, and he largely made the decisions. Keeping the Opera Company up and running in its early years took a lot out of him, physically and emotionally. The run-ins with Turnovsky, and finding himself somewhat marginalised in the organisation he created, never ceased to upset him. Turnovsky himself seemed to have difficulty in acknowledging the contributions of others, and it is noteworthy that Dad receives only a solitary, passing mention in Turnovsky's autobiography, tn 1984, in the interview with John Mansfield Thomson that I mentioned earlier, there were times when Dad clutched the microphone so tightly that Thomson feared he would inadvertently crush it - such was the extent of Dad's pent-up emotion.

Shortly after Dad died in early 2012, Eva Radich asked me onto her Concert FM Upbeat programme to talk about the Opera Company. She asked why Dad and Turnovsky didn't get on. Although I should have seen the question coming a mile off, it took me completely by surprise. As tactfully as I could, I made the observation that Turnovsky had a desire to dominate. In fairness, the Opera Company would not have grown and enjoyed the successes of the 1960 s without his shrewd business acumen. He was critical to the company's growth and achievements during his reign as Chairman of the Board. Just as he had with Tatra, he took the Opera Company to further stages of development in ways that Dad could not have done. As Dad said to me once, 'I am no businessman'. It is an exaggeration, however, to describe Turnovsky, as one journalist did, as the 'main architect of the New Zealand Opera Company', given the groundwork he inherited. 23 But he did make things happen that would not have otherwise.

A coup of sorts took place when Dad was in England in 1959 on a Government Bursary to study opera at Glyndebourne. Turnovsky persuaded New Zealand Breweries to cough up sponsorship of £5,000 for the next five years; this was on top of an equal government grant. As Turnovsky wrote in his autobiography, amusingly and accurately, 'I was selling respectability - a valuable asset for those in need of it, such as breweries - which would earn the sponsors the gratitude of a public whose enjoyment of opera was in no conflict with its taste for a glass of ale'. 24 That £50,000 over five years saved the Opera Company from collapse in 1959, and paved the way for a securer future. During Dad's absence, the Opera Company purchased its own premises - a gracious house in Hill Street that was tailor-made for the company's requirements - from the proceeds of a raffle organised by Phyllis Brusey, who had been recently appointed to the Board of Directors.

When Dad and the family returned to New Zealand in late 1959, there were already moves afoot to push him out of the company, but he managed to hang in. There is a telling throwaway line in the Minutes of the Board of Directors, where Jim Hartstonge said that 'a place must be kept' for Donald Munro - indirect evidence that some Board members felt there was no place for him any more. 25 One can speculate on their reasoning: they had done very nicely thank you in Donald Munro's absence, and who needed him anyway? However, it is simply not true, as Dad often later claimed, that Turnovsky usurped the chairmanship of the Board in his absence. Instead, Mum and Dad proposed and seconded him as Chairman when overseas, and there is a telegram to that effect. My father vehemently denied this when I raised the matter, but that's what happened. My mother remembers the telegram being sent in both their names from Scotland. 26 Turnovsky and my father clashed on many issues. A fundamental disagreement was Dad's insistence that New Zealand had depth of singing talent and only occasionally did the Opera Company need to bring in overseas singers. Turnovsky

took the opposite view. Dad also complained that the Board of Directors as a whole was taking artistic decisions it wasn't qualified to make, and was never meant to make. Those were enormous gulfs between them, and there were others. Whatever the tension at Board meetings, Dad ensured that the singers were not burdened by such knowledge. For that reason they are unable to tell me much at all about backroom intrigues, expect to say that Turnovsky was not their favourite person. I asked Geoffrey de Lautour how much he had to do with Turnovsky, to which Geoffrey responded, 'As little as possible'. Matters came to a head in early 1966. Dad was touring Australia with Porgy and Bess, and wrote to Turnovsky demanding his resignation as Chairman of the Board. What prompted the letter was Turnovsky becoming a liability to the company. As Dad wrote, 'The publication in the press of the Company's attitude towards the Arts Council over our orchestral problem & the unexpected & distressing adverse press and public reaction... We have all been aware of the past antagonism to you personally, by certain members of the Arts Council, the N.Z.B.C. & indeed the Ballet Trust, which the recent press statements & their subsequent reaction has intensified'. 27

However, Dad had no support from a supine Board at the showdown meeting when he returned to Wellington, so he tendered his resignation on the spot and walked out of the room, telling those in attendance that the Opera Company would only last another four years. (It lasted another five). I was 18 years old at the time and had no idea of the brewing trouble until Dad told lan and myself soon afterwards. A few months later he was appointed to a senior lectureship at the Elder Conservatorium of Music in Adelaide, a vacancy which he learned about during the Australian tour and which he was confident of getting. To my mother's consternation, he resigned from the Opera Company before the Adelaide job had been confirmed. The family moved to South Australia early the following year, with Bruce Mason bemoaning in his Listener column that yet another New Zealander in the artistic sphere had been forced abroad. 28 The Opera Company continued, but with mishaps - including the warehouse fire. The props and costumes were covered by insurance but it was still a grievous blow. Turnovsky stepped down as Chairman of the Board soon after, and the position was taken over by Phyllis Brusey, who thought she knew more about opera than she did, and whose costly mistakes and lack of self-awareness alienated the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council. A former Board member who I interviewed some years back said that he laid the blame for the demise of the Opera Company 'entirely at the feet of Phyllis Brusey' (whom my brother and I nicknamed 'Syphilis Brusey', to our mother's disapproval). He later moderated his view, and in fact, it is misleading to blame it all on Brusey, culpable though she was for some of it. There was considerable anti-opera feeling within sections of the Arts Council,

and Brusey played into their hands. One can also appreciate the Arts Council's reluctance to dispense public funds to an organisation so poorly managed at the top. Not that the Arts Council is blameless. It demanded a shotgun wedding between the Opera Company and the New Zealand Ballet, which was never going to work, as well as being generally hostile and overbearing. The coup de grace was at the end of 1971 when the Arts Council pulled the plug. Without a government subsidy the Opera Company could not continue as it had done, and it closed its doors to the public. But was this necessary? Singer Geoffrey de Lautour had a point in remarking that: I have often wondered why the Company did not simply retrench and carry on with the piano tours, for which there was always a good following. I can only assume that [the Directors] had been thinking big for so long, they were incapable of getting back to grass roots without the massive infusion of cash from sponsors and the Arts Council. Their board was now made up of big business executives, and, since Donald had gone, there was no one left with [the] vision and drive capable of doing such a venture. 29

Instead, the Opera Company limped on as a hollow legal entity for another decade, and was finally wound up completely. It was a sad finale, but I mustn't finish on a bum note. The Opera Company had shut up shop but the art form continued - at first because the singers founded their own small opera groups. Among these was Dorothy Hitch's appropriately named Shoestring Opera in Christchurch, whose name harks back to the early days of the New Zealand Opera Company. Other companies started by former singers were the De La Tour Opera Company in Wellington, which turned into Wellington City Opera in 1984; the New Opera Company of Wellington; and Percel Opera. 30 In Auckland, there were various, generally short-lived operatic enterprises: the Auckland Opera Trust, productions by the Auckland Symphonia, Northern Opera, and the Auckland Opera and Ballet Company. Then there was the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council's initiative in 1979 in setting up another national company, the National Opera of New Zealand, based in Auckland, which lasted till 1982 and whose assets, at its collapse, were controversially transferred to Mercury Theatre, which made no attempt to stage performances outside of Auckland. 31 In all, it was a bewildering succession of comings and goings. One of the New Zealand Opera Company's notable legacies stemmed from the engagement of a Maori chorus in its 1965-66 season of Porgy and Bess. This launched the careers of several Maori singers, including Don Selwyn. Another venture was the filming of opera productions for television in the early 1980 s by Peter Coates, who had sung in Opera Company choruses. That these could never be made for television today is a remarkable commentary on the changed

cultural climate, and the current priorities of almost all the TV networks. To the dismay of my father and myself, Coates never received the support he deserved from the funding bodies.

The lost ground was finally made up with the formation of New Zealand Opera in 2000 - a merger of the National Opera of Wellington and Opera New Zealand in Auckland. 32 Although New Zealand Opera has no connection with my father's opera company, it fulfils a comparable function as a truly national and professional enterprise.

In 2006, Wagner's Parsifal was performed at the New Zealand International Arts Festival, in Wellington, with an all-New Zealand cast, including Donald Mclntyre, Simon O'Neill and Paul Wheelan. Dad happened to be in Wellington at the time, and after the performance, he said that he felt vindicated in his view that New Zealand has always had the singing talent to stage grand opera. He was right. Spot on, in fact.

ENDNOTES 1 This paper is the slightly modified text of a presentation to the Friends of the Turnbull Library on 27 August 2014, and the flavour of the spoken word has been retained. I am most grateful to the anonymous peer reviewer for providing such stringent and constructive feedback. 2 Daniel Snowman, The Gilded Age: A Social History of Opera (London: Atlantic, 2009), ch. 23. 3 Harold Rosenthal, ed., Opera Annual, 1954-5 (London: John Calder, 1954), pp. 24-43; Wilfrid Blunt, John Christie of Glyndebourne (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1968). A recent large-scale casualty was the New York Opera, which filed for bankruptcy in late 2013. 4 Doug Munro, 'Donald Munro and the New Zealand Opera Company', in Music in New Zealand, 33 (1998), pp. 34-39; 'The Early Years of the New Zealand Opera Company, 1954-1957', in History Now, 11:1-2 (2005), pp. 19-23. Both available at www.operafolks.com/Cooke/Munro_Donald_page.html, accessed 3 September 2014. 5 Adrienne Simpson, Opera's Farthest Frontier: A History of Professional Opera in New Zealand (Auckland: Reed, 1996), pp. 205-19. 6 Geoffrey de Lautour, The Singer I'll Love for the Song (Auckland: Flip Publishing, 2000), pp. 59-92; Corinne Bridge-Opie, / Heard You Singing: My Life with Ramon Opie (Auckland: Bridge, 2012), pp. 83-120; 137-40; 145. 7 For a discussion, see Tony Vercoe, 'Bravo! A Tribute in Three Parts to the New Zealand Opera Company (1954-1971)', in Music in New Zealand, 28 (1995), pp. 10-12. 8 Phyllis Brusey, Ring Down the Curtain (Wellington: Monigatti, 1973), pp. 99-192. 9 J. M. Thomson, interview with Donald Munro, 9 January 1984, Alexander Turnbull Library (hereafter ATL), OHlnt-0133/38 (three tapes). 10 James Hartstonge to Donald Munro, 18 April 1967, Munro Papers, ATL, MS-Papers-7213-3. 11 William Dart, 'A Unicorn for Christmas', in Music in New Zealand, 3 (1988/89), pp. 6-13; 41. This provides an informed assessment of the actual production but the intricate behind-the-scenes manoeuvrings were not part of his brief. 12 Philip Norman, Douglas Lilburn: His Life and Music (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2007), p. 180. 13 Quoted in Sarah Gaitanos, Nola Miller: A Theatrical Life (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2006), p. 150. 14 Minutes of Special Meeting, 31 May 1954, Victoria University College Council of Adult Education Reports and Minutes, J. C. Beaglehole Room, Victoria University Library. The CAS has been written-up by Phillippa Ulenberg, The Community Arts Service: History and Social Context, MA thesis, University of Waikato, 2009. 15 Jennifer Shennan, A Time to Dance: The Royal New Zealand Ballet at 50 (Wellington: Royal New Zealand Ballet, 2003), p. 12.

16 These singers recall of the rigours of touring in their autobiographies: Cyril Charles Kelleway, My Life in Song (Auckland: privately published, 2012), pp. 37-61; Bridge-Opie, I Heard You Singing, pp. 108-20. 17 Margaret Lovell-Smith, The Enigma of Sister Mary Leo (Auckland: Reed, 1998), p. 105. 18 This article's anonymous peer reviewer did point out the 'somewhat superficial understanding of the aesthetic, intellectual and social aspects of an art form - any art form - ... was probably normal in the 50s and 60s. At that time there was little occasion for critical commentary on opera in New Zealand; hardly any recordings of other than individual arias; scarcely any newspaper or periodical treatment, apart from the Listener, of the artistic or intellectual element, and very few people with any experience of opera performance in other parts of the world (though much is sometimes made of the experience of New Zealand soldiers who discovered opera as they pushed through Italy in the second world war...)'. 19 Bill O'Reilly, 'lron Curtain Opera', 'The Consul - scrapbook of newscuttings', Munro Papers, ATL, 83-011-07. 20 John Gruen, Menotti: A Biography (New York: Macmillan, 1978), p. 205. 21 Meech to NZOC, 27 November 1957, Archives New Zealand, IA 1 W 2587 155/206/729 22 Minutes of the Board of Directors, 14 June 1956, 28 March 1958, 29 May 1958, NZOC Records, ATL, MSX-2656. 23 Alan Fenton, 'Mr. Opera', in New Zealand Free Lance, 31 August 1960 (newspaper clipping in Turnovsky Papers, ATL, 91-232-1/13B). 24 Fred Turnovsky, Fifty Years in New Zealand (Wellington: Allen & Unwin, 1990), p. 146. See also 'Opera Should Bring Tourists', in Brewnews 12 (1959).

25 Minutes of the Board of Directors, 14 September 1959, NZOC Records, ATL, MSX-2656. 26 Minutes of the Board of Directors, 10-11 August 1959, NZOC Records, ATL, MSX-2656; Notes of telephone conversation with Jean Munro, 2 May 2010. 27 Donald Munro to Fred Turnovsky (handwritten draft, written in Sydney), 30 January 1966; also Donald Munro to Doug Munro, 8 October 2002, both in Munro Papers, ATL, MS-Papers-8450-17. Years later, Dad scribbled on the top of his handwritten draft, 'Was it the right thing to do or not?' 28 Reprinted in Bruce Mason, Every Kind of Weather: Selected Writings on the Arts, Theatre, Literature and Current events in New Zealand, 1953-1981, ed. David Dowling (Auckland: Reed Methuen, 1986), pp. 153-54. 29 de Lautour, The Singer I'll Love for the Song, p. 101. 30 Adrienne Simpson, Opera's Farthest Frontier, pp. 220-21; de Lautour, The Singer I'll Love for the Song, ch. 28; Dennis Clark and Cyril Kelleway, A Troupe of Strolling Players: The Perkel Opera Story (Auckland: privately published, 2004). 31 Some of these ventures are recounted in Adrienne Simpson, Capital Opera: Wellington's OperaCcompany, 1982-1999 (Wellington: The National Opera of Wellington, 2000); Nicholas Tarling, Off and On: Opera in Auckland, 1970-2000 (Palmerston North: Dunmore, 2002). 32 A name such as National Opera of Wellington is oxymoronic, but it was in response to the presumptuous move in 1996 by Auckland Opera, which renamed itself Opera New Zealand, though with no intention of acting as a national company.