Anne Sharp
Encyclopedia
Anne Sharp is a Scottish
coloratura soprano
particularly associated with the operas of Benjamin Britten
.
, Lanarkshire
, the eighth and youngest child in a family of keen amateur musicians. Her father was an engineer in the steel industry, and also an amateur singer and choirmaster. She attended Glencairn Primary School and Dalziel High School
in Motherwell. After leaving school she worked as a secretary while taking private singing lessons, and in 1941 she began studying at the Scottish National Academy of Music
in Glasgow, winning the Jean Highgate singing scholarship in 1943. During her years of study, which coincided with the Second World War, she also sang in the choir of Glasgow Cathedral
. She gained the Performer's Diploma in Solo Singing from what was by then the Royal Scottish Academy of Music in 1944, and similar diplomas awarded by Trinity College London
and The Royal Academy of Music
in 1946.
In the summer of 1946 the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden
was re-establishing itself after the Second World War, and to this end a series of auditions was held in various centres around the country to recruit singers for the opera chorus. Anne Sharp, who attended the Glasgow audition, was one of seven Scots who were successful. A contemporary newspaper article reported:
, Anne Sharp sang in the chorus in the first post-war production, Purcell
's The Fairy Queen
, then in the 1947 productions of Bizet's Carmen
, Massenet's Manon
and Mozart's The Magic Flute
.
In March 1947 she became a founder member of Benjamin Britten
's English Opera Group
, singing Britten roles at Glyndebourne
, Sadler's Wells, Lucerne
, Scheveningen, Oslo and Copenhagen as well as the company's home base at Aldeburgh. Able to pass as a teenager even in her thirties, she sang the role of "tiresome village child" Emmie Spatchett in Albert Herring
, the centrepiece of the first Aldeburgh Festival
in June 1948.
She created the roles of (13-year-old) Cis Woodger in Albert Herring
and Molly Brazen in Britten's 1948 adaptation of The Beggar's Opera
, as well as Juliet Brook in The Little Sweep
, a part written for her by Britten. In the play Let's Make an Opera! which precedes The Little Sweep, in which the characters were named for the original cast members, "Annie Dougall" (a bank clerk) who takes the part of the 14-year-old Juliet was originally played as a Scots girl, with the original libretto containing a number of Scots expressions for that character. Britten initially conceived the role of Polly Peachum in The Beggar's Opera for Anne Sharp, but while composing the opera changed his concept of the character to a mezzo-soprano role. The part was eventually created by Nancy Evans
.
Between 1948 and 1950 she appeared in live radio broadcasts of Albert Herring, Let's Make an Opera! and The Beggar's Opera on the BBC Third Programme and the BBC Home Service. In February 1950 Let's Make an Opera! was broadcast live on BBC television, one of the earliest televised operas.
Other performances during this period included the soprano solo parts in Bach
's Mass in B minor, Handel
's Messiah
and Brahms' A German Requiem, and solo recitals for the BBC Third Programme including Handel's Lusinghe piu care and Richard Strauss
's Ständchen. Operatic roles included the Queen of the Night in Mozart's The Magic Flute
and Michaela in a concert performance of Bizet's Carmen
. She also created the title role in Lawrance Collingwood
's little-known opera The Death of Tintagiles, at its only performance in April 1950.
minister. She continued her operatic career in London intermittently after her marriage, but after the birth of their daughter in 1953 concentrated on oratorio roles in Scotland.
Anne Sharp lives with her daughter in West Linton
, Peeblesshire
.
Anne Sharp in the original 1949 production of Let's Make an Opera!
Scotland
Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...
coloratura soprano
Coloratura soprano
A coloratura soprano is a type of operatic soprano who specializes in music that is distinguished by agile runs and leaps. The term coloratura refers to the elaborate ornamentation of a melody, which is a typical component of the music written for this voice...
particularly associated with the operas of Benjamin Britten
Benjamin Britten
Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten, OM CH was an English composer, conductor, and pianist. He showed talent from an early age, and first came to public attention with the a cappella choral work A Boy Was Born in 1934. With the premiere of his opera Peter Grimes in 1945, he leapt to...
.
Background and education
Anne Smellie Graham Sharp was born in MotherwellMotherwell
Motherwell is a town and former burgh in North Lanarkshire, Scotland, south east of Glasgow. The name "Moderwelt" appears on a map of Lanarkshire made by Timothy Pont some time between 1583 and 1611 and printed in the Netherlands in around 1652, although the settlement was probably little more...
, Lanarkshire
Lanarkshire
Lanarkshire or the County of Lanark ) is a Lieutenancy area, registration county and former local government county in the central Lowlands of Scotland...
, the eighth and youngest child in a family of keen amateur musicians. Her father was an engineer in the steel industry, and also an amateur singer and choirmaster. She attended Glencairn Primary School and Dalziel High School
Dalziel High School
Dalziel High School is a non-denominational secondary school that is based in Motherwell, North Lanarkshire, Scotland. The current rector of the school is Levi toi.1.-Overview:...
in Motherwell. After leaving school she worked as a secretary while taking private singing lessons, and in 1941 she began studying at the Scottish National Academy of Music
Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama
The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland is a conservatoire of music, drama, and dance in the centre of Glasgow, Scotland. Founded in 1845 as the Glasgow Educational Association, it is the busiest performing arts venue in Scotland...
in Glasgow, winning the Jean Highgate singing scholarship in 1943. During her years of study, which coincided with the Second World War, she also sang in the choir of Glasgow Cathedral
Glasgow Cathedral
The church commonly known as Glasgow Cathedral is the Church of Scotland High Kirk of Glasgow otherwise known as St. Mungo's Cathedral.The other cathedrals in Glasgow are:* The Catholic Metropolitan Cathedral Church of Saint Andrew...
. She gained the Performer's Diploma in Solo Singing from what was by then the Royal Scottish Academy of Music in 1944, and similar diplomas awarded by Trinity College London
Trinity College London
Trinity College London is an international examinations board based in London, England. TCL offers qualifications across a range of disciplines in the performing arts and arts education and English language learning and teaching...
and The Royal Academy of Music
LRAM
LRAM is an abbreviation for Licentiate of the Royal Academy of Music. This professional diploma was formerly open to both internal students of the Royal Academy of Music and external candidates in voice, keyboard and orchestral instruments and guitar, as well as conducting and other musical...
in 1946.
In the summer of 1946 the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden
Royal Opera House
The Royal Opera House is an opera house and major performing arts venue in Covent Garden, central London. The large building is often referred to as simply "Covent Garden", after a previous use of the site of the opera house's original construction in 1732. It is the home of The Royal Opera, The...
was re-establishing itself after the Second World War, and to this end a series of auditions was held in various centres around the country to recruit singers for the opera chorus. Anne Sharp, who attended the Glasgow audition, was one of seven Scots who were successful. A contemporary newspaper article reported:
London career
At the Royal Opera HouseRoyal Opera House
The Royal Opera House is an opera house and major performing arts venue in Covent Garden, central London. The large building is often referred to as simply "Covent Garden", after a previous use of the site of the opera house's original construction in 1732. It is the home of The Royal Opera, The...
, Anne Sharp sang in the chorus in the first post-war production, Purcell
Henry Purcell
Henry Purcell – 21 November 1695), was an English organist and Baroque composer of secular and sacred music. Although Purcell incorporated Italian and French stylistic elements into his compositions, his legacy was a uniquely English form of Baroque music...
's The Fairy Queen
The Fairy-Queen
The Fairy-Queen is a masque or semi-opera by Henry Purcell; a "Restoration spectacular". The libretto is an anonymous adaptation of William Shakespeare's wedding comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream. First performed in 1692, The Fairy-Queen was composed three years before Purcell's death at the age...
, then in the 1947 productions of Bizet's Carmen
Carmen
Carmen is a French opéra comique by Georges Bizet. The libretto is by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, based on the novella of the same title by Prosper Mérimée, first published in 1845, itself possibly influenced by the narrative poem The Gypsies by Alexander Pushkin...
, Massenet's Manon
Manon
Manon is an opéra comique in five acts by Jules Massenet to a French libretto by Henri Meilhac and Philippe Gille, based on the 1731 novel L’histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut by the Abbé Prévost...
and Mozart's The Magic Flute
The Magic Flute
The Magic Flute is an opera in two acts composed in 1791 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to a German libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder. The work is in the form of a Singspiel, a popular form that included both singing and spoken dialogue....
.
In March 1947 she became a founder member of Benjamin Britten
Benjamin Britten
Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten, OM CH was an English composer, conductor, and pianist. He showed talent from an early age, and first came to public attention with the a cappella choral work A Boy Was Born in 1934. With the premiere of his opera Peter Grimes in 1945, he leapt to...
's English Opera Group
English Opera Group
The English Opera Group was a small company of British musicians formed in 1947 by the composer Benjamin Britten for the purpose of presenting his and other, primarily British, composers' operatic works. The group later expanded in order to present larger-scale works, and was renamed the English...
, singing Britten roles at Glyndebourne
Glyndebourne
Glyndebourne is a country house, thought to be about six hundred years old, located near Lewes in East Sussex, England. It is also the site of an opera house which, with the exception of its closing during the Second World War, for a few immediate post-war years, and in 1993 during the...
, Sadler's Wells, Lucerne
Lucerne Festival
- History :The festival was founded in 1938 with a series of concerts in the gardens of Wagner's villa conducted by Arturo Toscanini, who had formed an orchestra with members of different orchestras and soloists for the concert...
, Scheveningen, Oslo and Copenhagen as well as the company's home base at Aldeburgh. Able to pass as a teenager even in her thirties, she sang the role of "tiresome village child" Emmie Spatchett in Albert Herring
Albert Herring
Albert Herring, Op. 39, is a chamber opera in three acts by Benjamin Britten.Composed in the winter of 1946 and the spring of 1947, this comic opera was a successor to his serious opera The Rape of Lucretia...
, the centrepiece of the first Aldeburgh Festival
Aldeburgh Festival
The Aldeburgh Festival is an English arts festival devoted mainly to classical music. It takes place each June in the Aldeburgh area of Suffolk, centred on the main concert hall at Snape Maltings...
in June 1948.
She created the roles of (13-year-old) Cis Woodger in Albert Herring
Albert Herring
Albert Herring, Op. 39, is a chamber opera in three acts by Benjamin Britten.Composed in the winter of 1946 and the spring of 1947, this comic opera was a successor to his serious opera The Rape of Lucretia...
and Molly Brazen in Britten's 1948 adaptation of The Beggar's Opera
The Beggar's Opera
The Beggar's Opera is a ballad opera in three acts written in 1728 by John Gay with music arranged by Johann Christoph Pepusch. It is one of the watershed plays in Augustan drama and is the only example of the once thriving genre of satirical ballad opera to remain popular today...
, as well as Juliet Brook in The Little Sweep
The Little Sweep
The Little Sweep is an opera for children in three scenes by the English composer Benjamin Britten, with a libretto by Eric Crozier.- Let's Make an Opera! :...
, a part written for her by Britten. In the play Let's Make an Opera! which precedes The Little Sweep, in which the characters were named for the original cast members, "Annie Dougall" (a bank clerk) who takes the part of the 14-year-old Juliet was originally played as a Scots girl, with the original libretto containing a number of Scots expressions for that character. Britten initially conceived the role of Polly Peachum in The Beggar's Opera for Anne Sharp, but while composing the opera changed his concept of the character to a mezzo-soprano role. The part was eventually created by Nancy Evans
Nancy Evans
Nancy Evans OBE was an English mezzo-soprano who had a notable career as a concert and opera singer. She is particularly associated with Benjamin Britten who wrote his song cycle, A Charm of Lullabies, and the role of Nancy in his opera Albert Herring for her.-Biography:Evans was born in Liverpool...
.
Between 1948 and 1950 she appeared in live radio broadcasts of Albert Herring, Let's Make an Opera! and The Beggar's Opera on the BBC Third Programme and the BBC Home Service. In February 1950 Let's Make an Opera! was broadcast live on BBC television, one of the earliest televised operas.
Other performances during this period included the soprano solo parts in Bach
Bạch
Bạch is a Vietnamese surname. The name is transliterated as Bai in Chinese and Baek, in Korean.Bach is the anglicized variation of the surname Bạch.-Notable people with the surname Bạch:* Bạch Liêu...
's Mass in B minor, Handel
HANDEL
HANDEL was the code-name for the UK's National Attack Warning System in the Cold War. It consisted of a small console consisting of two microphones, lights and gauges. The reason behind this was to provide a back-up if anything failed....
's Messiah
Messiah (Handel)
Messiah is an English-language oratorio composed in 1741 by George Frideric Handel, with a scriptural text compiled by Charles Jennens from the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. It was first performed in Dublin on 13 April 1742, and received its London premiere nearly a year later...
and Brahms' A German Requiem, and solo recitals for the BBC Third Programme including Handel's Lusinghe piu care and Richard Strauss
Richard Strauss
Richard Georg Strauss was a leading German composer of the late Romantic and early modern eras. He is known for his operas, which include Der Rosenkavalier and Salome; his Lieder, especially his Four Last Songs; and his tone poems and orchestral works, such as Death and Transfiguration, Till...
's Ständchen. Operatic roles included the Queen of the Night in Mozart's The Magic Flute
The Magic Flute
The Magic Flute is an opera in two acts composed in 1791 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to a German libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder. The work is in the form of a Singspiel, a popular form that included both singing and spoken dialogue....
and Michaela in a concert performance of Bizet's Carmen
Carmen
Carmen is a French opéra comique by Georges Bizet. The libretto is by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, based on the novella of the same title by Prosper Mérimée, first published in 1845, itself possibly influenced by the narrative poem The Gypsies by Alexander Pushkin...
. She also created the title role in Lawrance Collingwood
Lawrance Collingwood
Lawrance Arthur Collingwood CBE was an English conductor, composer and record producer.Lawrance Collingwood was born in London and became a choirboy at Westminster Abbey. He studied at the Guildhall School of Music and Exeter College, Oxford...
's little-known opera The Death of Tintagiles, at its only performance in April 1950.
Vocal quality
Elisabeth Parry, a contemporary in the English Opera Group, described Anne Sharp as having "… a lovely natural very high soprano voice, which never seemed to give her any problem. In our digs we used to tease her because she could get out of bed in the morning and lie in the bath singing up to E in alt." In 1950 the Totnes Times described "a charming presentation of the Queen of the Night." In 1957 the North Star reviewed her performance in Messiah as follows:Marriage and later life
In December 1950 Anne Sharp married Rev. James Lyon Kerr, a Church of ScotlandChurch of Scotland
The Church of Scotland, known informally by its Scots language name, the Kirk, is a Presbyterian church, decisively shaped by the Scottish Reformation....
minister. She continued her operatic career in London intermittently after her marriage, but after the birth of their daughter in 1953 concentrated on oratorio roles in Scotland.
Anne Sharp lives with her daughter in West Linton
West Linton
West Linton is a village and civil parish in southern Scotland, on the A702. It was formerly in the county of Peeblesshire, but since local government re-organisation in the mid-1990s it is now part of the Tweeddale committee area of the Scottish Borders. Many residents are commuters due to the...
, Peeblesshire
Peeblesshire
Peeblesshire , the County of Peebles or Tweeddale was a county of Scotland. Its main town was Peebles, and it bordered Midlothian to the north, Selkirkshire to the east, Dumfriesshire to the south, and Lanarkshire to the west.After the local government reorganisation of 1975 the use of the name...
.
Recordings
- Molly Brazen, in the 1948 BBC radio original cast performance of The Beggar's Opera, issued by Pearl in April 2005.
- Emmie Spatchett, in a 1949 performance of Albert Herring recorded live at the Theatre Royal, Copenhagen, issued by Nimbus in September 2008.
- The 1949 BBC archive recording of Let's Make an Opera! with Anne Sharp in the dual role of Anne Dougall and Juliet Brook is not commercially available.
External links
- Britten-Pears Foundation article on The Little Sweep
- Nimbus recording of 1949 performance of Albert Herring
- Guide to Musical Theatre article on The Beggar's Opera
- Pearl original cast recording of The Beggar's Opera
Anne Sharp in the original 1949 production of Let's Make an Opera!
- Let's Make an Opera! play, rehearsing the audience (extreme left) (Getty Images)
- Let's Make an Opera! play, rehearsing the audience in the "Night Song" (second from left) (Getty Images)
- The Little Sweep scene 1, freeing Sammy from the chimney (left, standing) (This picture is wrongly dated, being from the 1949 production not the 1951 revival.) (Boosey and Hawkes)
- The Little Sweep beginning of scene 2, Sammy's bath (extreme right)(Getty Images)
- The Little Sweep scene 3, trying to lift the trunk (centre, rear)(Getty Images)
- http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://www.arenapal.com/files/photographers/spotlight/boosey_and_hawkes/the_little_sweep_let_s_make_an_opera_1049060s.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.arenapal.com/files/photographers/spotlight/boosey_and_hawkes.html&usg=__PEn9UwWBWXJ6izDb8MTA-1Xnp_E=&h=120&w=120&sz=18&hl=en&start=0&zoom=1&tbnid=1k3XUx83aXB2WM:&tbnh=96&tbnw=96&ei=hRVwTcCSKpWu4Aa0p8TXDQ&prev=/images%3Fq%3D%2522Let%2527s%2BMake%2Ban%2BOpera%2522%2Barenapal%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DG%26biw%3D1280%26bih%3D632%26tbs%3Disch:1&um=1&itbs=1&iact=rc&dur=384&oei=_hNwTdaPBoW6hAfz4tgu&page=1&ndsp=18&ved=1t:429,r:2,s:0&tx=37&ty=41The Little Sweep scene 3, final tableau (extreme right)] (Boosey and Hawkes / ArenaPAL : Performing Arts Image Library)
