Vale Saint Joan

Sir Roger wishes to make a special personal note of his sadness at the death, of La Stupenda, Dame Joan Sutherland; the loss of one of the truly greats.

Her career properly began when “she won a two-year scholarship for vocal training with John and Aida Dickens in Sydney in 1946. The couple helped Sutherland develop the upper range of her voice, which would prove important in her development as an opera singer.” And  with their help, in 1949 she won the Sun Aria. 

This may be unremarkable except that, soon after, John and Aida Dickens migrated from Sydney to Tamworth, NSW, where Sir Roger’s pater, the Earl-Surgeon Edouard d’Migentlé – attracted to the idea of a career “to fall back on” should the practice of medicine fall through, and imagining that the fall-back position might be “The Opera” – sought the assistance of the famed John and Aida.

The Dickenses succeeded magnificently and crafted in Earl Edouard the most beautiful tenor voice you never heard.

As it transpired, medicine proved a sufficiently stable occupation that his singing was limited to the amateur field and particularly to operas of the D’Oyly Carte variety, although he always, wherever he went — and if anyone was kind enough to ask — seemed to “just happen to have a few pieces of music with me”  if someone could be kind enough to muddle their way through some vague approximation to an accompaniment.

This would be nothing to you, dear Reader, except that the Earl-Surgeon felt that his children, also, might profit from something to “fall back on” and thus they were enrolled with Aida Dickens, Sir Roger being just 8-years-old. And thus he attended weekly piano lessons with Aida at her home in Belmore Street, West Tamworth.

And so it is that Sir Roger now feels himself, sharing her teacher, to be in some way a Brother-In-Arts, and now a bereft colleague, of the great Saint Joan.

Sadly enough, their teacher was the only thing Sir Roger and Dame Joan were destined to share. Sir Roger proved to be a little-talented and neglectful student who never completed Preliminary Grade. (He blames this on being forced to play impenetrable pieces by Czerny at such a young age.)

Sir Roger’s sister, La Princesse d’Migentlé was the opposite and went on to complete her A.Mus.A. in record time and with flying colours.

Nevertheless, Sir Roger can still play the first five bars of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata whenever anyone is kind enough to ask (and, to be truthful, even when they, frequently, request he not…please…)

Vale et  benigne facis!