Rita Hunter

Operatic diva limited by an easy-going approach to her art

Brünnhilde, Wotan's naughty daughter, was the perfect role for Rita Hunter, the diva from Wallasey, who has died in Sydney, aged 67. The whole point about Brünnhilde is that she is human and wilful even before she is deprived of her immortal status. The fact that Rita, at 20-stone, would have been quite a challenge for any horses in the Ride Of The Valkyries did not remotely disqualify her from shining memorably in the role at the Coliseum in 1973.

It was a space-age Ring anyway, in Andrew Porter's English vernacular, which suited Rita and her Siegfried, Alberto Remedios - not to mention Norman Bailey's rather noble, soft-grained Wotan. And it was a performance grounded, somewhat naively, in the truth of feelings, not in metaphysical speculation.

Rita Hunter had a beautiful, and highly individual, voice of formidable strength, as well as a lovely, irrepressibly cheerful smile. But the sound she made was not just sweet, and the smile masked a certain lack of realism. There could be a mewling, almost feline, twang in her lower register.

She became distinctly less cooperative as her career took off. The voice could develop a sufficiently admonitory timbre from time to time, without which she could not have compassed the tragic sentiment that is essential in the Ring. But the limitations of her career, as also in a way of Remedios's, following the huge and well-deserved success of the English Ring that really made her name, demonstrated all too clearly that the conductor Reginald Goodall's musical preparation and inspiring leadership had been crucial factors in setting her up as a credible star.

Goodall was her real Svengali - not Eva Turner, from whom she acquired a few distinctive vocal habits, when she took lessons from her for six months. "What I got from Eva was not so much vocal progress as a mental attitude to things," she said. "I had a very piercing sound, which was fine and loud and raised the roof. But I knew there was something else I wanted, a round, nice warm tone - because I was a great lover of Tebaldi."

She quite quickly turned her back on the sorts of demands that Goodall represented, though treasuring, perhaps too confidently, his brilliant advice to her: "Don't move. Do it with your face." Hunter's vocal gift was indeed rare, but not sufficient to compensate for the disadvantages of her personality - for her cheerful, insouciant arrogance as an artist, and a growing disinclination to work hard enough at musical preparation, and at the appropriately polished and imaginative theatricality.

What was wonderful about that initial Brünnhilde was that it triumphed over all the many problems of her shape and mobility - though she was quite capable of being delicate in her movements, as well as dramatically urgent. But in the end, and quite quickly, the international invitations stopped coming because the voice, by itself, was not enough.

She was a quick student, who learnt from listening, but not really much good at foreign languages. In any case, she was increasingly not bothered to keep her technique sufficiently in the sort of shape it needed to be in. Opera audiences can work their imaginations quite hard if the vocal quality is there, as the thunderous careers of Jane Eaglen and Ben Heppner prove. Hunter was glorious, but in the end, sadly, pas sérieuse as far as the wider market was concerned.

Her occasional recitals were demonstrations of rebellious unconcern: it might be the Queen Elizabeth Hall, but she would treat the event as if it were taking place in a working-men's club which just happened to have been taken over by a load of screaming opera queens, for whom her camp cool and laid-back informal stardom were cause for ribald celebration.

For those who listened and longed for her to realise her enormous promise as a Wagnerian star, it was depressing to notice how casually she broke up phrases to seize a breath, how irresponsibly she would just get by. Her alibi for not trying harder was the sense that the glandular disorder which made her so huge - her Bellini, in New York, was greeted with the headline "Enorma" - was something she could not help, and it was size that was stopping her being cast by opera house managements.

T he daughter of a boilermaker, Hunter's first singing lessons came from Olive Lloyd, who conducted the local pantomime society orchestra, and who taught her to hold her breath for "a long, long time". She was also taught by Harry Burgon, the music teacher at the next-door boy's school, who cast her as Little Buttercup, in HMS Pinafore, at the age of 13.

Her next teacher, Edwin Francis, predicted she was a young Eva Turner, and later introduced her to her future Siegfried, Remedios. She joined the Sadler's Wells chorus in 1954, aged 21, and after a couple of years - and nothing more exciting than singing one of the bridesmaids in Figaro - transferred to the Carl Rosa company because her teacher, Edward Renton, encouraged her to think it was "better to be a large pea in a small pod".

When the Carl Rosa merged with the Wells, she got a six months' study grant with Eva Turner, who once declared Hunter would never make a singer, and would have to scrub floors for a living. Then she went to her husband's teacher Redvers Llewellyn, and - back on the Sadler's Wells books - began to get roles: Marcellina, in Figaro, whose single and very difficult aria gave her a big chance, and, in 1964, her first Wagner, Senta, in Flying Dutchman. She was also Odabella, in Verdi's Attila, and Musetta, in Bohème. The birth, in 1968, of her daughter, Mairwyn, coincided with the Wells sacking her. She was quite quickly welcomed back, though, since she was Goodall's Brünnhilde in the making.

Her career was full of might-have-beens. She sang Third Norn at Covent Garden in 1963. When she did Leonore, in Trovatore, at the ENO in February 1983, it was a mixed blessing: she had not sung since the previous November (though she confidently assured me that her voice would be fully fit again after just a few days' rehearsal).

In 1979, she was supposed to be Turandot to Luciano Pavarotti's Calaf at the New York Metropolitan Opera, but, following a stagehands' strike, she jetted off to do Nabucco in Sydney, where she was to be offered a whole roster of big roles.

T his emigration was a mix of sour grapes about the rest of the world's failure to use her talent, and opportunism - an Australian Ring was in the offing. In 1983, she told me: "I love Lady Macbeth because she's such a wicked old bag, and Lazaridis's costumes for her in Australia are not little. You need a good pair of shoulders to cart them around. Obviously, I'm not going into trousers and doing Fidelio. I wouldn't inflict that on anybody."

Hunter's self-deprecating sense of humour, which led to lots of chat-show appearances down under, should have been exploited in opera. She never sang Alice Ford, which might have been ideal for her at Covent Garden.

The Australian Opera was once said to be considering casting Joan Sutherland as Josephine in Pinafore, opposite Hunter as Buttercup. But of that suggestion, she said: "I would hate to be considered a large funny lady." Her autobiography was Wait Till The Sun Shines Nellie (1985); and her triumph as Brünn- hilde in the Goodall Ring is still available on CD.

Mairwyn survives her; her husband, John Darnley, died in 1994.

Tom Sutcliffe

Rita Nellie Hunter, singer, born August 15 1933; died April 29 2001

The GuardianTramp

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