Lawrence’s and Lehmann’s early years had two important things in common: they were passed before the advent of the microphone, and in families that boasted more than one gifted singer, wherein shared music-making was a regular feature of home and community life. Otherwise, when it comes to  upbringings (see Lehmann, Part 1 for a sketch of hers), Lawrence’s is reflected in the adjective that came first to mind as I listened to her Ortrud excerpt: “coltish.” And in fact she had a horsey childhood, not of the upper-class equestrienne sort, but the bush-country bareback kind. She was raised by a hardworking father and multiple older siblings on a farmstead outside the tiny town of Dean’s Marsh, State of Victoria, Australia, where there was no high culture to speak of and her primary vocal models were recordings of Dames Nellie Melba and Clara Butt. Her voice, she tells us in Interrupted Melody, was of long range and considerable strength from a very young age, and her use of it uninhibited. After what seems to have been some sensible early instruction in Melbourne, in 1928 (the year she turned 19, if the commonly accepted birthdate is correct) she won every possible first in an important competition in Geelong, and by the Fall of that year, never having seen an opera performed, was off to Paris for advanced study. There, the way was smoothed for her by the baritone John Brownlee (a fellow Australian) for lessons with the formidable Cécile Gilly.

Mme. Gilly must have been a highly effective teacher. The privately made studio recordings Lawrence made in Melbourne in 1928 (included in this set) show that her voice possessed the professionally necessary range, and that its owner did not lack the confidence and artistic ambition to have a go at “O Don fatale.” But its quality is far from evenly developed or gathered into a coherent identity, and as one would expect, there are only the beginnings of a sensibility with regard to languages, musical styles, etc. Yet in less than five years’ time she made highly successful professional debuts at Monte Carlo (1932, as Elizabeth in Tannhäuser); Lille (as the Walküre Brünnhilde); and the Paris Opéra (February, 1933, as Ortrud). In 1933 she also made her first series of recordings. Those that I have heard (“O palais radïeux,” from Reyer’s Sigurd, and the Ortrud/Telramund scene from Lohengrin, with Martial Singher) show both voice and stylistic grasp in full maturity, as well as a superior elocutionary command of French. At the age of 24, Lawrence was ensconced as a dramatic soprano star of the Opéra, rivaled only by the longer-established Germaine Lubin.

This triumphal progress was enabled by a sort of tutorial/lifestyle regimen that has disappeared, along with the voices it produced, from our operatic world. Its pattern will be recognizable to those familiar with the biographies of many American singers up through the  WW2 years, and a few beyond. It embraced intensive, demanding study with a well-connected private teacher who assumed a mentoring role; coaching, language instruction, and guidance in acting (the “scenetics” of roles or, at the least, “deportment”) from the teacher’s network of colleagues; absorption of the necessary cultural background in a major operatic center; and financial support from family and/or private patrons who’d taken an interest. Its presumptive goal was not versatility or eclecticism, but stardom, standing out above the rest in the great roles of the repertory. It provided the sense of being admitted to an elite, and at the same time the sheltering, a chaperoning, that went with that. It was independent, not institutional, and individual, not collaborative, in focus, including no formal academics beyond the secondary level, no apprenticeships, choral assignments, grooming in small roles, or other forms of gradualism. It assumed ambition, discipline, and the assumption of responsibility from an early age on the pupil’s part—though in most cases, including Lawrence’s, it could take for granted the rudimentary musical education that a normal home/school environment once provided in the primary and secondary years. From what seem to us unpromising early circumstances (and in the interwar years, the systems of professional training and performance opportunity were far less developed in Australia than in even the U.S.A.), there emerged fewer working singers, but among them a higher proportion of the great and near-great.