‘This moment was sacred’: four artists’ most potent Opera House memories

This story is part of the Sydney Opera House 50th Anniversary Magazine.See all 9 stories.

Paul Kelly, musician

Paul Kelly performs on the Opera House Forecourt in 2017.Credit: Prudence Upton

It’s a heart-stopping building. I lived in Sydney ­between 1984 and 1990 and toured a lot in that time, often travelling north. Coming back into the city after a series of shows, having driven through the interminable northern suburbs, suddenly we would swing down onto the freeway from Crows Nest, and there out to the left on Bennelong Point would be those dreaming sails that would, in Seamus Heaney’s words, “catch the heart off guard and blow it open”.

I’d been close to the building, if “building” is what you could call it. I’d walked around it, wondering at the ­irregular size of the tiles. I’d caught the ferry from Circular Quay to Manly and seen it singing in the light on the way home, but I hadn’t been inside it and had never seen a show there. Money was too tight to mention.

In 1987, I received my first royalty cheque. It was more money than I’d ever been paid at one time. I did two things. I bought myself a gold electric guitar from a music shop on Parramatta Road and then three tickets for me, my big sister Anne and a housemate, Irene, to Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni at the Sydney Opera House.

Both my grandparents on my mother’s side sang Italian opera. Ercole and Nance Filippini. They didn’t just sing it; they produced it. During the 1920s and ’30s, they toured opera around Australia on a shoestring budget, long before the days of government subsidies. They travelled by train up the Queensland coast, through towns where many migrant Italians worked, cutting cane in fierce heat to put sugar in everybody’s tea and cake. No orchestra. Just one piano player, two violins, a handful of singers and a volunteer chorus. Their dreams were grand but their income stream less so. Still, they scraped by. Money too tight to mention. Tighter, even, when Ercole died from ulcer complications in 1934.

So, I’d grown up with opera in the air. Though I was a sports-mad child – cricket, football, tennis, swimming – somehow that music poured into me like milk.

I was proud and excited to be shouting Anne and Irene to the opera. Anne had been but Irene never had, nor I.

We took our seats. The lights dimmed. The overture began with those two big, long chords of doom. Instantly, I was electrified and, if memory serves me well, which it doesn’t always, for the next three hours I didn’t leave the edge of my seat.

Leporello is the first character we see on stage and the first voice we hear. Don Giovanni’s conflicted and put-upon servant, his enabler and moral critic. It’s a role my grandfather, a baritone, would have played. Leporello getting into scrapes through trying to help his master out of scrapes is a constant theme of the story.

I won’t try to describe the plot. In time-honoured opera tradition, it is convoluted and ridiculous. Throughout, Don tries to seduce every woman he meets, highborn and low, in streets, mansions and ­gardens. None of them are too wise. He has no redeeming qualities. But he can sing. That night, just as the Don’s thrilling, seductive tenor melted all resistance, so too did Mozart’s music flood my whole being. I’d heard the music before – much of it had a deep familiarity – but to see the characters in the flesh, their voices intertwining, was a whole different experience.

For the first time I really saw and heard the genius of opera, and in particular, Mozart. Tawdry to glory. The tenors, the sopranos, the baritone, the bass. Joining up, flying off, joining back. Again, the roof blew off my head. Then, when the ghost of the Commendatore ­appeared right near the end singing “Don Giovanni!” in a voice of deep doom, I swear my body left the chair. “Repent!” commanded the Commendatore. But Don, like Shakespeare’s Richard III, who also delighted in his wickedness, cunning and power, was not for ­turning. Defiantly he consigned himself to the flames. I didn’t want to leave the theatre as the lights came up. I wanted to stay in the spell with the Don in the fiery furnace. “Bravo to him!” I exclaimed to Anne and Irene as we slowly left our seats. “He stayed true to his ­terrible self. You have to admire that.”

Anne still teases me to this day. “I’ll never forget the expression on your face at the end of Don Giovanni,” she says. “Your eyes were blazing! You loved him, didn’t you?” True, I did. True, I do. That’s what opera can do to you.

Frances Rings, artistic director, Bangarra Dance Theatre

Peta Strachan, Frances Rings and Elma Kris in Bangarra Dance Theatre’s Skin, in the Drama Theatre, 2000.Credit: Michael Rayner, courtesy of Bangarra Dance Theatre.

It felt like a cultural renaissance, particularly in Sydney, when the Olympics came around in the year 2000. Hundreds of Indigenous people from around Australia travelled to town for the opening cere­mony. There was definitely a buzz. It felt like a ­snapshot in time: this is Indigenous Australia right now. These are the stories that are changing perceptions of who we are.

At Bangarra Dance Theatre, we’d been travelling the world but we could feel the momentum at home, too. With that came the fearless vision that Stephen Page had for the company and the work we were doing at the time. We performed at the opening ­ceremony and then we watched Cathy Freeman as she lit the cauldron, all these images being beamed across the world. And then we went straight from the Olympic Games – showing our art, our culture, our stories, our ancestry – to the Sydney Opera House to share our contemporary experience.

We were presenting a work called Skin, choreographed by Stephen Page as part of the Olympic Arts Festival. There was a women’s section, Shelter, and a men’s section, Spear. I was a dancer on stage, performing in the women’s section, and the part I remember is what happened after the dancing had stopped.

Archie Roach was appearing with us as a guest, along with other artists like Wayne Blair, who had just graduated from college. David Page did the score, Stephen Page did the choreography and Russell Page was performing. It was bliss to have the magic of those creatives in this space. At the end, as part of our curtain call, Archie sang Took the Children Away. That song is an anthem for a reason. When Bangarra tells a story, we evoke a timeless space, a past and a present. You carry other people’s stories, but that song is your own story, the story of your own grandmother, your own grandfather, a government policy that affected every Indigenous person in Australia. It was very emotional, a powerful and symbolically strong moment.

Normally we just come out and do our bows. We’re exhausted, so we go off and do our thing, but this ­moment was sacred. It gave us the opportunity to sit together in this space while Archie sang his anthem. For me, as a young Indigenous woman, part of a company that travelled the world, it was so good to be able to slow down and have that moment on stage with my peers, and just remember.

Wendy Martin, arts producer

Wendy Martin with her father Lloyd, the Opera House’s general manager for 19 years.

I grew up with the Opera House. The first time I went there, the builders were still on site, and I remember my father showing me John Olsen’s mural, Salute to Slessor’s 5 Bells. I was there for the opening in 1973. My parents were part of the formal party, among the dignitaries, and, as an 11-year-old, I watched from the Botanic Garden. It was thrilling to be part of it. Before he joined the Opera House, my father, Lloyd Martin, ran the Tivoli circuit; he became managing director at only 24, after his own father died while in America seeking talent.

I remember the day Dad showed us an advertisement he’d cut out of the paper for a job at the Opera House. And I remember how excited I felt when journalists came to our house to interview him after he was named deputy general manager. The building hadn’t opened yet, but it felt like a big deal. Dad took over as general manager in 1978, succeeding Frank Barnes, and remained in the role for 19 years. In 1997, when he retired, his Opera House season had lasted nearly 25 years.

Dad never missed an opening night. He was notorious for falling asleep in the theatre, once while sitting ­between the Duke and Duchess of Kent. That episode even made it into the papers. One night I was with him in the Concert Hall, watching the French jazz violinist Stéphane Grappelli. I was so moved by the performance that I turned to my father and squeezed his hand to ­acknowledge the wonderful experience we were sharing. His head was leaning back. He was sound asleep.

While the Opera House played a huge role in my early life, I never imagined I would work there myself. But there I was, just before the Sydney Olympics, walking across the Forecourt with a lump in my throat, clutching a job application in my hand. Was it really possible that I could come to work in this extraordinary place every day? When I got the job – I worked as a programmer and producer, later overseeing performance and dance – I always believed it was my responsibility to ensure audiences felt the same sense of magic and ­wonder inside the theatres as I had felt walking across the Forecourt on that perfect Sydney spring day.

At first, I was reticent to acknowledge I was Lloyd Martin’s daughter. Twenty-seven years after it had opened, there were still many staff members, particularly front-of-house, who had been there from the beginning. I was delighted to discover their fondness for Dad. He loved that I was working at the Opera House. We shared stories of the place and the people and we talked about the business. I always felt his sense of delight when he attended an opening night of a production I’d produced or presented.

I left in 2003 and returned two years later. Dad had just found out that his cancer had come back after a decade in remission. He continued going to every Opera House opening night, right to the last months of his life. He died at home, in his bed, on August 11, 2005. From his house in Vaucluse, you could see the Opera House across the harbour. It was always in his eyeline.

Later that day, Opera House management told us how they were going to honour his memory. There’s a Broadway tradition of dimming the marquee lights outside theatres to acknowledge the passing of distinguished artists. They decided to do the same for Dad, a man who was very much a person of the theatre.

It was incredibly moving. At dusk, when the lights came on across Sydney, we watched the Opera House against the sky. Inside, the shows were on, but the sails outside were bathed in darkness. The building was a shadow, an outline, against the night sky. My brother Simon and I wanted to be up close, so we drove to Bennelong Point, stood on the Forecourt and looked up at the sails. Jørn Utzon had told my father that the sails should only ever be lit as if by the moon. Now they were in shadow. Lloyd was a humble man who would never have imagined such a profoundly beautiful gesture in his honour. We stood there in silence and spoke to him.

Barrie Kosky, opera and theatre director

A scene from Sydney Theatre Company’s Tartuffe, by Molière, in the Drama Theatre, 1997.Credit: Tracey Schramm, courtesy of Sydney Theatre Company

Three postcards stick out in my mind. The first was in October 1990. Joan Sutherland’s farewell performance at the Sydney Opera House. She was doing Les Huguenots, that long, large, historical Meyerbeer opera, and the snapshot I have is of Joan Sutherland, in her huge 16th-century costume, leaning against the billiard table in the Green Room, eating a bag of chips with the technicians while they played. I’ve never been able to listen to Joan Sutherland again without thinking of that moment, which was pretty fabulous.

The second postcard comes from August 12, 1995, when I had just received one of the worst responses to an opera production in the history of the Opera House: I was booed on the opening night of Verdi’s Nabucco. It’s very rare for Australian audiences to boo like that. I’m used to it now; I’ve had 35 years of it. But it was new then, and it was something of a badge of honour that I had made a certain section –and it was a section, a lot of the audience loved it – decide to take their revenge in that particular Australian way. (It wasn’t like German booing, which is full throttle.) It was a historic night at the Opera House because it had never happened like that before. Ever. I was terrified and elated and I was in the lift going to the dressing rooms after the show when the Whitlams, Gough and Margaret, appeared in front of me. I didn’t know them at all, and Margaret turned around to me, and I thought, “Oh God, here we go.” And she just went: “Bravo, maestro.” And then Gough said: “I absolutely loved it.” And then proceeded for two minutes as the lift was moving to give me their potted version.

The third postcard was two years later. I did a production of Tartuffe for the Sydney Theatre Company, which had a great cast including David Wenham and Mitchell Butel. From opening night on May 15, 1997, it was ­critically savaged by one of the biggest audiences the STC had ever had at the Opera House. We reinvented Molière’s story to a contemporary Australian Christmas, a hot summer Christmas. There was a ­particularly wild set by Peter Corrigan, there was lip syncing, “Daisy” Wenham did a huge dance with a ­turkey, and there was drag and drugs, the whole thing. It was a raucous, acidic pantomime version.

We’d done previews and we knew the show was working but after three hours of this crazy Aussie Christmas where everything went wrong, we hadn’t got the last two minutes right. I had cast Lola Nixon, a fabulous vaudeville cabaret musical performer who had been in the Tivoli circuit in the 1950s, in the role of the nurse, a character I invented, and she didn’t speak for the whole show. That was the whole joke. She was a bit like Barry Humphries’ Madge. She didn’t speak for three hours, she just watched all the antics, and I thought that maybe Lola needs to say something at the end. And Wayne Harrison, the STC’s artistic director, said, and to this day I’ll always be grateful for this: “Oh, I know the line. Try this out at the preview tonight.”

It was the last line of the show and then there was blackout. So, after three hours, there was an empty stage and Lola turned around to the audience and in the most fabulous Aussie vaudeville voice, she said: “Best f---in’ Christmas I’ve ever had.” To this day, never have I heard an audience roar with laughter at a blackout line like that in the Opera House. It worked and we did it for the rest of the six weeks.

This is an edited extract from Transcendence: 50 Years of Unforgettable Moments at the Sydney Opera House (Thames & Hudson, $60), 60), edited by Ashleigh Wilson, out now.

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