The Devonport Flagstaff Page 18
Interview
April 8, 2016
Devonport high note in international soprano’s repertoire After living in Europe and America for 48 years, internationally renowned opera singer Mary O’Brien-Specht returned to Devonport, where she was born and raised. She spoke to Maire Vieth about being a student of Dame Sister Mary Leo, singing for the Vienna Volksoper, touring with Peggy Lee and appearing in My Fair Lady with Rex Harrison on Broadway. After almost five decades travelling the globe as a soprano, Mary O’Brien-Specht returned to Devonport in 2011. She had left in 1963 at the age of 26. But when she was widowed in 2009, she felt the call of her old suburb. She settled in an apartment on Vauxhall Rd, which stands on the piece of land where her grandmother Jessie Franklin once lived. Her parents’ house was only a few steps away on Grove Rd. Now she can’t imagine living anywhere else, not even across the Harbour Bridge. “You’d have to get your passport out,” she says. Mary was born in 1937 at Pentlands maternity hospital on Buchanan Street. She was the youngest of three. Her father, James Lawrence O’Brien, was Devonport’s Deputy Fire Chief and soon the O’Briens moved to a flat next to the Calliope Fire Station. She first heard classical music in her grandmother’s Vauxhall Rd home. “We didn’t have a piano but she had an old Victrola record player and used to play wonderful records of people like Joseph Schmidt and Richard Tauber (both famous Austrian tenors at the time). I loved it and sang away in German, which I didn’t understand at all of course.” After graduating from St Leo’s School in Devonport, she went to St Mary’s College in Ponsonby. Sister Mary Leo became her singing teacher. “That was it! She was a wonderful teacher, became a great friend and a very important person in my life,” Mary says. The nun was originally from Devonport as well. She had grown up as Kathleen Niccol at 159 Victoria Road and had gone to St Leo’s school. Her grandfather Malcom Niccol had been Devonport’s first mayor. Dame Sister Mary Leo, who died in 1989, is today best known for tutoring both Dame Kiri Te Kanawa and Dame Malvina Major. “I’m what’s known as BK - Before Kiri.” she says. Mary started out in the school choir. “I was a soprano but I could do alto too and Sister Leo liked that because she could move me around, which was wonderful because I learned a lot from it,” she says.
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Drawn home to Devonport… Soprano Mary O’Brien-Specht One-on-one singing lessons soon followed. “You would have a lesson that would take about an hour or so. She was often interrupted by other pupils coming in and would tell you to go over in the corner there and breathe,” she says. Mary graduated from St Mary’s in 1954 at the age of 17 and for the next three years continued to study with Sister Mary Leo privately. “I lived at home and had a job down at the Naval base as a gofer. Off I would go to work on my bike at eight in the morning, get off at four and go over on the boat to Auckland, up to St Mary’s and work for the rest of the day there, just really concentrating on singing and learning repertoire,” she says. She also performed regularly in small concerts, often in halls around Devonport. In 1957, Mary got her first big break. She was to share the lead in the Auckland Light Opera Company’s production of La Traviata with Mina Foley, Sister Leo’s first star student who had studied in Rome, Los Angeles and New York and performed at La Scala in Milan. Then Foley became sick and Mary took over the role as Violetta on her own. “I was only 20 years old. I did eight shows at Her Majesty’s Theatre on Queen St in one week. It was a big risk,” she says. But it was the start of things to come. In 1958, Mary won the John Court Memorial Aria competition and a year later the Mobil Song Quest. By 1959, she had joined the New Zealand Opera Company and sang as Rosina in The Barber of Seville, the company’s second full-scale production touring through New Zealand. “I did hundreds of Barber of Sevilles, from North Cape to Bluff,” she says. Lead roles in Don Pasquale,
The Magic Flute and La Boheme followed. In 1958, Mary married New Zealand yachtsman Bernie Skinner. The couple had a son, Paul, but later divorced, and Paul stayed with his father. “Sometimes I think about that. I wanted a career and to go away and Bernie wanted to stay in New Zealand. Another woman might have made a different decision, but it was my decision and I made it. I had to do what I had to do,” she says. Professionally, Mary felt trapped in New Zealand. “During the 1960s, it was very difficult to go where you wanted. You had to go by ship anywhere, even Australia. And it took about six weeks to get to Europe.” In 1963, She moved to Sydney and performed under contract at the Elizabethan Theatre Trust. “I did Micaëla in Carmen, Marguerite in Faust, Fiordiligi in Cosi fan Tutte, and Louise for an opera on TV called Louise.” In 1965, she briefly returned to New Zealand as Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni. The New Zealand Listener ran an article on her entitled “Singer on her way up.” The same year, she headed for Europe. She had only a vague plan. “I wanted to go somewhere where I could become a more rounded personality as a singer, to be able to sing Lieder [German art songs] as well as opera. I was infatuated with a lot of German opera. A colleague who had worked with me in Australia was at the Vienna Volksoper [a major opera house]. I was introduced to an agent there, who got me an audition in Linz. I got the job,” she says. Linz is Austria’s third largest city, just west of Vienna. Mary fell on her feet. She learned to speak