Joan Carden

Her parents were Frank Carden (1902–1967) and Margaret Carden née Cooke (1896–1997).

Joan Carden AO OBE (born 9 October 1937 ) is an Australian operatic soprano.

She has been described as "a worthy successor to Dame Nellie Melba and Dame Joan Sutherland" and was sometimes known as "the other Joan" (a reference to Sutherland and Dame Joan Hammond) or "The People's Diva".

She was a Principal Soprano with Opera Australia for 32 years, and was particularly associated with the title roles of Giacomo Puccini's Tosca and Madama Butterfly.

Joan Maralyn Carden was born in Melbourne, an only child, in 1937.

However, she sang over 50 other roles, from the 18th century, including virtually all the Mozart heroines, through to works by contemporary composers.

She attended Lee Street State School, North Carlton, and Ormond State School, Melbourne, and was dux of Prahran Technical Girls' School in 1955.

Her first experience of opera as a child was hearing Mozart's The Magic Flute, and then Richard Strauss's Salome sung by Joan Hammond.

She would later become a friend of Hammond, singing at her funeral in Bowral, and at her memorial concert in Melbourne, and she also received the Dame Joan Hammond Award.

In Melbourne, her first singing teacher was the English-born Wagnerian soprano Thea Phillips when she was seventeen who gave her gentle instruction.

Her teacher was then briefly Henri Portnoj.

She played the Mother Abbess in the Adelaide season of The Sound of Music having begun her stage career as understudy to June Bronhill in 1960, in The Merry Widow.

She was a private student at Trinity College of Music in London and won a Stuyvesant Scholarship tenable at London Opera Centre, 1966/7, where her singing teacher was the West Australian expatriate Vida Harford (1907–1992), with whom she studied for the remainder of her teacher's life.

She won a major prize in the Munich International Music Competition in September 1967, before graduating from the London Opera Centre that year.

She performed in the United Kingdom, and Germany.

She returned to Australia in 1970, joining in 1971 the Australian Opera (now Opera Australia) as a major principal till retiring from that company in 2003.

Her debut with OA was in 1971 as Liù in Puccini's Turandot in 1971, then Marguerite in Gounod's Faust.

In the first season at the Sydney Opera House (1973–74) she sang Pamina in The Magic Flute.

At the Royal Performance in October, she sang Natasha in Prokofiev's War and Peace.

Her career with OA saw her sing such other roles as Tosca and Madama Butterfly many times, as well as Marguérite (Faust), Gilda (Rigoletto), Queen Elizabeth (Maria Stuarda; opposite Deborah Riedel in the title role), Desdemona (Otello), Leonora (Il trovatore and La forza del destino), Violetta (La traviata), Tatiana (Eugene Onegin), Mimi (La bohème), most of the Mozart heroines, including Donna Anna and Elvira (Don Giovanni), the Countess (The Marriage of Figaro), Fiordiligi (Così fan tutte), Vitellia (La clemenza di Tito), plus Richard Strauss's Feldmarschallin (Der Rosenkavalier), Ellen Orford (Peter Grimes), the four heroines performed in English and then French, in The Tales of Hoffmann, Eva (Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg), Alice Ford (Falstaff), Elisabetta (Don Carlos), and the title roles in Lakmé, Alcina, Adriana Lecouvreur and Suor Angelica.

She also sang a concert repertoire including Verdi's Requiem, appearing with Sydney Philharmonia and other ensembles.

Overseas, she sang Gilda (Rigoletto) at Covent Garden in 1974, Donna Anna (Don Giovanni) at the 1977 Glyndebourne Festival (in the production by Sir Peter Hall) and with the Metropolitan Opera in 1978.

Her American debut, however, was as Amenaide with the Houston Grand Opera opposite Marilyn Horne in Rossini's Tancredi.

She also appeared as Constanza (The Abduction from the Seraglio) with Scottish Opera in 1978.

In 1980, she performed with the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. She sang the four soprano roles in English in Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffmann for Opera North in 1981, and reprised these roles with Opera Australia the following year.

and later in French.

In 1982, she sang with Greater Miami Opera as Amelia in Verdi's Simon Boccanegra, with Cornell MacNeil.

Joan Carden also sang with I Solisti Veneti, conducted by Richard Divall, and many Australian state opera companies.

On 26 January 1988 she was given the honour of singing the Australian national anthem Advance Australia Fair to a worldwide audience as part of the celebrations of Australia's Bicentenary.

That same day she also sang in the world premiere of Peter Sculthorpe's Child of Australia at the Opera House, with narrator John Howard and the Sydney Philharmonia Choir and Australian Youth Orchestra under Carlo Felice Cillario.

On 11 April 1991 she was invited to share her reminiscences in an address to the National Press Club in Canberra.

She sang 'Waltzing Matilda' and the national anthem during the worldwide telecast of the 1992 AFL Grand Final.

In 1993 and at an Australia Day charity concert with José Carreras at Covent Garden before Prince Charles.

That year she received an Australian Artists Creative Fellowship.

In 2000 she stepped in at very short notice to sing Tosca in Adelaide for an ailing friend, Deborah Riedel who subsequently died of liver cancer at the age of 50.

The story of wearing her own jewellery is apocryphal.

Her farewell major role with Opera Australia was as Tosca in Sydney in 2002.

After her final performance she was awarded the Opera Australia Trophy at a ceremony at the Opera House.

In March 2003 she was given a reception in her honour by the Governor-General, Major General Michael Jeffery, at Admiralty House, Sydney.

However, she did not stop singing altogether.