On May 30, 1977, the Royal Opera House staged a gala evening to mark the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. Garlands of flowers were strung on gilded balconies, beefeaters lined the stairwell and world-leading opera singers and ballet dancers, including Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn, performed in front of Her Majesty. The event was broadcast live to an international audience estimated at 50 million.
For just a moment, Elizabeth II was upstaged as a stately Queen Dido, played by Josephine Veasey, paraded down the aisle to the chorus of “Hail to the Queen”, followed by four adoring trainbearers.
The programme opened with a soaring hymn of greeting from Hector Berlioz’s opera, Les Troyens. Veasey may have been only 5ft 1in, but with her luminous features and full figure she cut a commanding Dido. Her kohl-rimmed eyes and cropped dark hair, piled into a gem-studded headpiece, gave Dido a beguiling quality, and the emotional weight of her warm mezzo-soprano captured the tragic queen’s dual ferocity and tenderness. According to a New York Times review of an earlier performance in the role: “She turns into the most fearsome of wronged women, then makes another effective switch into the sadness and resignation of her death scene.”
Veasey was, by this point, a titan of the opera world. She was one of the postwar Royal Opera’s reigning Carmens, with Jon Vickers as her Don José, and was a frontline member of the Covent Garden company, where her versatility made her indispensable to successive directors.
She had proclaimed Georg Solti her “musical father”; as music director of Covent Garden from 1961 he was quick to recognise Veasey’s potential. “He was absolutely magnificent for me,” she recalled. “He inspired me to work.”
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Solti cast her in her first Verdi role, Preziosilla, in a much-criticised production of La Forza del Destino. She followed up with appearances as Amneris, Iphigenia (in Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride), Dido, Eboli and Herodias. Solti pushed Veasey to tackle roles she thought beyond her remit, such as the weightier Wagnerian parts of Brang, Waltraute and, most notably, Fricka.
In 1968 she made her debut as Fricka at Salzburg in the operas Das Rheingold and Die Walküre under the directorship of Herbert von Karajan. She disliked working with him. When she was suddenly dropped from the role of Fricka after suggesting they retake some scenes, she told von Karajan she would never work with him again. “I’d rather scrub floors,” she said defiantly.
Colin Davis was another conductor bewitched by her talent. It was he who introduced Veasey to the beauty of Berlioz. Her performance as Queen Dido in Les Troyens, which he conducted, proved indispensable to her career. It led to a much-circulated recording of Dido for Philips in 1969, an invitation to sing the role at the Opéra National de Paris in November 1969 and, finally, in front of the Queen.
Josephine Veasey was born in 1930 in Camberwell, south London, to Ivy (née Dunn) and Frank Veasey, who made scientific instruments. She and her elder sister Doreen were evacuated to Crawley Down in Sussex during the war and after school she took a job at the Civil Service Clerical Association in East Grinstead. Her parents encouraged her to learn the piano and while Veasey was working for the civil service her talent was spotted by Audrey Langford, the Covent Garden singer, who insisted that she take lessons after hearing the power of her voice.
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In 1949, still a teenager, Veasey was signed up for the Covent Garden chorus by Karl Rankl, the company’s musical director. Rankl always took justifiable pride in the number of singers who, like Veasey, achieved the rare feat of emerging from his choristers’ ranks to make careers as principals.
The young mezzo’s rise was by no means meteoric. She joined Opera for All, a touring company subsidised by the Arts Council, but was deemed too young for leading roles. After a year, however, she was invited to join the Covent Garden company as a soloist. Her first part was as the Shepherd Boy in Wagner’s Tannhäuser in 1955, the same year she was offered a full-time contract, where she had the luck to come under the experienced batons of Rudolf Kempe and Reginald Goodall.
Her first big role, Cherubino in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, was a success but not a sensation, and she always regarded it as her proper debut. Although Veasey admitted feeling frustrated at not being offered bigger parts sooner, she was later thankful that she was not pressured into roles that would have strained her voice too early.
Much to the dismay of her agent, Veasey married Ande (Alan) Anderson, a stage manager at Covent Garden, in 1951. Two children, Nick and Charlotte, survive her. The decision to marry and have a family reinforced her distaste for incessant travel and a marked preference for working near home. She and Anderson divorced in 1969.
In the 1960s Veasey’s growing reputation opened the doors to her of the most important opera houses and she was heard at Vienna, Cologne, Hamburg, Berlin, Munich and Los Angeles among others.
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After some 20 years at the top, she unexpectedly announced her retirement in 1982 after performing as Herodias in Salome.
Retirement was “the easiest struggle of my life” after working with a succession of directors she felt were inferior to the masters who had accompanied her golden years. She had also tired of the “lonely life” of going from one hotel room to another.
After the curtain fell for the last time, she was, from 1985 to 1994, vocal consultant to the English National Opera and a sought-after teacher, both privately and at the Royal Academy of Music. As such, she helped to shape a generation of British opera singers. One former pupil, Felicity Palmer, now a world-renowned mezzo-soprano, recalled her soothing words: “Singing is really simple, dear.” Veasey was appointed CBE in 1970.
For all her on-stage bravado, Veasey was surprisingly timid. “I don’t have the kind of pushing personality that is always asking for new parts,” she once said. “I suppose I’m very English in accepting what comes along.” So many would transpire at Covent Garden alone — 780 performances and 60 roles in total — that she came to regard it as “her” house.
Josephine Veasey, CBE, mezzo-soprano, was born on July 10, 1930. She died on February 22, 2022, aged 91