The Fortunate Deception

Singing & Drowning

By Janet Kenny

“I have a song to sing-oh. Boy, do I have a song! I was a young, inadequately prepared singer, fresh from New Zealand and it was the general opinion that I had a rather good voice, which enabled me to hold my own against competition in a foreign climate. I had achieved some small successes and become acquainted with some interesting musicians. The death in 2016 of the great conductor Sir Neville Marriner has caused me to remember my encounter with him. It is at once a sad story and a very funny story. I have preserved my account of events.”—Janet Kenny

POINT VERNON Australia—(Hubris)—March/April 2026—I have a song to sing-oh. Boy, do I have a song! I was a young, inadequately prepared singer, fresh from New Zealand and it was the general opinion that I had a rather good voice, which enabled me to hold my own against competition in a foreign climate. I had achieved some small successes and become acquainted with some interesting musicians.

The death in 2016 of the great conductor Sir Neville Marriner has caused me to remember my encounter with him. It is at once a sad story and a very funny story. I have preserved my account of events.

The experiences surrounding this encounter led to my sad decision to abandon my career as a professional singer. My history of health problems had gladdened several understudies and discouraged employers. I need to say at this point that my voice was badly affected by the English climate. I had lived an outdoor life by the sea in New Zealand and the gritty, polluted air of London, the cold and the damp, plus the stress of the professional performance level, caused continual attacks of bronchitis, worsened by approaching anorexia.

One day, I received a stunning telephone call from a well-known répétiteur with whom I had recently worked. He spoke quickly: “Can you learn an operatic role in one week?” (My agent had told me to never say no to anything like this.)

“Yes,” I said. 

The répétiteur continued: “Lina Lalandi, who runs and finances the Oxford English Bach Festival, has met a charlatan of a singing teacher. He has convinced her that she has a voice. She hasn’t. She has discovered an unperformed Rossini opera score, “L’inganno felice.” It has one female (soprano) role, and all the other roles are male roles. She has engaged the most celebrated singers from La Scala and Sir Neville Marriner to conduct it.  

She must not go on.”  

These great singers can’t possibly be asked to share the stage with such a terrible singer! Neville Marriner agrees with me, and he is in our plot. If necessary, we seriously will abduct her and lock her in a cellar. The reputation of the festival depends upon her not appearing as a singer. We’ll tell her you’re her understudy”.

I was young and inexperienced. The only way that music can be learned quickly (unless one is Rostropovich) is to imprint it on one’s instrument. So, I sang the extremely demanding role for a week until—you’ve guessed it—I lost my voice.

And so I turned up at Lina Lalandi’s Belgravia mansion without a voice.  

Lina was charming. She went out of her way to make my obviously impecunious self feel at home. She told me that she would personally make the costumes for the production. She said she made all her own clothes. I had never been in a Belgravia mansion before. The floors seemed to extend endlessly up and down above and below ground.

Neville Marriner, who was in on the secret, seemed to deprive great enjoyment from the situation. He kept writing dreadful comments with illustrations about Lina Lalandi on pieces of paper which he made into darts and threw at me. I scooped them up as quickly and surreptitiously as I could. I was terrified she would read one of them.

I carried a magic slate and all of the performers (also in on the plot) scribbled funny messages on it. There was Paolo Montarsolo, Pietro Bottazzo and Giorgio Tadeo.

I stayed overnight in the Oxford women’s college Somerville College. I was amused to discover that they served the same disgusting breakfast that my New Zealand women’s college hostel had served.

My voice had almost come back by the time of the performance (in the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford). I sang a few experimental scales, and the other singers said nice things like “bella voce” in relieved tones.

But it was too late for me to step in. I really hadn’t remembered it securely and had never rehearsed the role. The opera had only had one performance at the time it was written. I understood why that was so when I tried to commit its meaningless decorations to memory. I don’t think that Rossini would have minded much if it were never resurrected.

Lina Lalandi went on. She did! 

It is not possible to convincingly describe the awfulness of her performance although a brave critic did try. Screechy, toneless and inaudible will do for a start. There was some nice phrasing; she was an excellent harpsichordist. But nice phrasing is not enough, alas.

A charming German baritone, Peter-Christoph Runge, who was also a friend was sitting beside me in the front row and he boomed as only a well-trained German baritone can: “My God! She is worse than Florence Foster Jenkins!”

Shortly after that event, my husband and I (as the late queen might have said) had our first English holiday in Devon. It was in Appledore by the sea. I was reminded of the life I once lived in New Zealand. “I’m giving up singing,” I said, and I did.

Here is a shortened version of the performance’s review as published in Opera Magazine (written by the great translator William Weaver, most known for his translation of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose):

“L’inganno felice,” Sheldonian Theatre, June 24, 1967

“Once she has made her mind up, Lina Lalandi is not one to be deflected from her chosen path. So it was that we all arrived at the Sheldonian Theatre to hear her make her debut as a singer in Rossini’s early and promising, one-act opera “L’inganno felice” on June 24. From her first entry it was evident that she had been extremely ill-advised—and I mean exactly that—to undertake the short, but nevertheless taxing part of Isabella. As one expected, her singing was neatly phrased and had a fine feeling for “bel canto” line, but the voice itself was hardly adequate, I should say to fill even a drawing room. Even in the reasonably intimate Sheldonian it was constantly drowned either by the other singers or by the orchestra.

If we must, albeit regretfully, condemn her own performance, all praise to her for resuscitating from the history books this musically interesting work that would and should provide a happy companion piece for the same composer’s much-heard “Il Cambiale Matrimonio” . . . . [A friend sent this review and skipped a bit here because it was late, her time.]

Most of the roles were filled by Italians whose names are familiar from Glyndebourne and other even more distinguished houses, and it was a tribute to Miss Lalandi that she had persuaded them to perform in a place quite unsuited to opera.”

Three Poems

To My Mother if She’s Listening
By Janet Kenny

I didn’t want your diamond ring,
bone china or your travel clock.

I didn’t want a single thing
when Dad died.
When I asked who took
the wooden camel with a chain
you said it went to charity.

I knew I never could explain
why that meant most of all to me.

So badly carved yet so alive.
It came from Cairo years ago.
Dad liked it so it did survive
obscurely where it didn’t show.

I tried to say that you meant more
than diamond rings,
but words like that were not your style.
I struggled for les bon mots juste
but they fell flat.

I wanted to say thanks, but froze.
We let the awkward moment close.

Poet’s Afterword: The generational gulf that separates mother and daughter can be particularly painful. The little rough-hewn camel has become symbolic to me of the guilt I feel about my more liberated life and my mother’s sense of abandonment and betrayal. I think it came to a head when I refused her diamond engagement ring. She had worn that ring with pride. Why didn’t I want it?

Articulated
By Janet Kenny

The thought that leapt into my head
when I was told of nuclear war
was: All grasshoppers will be dead.

And then it was as if I saw
their jigsaw, zigzag, tensile limbs
meccano-jointed, ready for

Olympic heights in leafy gyms.
Darwinian prodigies that spring
in arcs as freedom’s metonyms

for absolutely anything
unfettered where the will finds ways
to levitate somehow, to cling

on any apex where its gaze
looks further to more distant peaks.
And so the seeker never stays,

but leaves the stage to one who speaks
for those articulations lost
to grounded military cliques

who hate, and hurl their one riposte.
Annihilation, endless night,
to win the fight, despite the cost.

First published by White Violet Press.

Poet’s Afterword: The despair young people feel now when they realize the reality of climate change is very like the despair I felt, indeed still feel, about nuclear winter. The fragility and interdependence of all living things seems to be of no importance to the masters of war. This thought never left the back of my mind. No matter what I was doing the despair was still there. Also rage at the violation of my own potential. The time I spent confronting the war machine was time I should have spent with music, art and nature.

Damn Bones
By Janet Kenny

“It’s bones that break and let you down,”
they said, “The stiff stuff that supports
your rubber bits. Give up the clown-
act, pratfalls, stunts, the hard-ball sports.
Restrict trapeze-work, diving through
the flaming hoops. If I were you
I’d stop the high-wire tricks, and shun
the roller-derby. Any one
can dance the tango, but avoid
the sudden back-bends. You have won
the global tango-twist. Enjoyed
the thrill of grand jeté, and leapt
tall buildings with a single bound.
Now is the time to stop, except
when safety nets are spread around.
Now that you are one-hundred, try
to stay alive. You must not fly
unaided with a rubber band
and balsa wings. Please understand
you are too friable to risk
sports unreliable and brisk.
A slower pace, a gentler gait
may see you through the final strait.
Give up your surfboard and your bike,
it’s time to paddle, ride a trike.
Less brandy, and less violent sex,
it’s dangerous while wearing specs.
Sit down, shut up, it’s time to watch
the others while you sip your scotch.”

Poet’s Afterword: “Damn Bones” was my way of accepting osteoporosis.