Bel Canto Young Opera directed by Suzanne Ortuso is staging A Concert for Amy in Hobart on 21 December 2024.
Bel Canto Young Opera directed by Suzanne Ortuso is staging A Concert for Amy in Hobart on 21 December 2024 which will include works sung by Sherwin during her career. “Most people think Melba was the first [international] Australian [opera singer], but it wasn’t so. Amy Sherwin was before Melba,” Bel Canto Young Opera said. The singers will be performing pieces from the repertoire Sherwin sang during her career including the operas, Don Pasquale, La Traviata and La Boheme. The concert is part of fundraising efforts to commission a life-sized statue of Sherwin by sculptor, Peter Schipperheyn which it’s hoped will be installed near the Theatre Royal in Hobart.
Amy Sherwin grew up in in the Huon Valley, south of Hobart. Following early voice lessons with her mother, a piano and voice teacher, In 1878, she was invited to join the Pompei and Cagli Italian Opera Company. In May of that year, Sherwin made her debut at the Theatre Royal in Hobart as Norina in Donizetti’s Don Pasquale. The Mercury newspaper reported:
Her conception of her character gained after only a week’s study, during which the whole opera has been learnt, is considered faultless; and her rendering of it of great brilliance and refinement.
She performed with the company in Hobart, Victoria and New South Wales, and, later, New Zealand. The Ballarat Courier described Sherwin as having “a grand soprano voice of great range and power, and almost perfect purity of tone”. While in New Zealand with the company, Sherwin married Hugo Gorlitz. The couple would go on to have two children, Louis and Jeanette.
In 1879, Sherwin left the company and sailed with Gorlitz to the United States. She made her debut as Violetta in La Traviata at the Grand Opera House in San Francisco. She performed in other US cities and then made a name for herself in Europe. After she retired from the stage, Sherwin continued living in London. In November 1935, the West Australian newspaper reported Sherwin’s death:
She sang in opera at Covent Garden and made many successful tours in all parts of the world, commanding big fees. At the end she had no money to pay for the nursing home where she lived her last days. Attention was called to her plight last year while she was a patient in one of the free wards of Charing Cross Hospital. She sang one day as she lay in bed and the doctors and nurses were amazed at the beauty of the voice which years before had enraptured King Edward when Prince of Wales.
See also: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-12-07/amy-sherwin-the-tasmanian-nightingale/104530262
Images: Amy Sherwin (1855-1935)
