Early this year I booked tickets for a concert featuring Deborah Cheetham. I knew that Cheetham was an Indigenous soprano, composer and educator and recognised her photo on the flyer advertising the event, even though I had never seen her perform live on stage.
The program for the concert, 'Til the Black Lady Sings', included works by Vaughan Williams, Puccini, Dvorak, Richard Strauss, Lehar and Gershwin, as well as an aria from Cheetham's opera, Pecan Summer. I noted, in passing, that it was the opening event of the 2014 Melbourne Indigenous Arts Festival.
The evening turned out to be a unique, personal journey, portrayed through music by Cheetham of her life to date. She began by recalling her first memories of hearing, as a three-year-old, her adoptive mother singing a hymn in a Baptist church. There was a haunting quality of times past when Cheetham sang some of the verses.
Twelve years later in 1979 she heard Dame Joan Sutherland in The Merry Widow at the Sydney Opera House and was swept away, not only by the magnificence of Sutherland's voice but also by a dream of singing opera. It was only later, however, that this seemingly unreachable goal became grounded in the realm of possibility when she saw Afro-American soprano, Leona Mitchell, singing Tosca. Mitchell became the role model Cheetham clung to from that point when she realised that being black was no barrier to singing any number of roles.
This awakening was still evident in Cheetham's splendid rendition of Tosca's 'Vissi d'Arte', and the audience was aware of the perfection she achieved. But just when it seemed nothing could surpass the height of emotion in this work, the next aria she sang, 'Senza Mamma' from Puccini's Suor Angelica, did just that.
The aria describes Angelica's grief when she learns that the child she was forced to give up as a young unmarried woman has died. It was Cheetham's first performance of this heart-wrenching work and she dedicated it to both of her mothers — her birth mother, Monica, and her adoptive mother, Marjorie. Cheetham is a member of the Stolen Generations, taken from her mother when she was three weeks old by the Salvation Army. Her adoptive mother was unaware of this, believing that the baby she chose had been abandoned.
The tragic nature of this story was a stark reminder of a shameful period in Australian history, justified at the time by the