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Colin Cantwell
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Glyndebourne, alongside Elisabeth
Soderstrom, Margaret Price and Kiri Te
Kanawa in the soprano role of her sister
Fiordiligi.iri, etc)
In the end, she sang Cosi so often that
she had mixed feelings. “It’s wonderful
music, but there comes a time when
you just think you’d love to sing some-
thing else because the beauty begins to
be lost on you from sheer boredom,” she
complained.
She was delighted when for a change
the Royal Opera cast her as the sisters’
cunning servant, Despina, a perform-
ance that The Sunday Times hailed as
“the most hilarious, rudest, naughtiest
ladies’ maid” ever seen at Covent Gar-
den. Other Mozartian roles included
Zerlina in Don Giovanni and the page
boy Cherubino in Le nozze di Figaro.
Her down-to-earth attitude was
much admired. The critic Norman Le-
brecht, whose praise is hard-earned,
called her “one of the most agreeable
and unfussy personalities on the world
stage”. Once at an opera gala in Brus-
sels, the wife of the Belgian prime min-
ister admired her evening dress and
asked if it was Balenciaga. “No,” she
replied. “Pauline from Cockfosters.”
Among her biggest fans was Clive
James, who knew her for 40 years and
was smitten by more than her voice. Re-
viewing her performance in Der Rosen-
kavalier, he wrote: “The role of Octavi-
an was majestically incarnated by the
stunning British mezzo Anne Howells,
“It would not be too rash to predict a
useful career,” a buttoned-up opera
critic wrote of Anne Howells’s debut at
Glyndebourne in her first leading role.
She had spent three seasons in the
chorus at the opera house when in 1967,
as the summer season was about to
commence, one of the principals in
Cavalli’s L’Ormindo dropped out.
The production was an important
one for the house, the first performance
of the opera in more than three centu-
ries. It was an even bigger occasion for
Howells, who with only two weeks to go
until first night stepped in to play the
part of Erisbe, the Queen of Morocco.
She went on to sing the role more
than 30 times over the next two years,
launching a career that was far more
than “useful” and led to her being ac-
claimed as one of the most naturalistic
actors on the operatic stage.
“I suppose I’m more theatrical than
most opera singers. I’m not a singer’s
singer. I’m an actor’s singer,” she said.
The Sunday Times opera critic Hugh
Canning put it even more forcefully. “If
she were an actress she would be pack-
ing out the West End,” he wrote in 1995.
She almost got the chance when
Cameron Mackintosh invited her to
replace Patricia Routledge in the West
End production of Rodgers and Ham-
merstein’s Carousel. Her agent laughed
at the idea and she had to refuse
because she was contracted elsewhere,
but she regretted the missed opportuni-
ty. “I would have loved to do it,” she said
and added that her ambition was to play
Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard.
Sadly that opportunity never came,
either. Instead she cut an elegant dash
through the operas of Mozart, Rossini
and Offenbach as well as singing more
contemporary fare. She starred in the
world premieres of Mark-Anthony
Turnage’s The Silver Tassie, Sir Richard
Rodney Bennett’s Victory and Sir
Harrison Birtwistle’s Gawain.
All that held her back was the limited
mainstream repertoire for her vocal
range as a mezzo-soprano. “I can un-
derstand why a lot of mezzos have a go
at soprano roles because we don’t have
all that much, really,” she said.
However, she made the most of every
opportunity that came her way. One
morning her agent phoned to ask if she
was free to take the part of Octavian in
a dress rehearsal for Strauss’s Der Ro-
senkavalier at Covent Garden because
the mezzo singing the role was sick.
“You don’t have to go on stage, just read
it from the score in the wings,” she was
told.
“Like hell I will!” she told her husband
as she put down the phone. She took the
stage at the rehearsal and made such an
impression on the conductor, Sir Georg
Solti, that he asked her to sing the role
in his forthcoming recording of the op-
era.
Alongside Octavian, which became
her favourite role, she was closely asso-
ciated with Dorabella in Mozart’s Cosi
fan tutte, which she sang at the Metro-
politan Opera, Covent Garden and
Advised that no singer
revealed their age, she
knocked off five years
Howells with Luigi Alva in a 1969 production of The Barber of Seville at Covent Garden; right, in Strauss’s Capriccio at the
Royal Opera House, 1990; below, with the tenor George Shirley in 1973 during their run in Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande
Howells’s mar-
riages to the ten-
or Ryland Davies
between 1966 and
1981 and the oper-
atic bass Stafford
Dean between
1981 and 1988 end-
ed in divorce. Her
third husband Pe-
ter Fyson died in
- She is sur-
vived by two child-
ren from her
second marriage:
Matthew, an NHS
executive; and
Laura, who works
in public relations.
Anne Elizabeth Howells was born in
1941 in Southport, Lancashire, the
daughter of Mona (née Hewart) and
Trevor Howells. Much of her early
childhood was spent in South Africa,
where her father took a job as an
engineer.
The family returned to Britain when
she was ten and settled in Sale, Chesh-
ire. She failed her 11-plus and went to
the local secondary modern until she
transferred at 15 to Sale Grammar to sit
her O-levels.
At 13 she bought a violin from a school
friend but within weeks her father had
made her give it back because he
couldn’t stand the noise. She took up
singing lessons instead. She enrolled at
the Royal Manchester College of Music
after the principal, Frederic Cox, had in-
spired her with a talk at a school careers
convention. Her sister Susan Griffiths
also studied at the college.
She was taught by Vera Rozsa, whose
other students included Te Kanawa
and Anne Sofie von Otter and who was
due to coach the planned comeback of
Maria Callas at the time of the singer’s
death in 1977.
Rozsa told her that no singer revealed
their age, so she knocked five years off
which subsequently got her into troub-
le with Equity. “I got two cards and was
two different people. That’s the kind of
thing that sends people scurrying to see
which is accurate. But I will not say
which,” she said.
She eventually owned up to her real
age and made herself a promise that she
would leave the stage gracefully once
the years started to tell on her voice. “I
don’t want to drift into the sunset play-
ing the woman who comes on and sings
‘Milady, the Count is without’ and then
buggers off again,” she said. “I’ll give up
before that ever happens.”
True to her word, in 2000 she be-
came a professor at the Royal Academy
of Music, where she spent many years
tutoring the next generation of singers
in an inimitable style all her own.
Rozanna Madylus, one of her pupils,
recalled learning a song by Bizet, and
Howells telling her: “This must be sung
with the sensuality of having dipped
two fingers in warm scented oil and
slowly traced along the back of your
lover.” At that point the accompanying
pianist almost fell off his stool, uttering
the words: “I’d heard about your lessons
but I didn’t realise they’d be this good.”
Anne Howells, opera singer, was born
on January 12, 1941. She died of bone
marrow cancer on May 18, 2022, aged 81
Obituaries
Anne Howells
Mischievous Lancastrian mezzo-soprano and star of Glyndebourne and Covent Garden who told of an affair with a smitten Clive James
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singing and acting with the finely con-
trolled clarity of emotion that the role
demands but doesn’t always get.”
When a Covent Garden production
of Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia was tele-
vised on BBC2, James’s review virtually
ignored Joan Sutherland in the title role
and enthused instead about her co-star.
“Anne Howells was given
clothes worthy of her cap-
tivating looks. Usually
there is a very Brit-
ish conspiracy to
weigh down this
telegenic mezzo
with a load of
unlovely
schmutter,
thus to offset
the advantages
conferred on
her by nature.
This time she was
allowed to strut dy-
namically about in
highly becoming velvet
pants-suits plus Renais-
sance accessories.”
She paid him back in somewhat
unkind fashion in 2009 with a kiss-and-
tell account of an alleged affair, pub-
lished in The Oldie under the headline
“Clyde and the Diva”. In it she described
how they had met when “Clyde” was a
student at Cambridge and she was
singing with the “Oxbridge Operatic
Society”. Some years later he invited
her for dinner, where after a couple of
bottles of wine he peered over the table
and said: “Be my mistress.”
“Is there a vacancy?” she asked.
When he replied that there was, she
told him, “All right. I’ll give it a go.”
The rest of the article was wickedly
indiscreet. Sex was “accompanied by a
sort of running commentary by
Clyde as if a camera were
mounted on a track
running the length of
the bedroom”. At
one point he told
her: “I’ve been
eating short-
bread so you
can start by
sucking the
crumbs from
between my
teeth.”
When he ended
the affair he told her
that he could “Berlioz
no more”. Roles in both
Benvenuto Cellini and Les
Troyens by the French composer
were a core part of her repertoire.
The story made headlines and initial-
ly James made a half-hearted denial
and claimed that he lived strictly by the
code “look but don’t touch”. Friends
knew better and in 2012 his wife of 44
years threw him out of the family home
in Cambridge when further evidence
emerged of his affairs.
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