This was published 3 years ago
Opinion
Versatile, compelling and magnetic opera singer
By Peter Mccallum
TARYN FIEBIG: 1972 – 2021
She was the golden girl from the west and when she auditioned for Opera Australia’s Young Artist Program, the late Sir Richard Hickox, former artistic director of Opera Australia, said she had the most beautiful voice he had ever heard.
It was that voice, so fine, so clear, so bell-like, coloured and true, that was to bring delight and enchantment to hundreds of thousands. Yet Taryn Fiebig also understood the theatrical stage. She could hold the limelight or yield it, seize the moment or demur, move with spirit and grace yet always conveying humility. It was never about her; it was always about the music.
Opera singer Taryn Fiebig in August, 2019.Credit: Louie Douvis
Colleagues and friends loved her for her sunny disposition, her wit, her “melodious laugh” and her anarchic, whacky sense of humour. As Opera Australia artistic director Lyndon Terracini notes: “In this business it can be pretty bitchy. But you wouldn’t find anyone in the whole industry who would have a bad word to say about Taryn.”
Taryn Fiebig was born in Perth, Western Australia and, at Churchlands Senior High School where she excelled academically and was school captain, her musical and performing gifts initially manifested themselves as a cellist and actor. Lifelong friend Kirsten Matthews, who knew her from kindergarten, describes “Tazzie’s” early devotion to Barbara Streisand, a singer so different from the one Taryn was to become, and recalls being made to sit through countless viewings of the film Yentl.
Taryn initially studied to become a cellist at the University of Western Australia and led the cello section of the Australian Youth Orchestra. That grounding was key to her artistic ethos. As Terracini notes, “Fundamentally she was a musician who became a singer. She had great instincts.”
Taryn Fiebig in Pigmalion in 2017.
After studying in the UK with Emma Kirkby, Jane Manning and Evelyn Tubb on a Churchill Fellowship, Taryn joined the Australian Opera Studio, a performance-based opera school founded by singer Gregory Yurisich in 2002. At that stage she was still unsure whether to pursue the cello or singing until Talya Masel, head of production, persuaded her to apply. Masel had been introduced to her by fellow cellist and boyfriend, later first husband, Iain Grandage, via a striking recording she had made of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.
Initially she was a no-show at the audition until Masel got on the phone and told her in no uncertain terms to get down there, launching the career that almost wasn’t. The cello was not forsaken however. At fundraisers for Opera Australia, Australia Council CEO, Adrian Collette, formerly CEO of Opera Australia, describes how she would accompany herself singing Dowland and early baroque songs. “The place would just melt.” At one fundraiser at Buckingham Palace, she used Prince Charles’ cello because her own was cracked. “He shed a princely tear,” Collette recalls.
In 2004 she won a place in the Young Artist program with Opera Australia singing Susanna’s Act IV aria Deh vieni from The Marriage of Figaro for Hickox, Collette and producer Stuart Maunder. “She just brought it off the page in such a gorgeous way,“ Collette says. “She was one of those artists who invite you over the footlights.”
That aria’s beauty, warmth and grace became emblematic of Fiebig’s own style and she was to go on to sing it in a groundbreaking production under the great Scottish director Sir David McVicar. “Deh vieni is the musical climax of the work,” McVicar notes. “I wanted to put the spotlight on her so I placed her in front of the curtain. Bringing the curtain down behind a singer is very isolating but I knew she could carry it. She was so compelling to watch - a tiny little fairy of a woman. She was so magnetic on the stage, yet she was humble. She wasn’t ego driven in any shape or form. It was all about the music.”
Fiebig joined Opera Australia in 2005 as principal soprano and was to go on to do all three of Mozart’s Da Ponte operas with McVicar (The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni and Cosi fan Tutte), a body of work which she regarded as one of her most important achievements. “I loved coming to Sydney and doing those three productions,” McVicar says.
Taryn Fiebig as Musetta opposite Adrian Tamburini as Alcindoro in Opera Australia’s La Boheme.
“They were all so different and yet we had this fantastic shining thread through them all. Working with her was collaborating with her – a real meeting of minds. I would drive her really hard and she was fine with that – she would say ‘We have to find out about these characters’. She had this fantastic curiosity: she was never satisfied with anything and always wanted to go further and find new things. She thought like an actress and moved like a dancer, and had one of the most lyric soprano voices I have heard.”
As principal soprano she was enormously versatile, singing Zerlina in Don Giovanni, Mabel in The Pirates of Penzance (a part, Matthews notes that she had earlier missed out on at Wesley Downs Primary School), Clorinda in Cenerentola, Servilia in La Clemenza di Tito, Oscar in Un ballo in Maschera and Lisa in La Somnambula. The Wood Bird and Gertrune in Wagner’s Ring Cycle, directed by Neil Armfield, were a new direction entirely, exemplifying her continuous search for new horizons.
Some of her earliest successes were in comic roles, particularly Gilbert and Sullivan. As the plaintiff in Trial by Jury, she had a devastating, Meryl Streep way of removing her sunglasses. In La Boheme, as the meretricious Musetta, she brought out the character’s complexity, outrageous yet yearning for goodness. My Fair Lady, of which she gave over 200 performances, was her biggest success in music theatre and Richard E. Grant, who played Henry Higgins to her Eliza Doolittle, remembers the bond they formed.
“[The] moment I met and worked with Taryn we both acknowledged that we’d be friends for life. Instant connection… Loyal, hilarious, generous and life enhancing. Her loss is incalculable and I count myself very fortunate to have been her friend.”
Tayrn Fiebig with Richard E Grant and her sausage dog Malcolm in Sydney.Credit: Magda Szubanski
Fiebig’s musicianship, intelligence and hard work ethic stood her in good stead in a range of complex contemporary operas. She appeared as Aphrodite in Richard Mills The Love of the Nightingale and won both her Helpmann Awards in modern roles: in 2010 as Lucy Joy in Neil Armfield’s production of Brett Dean’s opera Bliss, based on Peter Carey’s novel, (a role she repeated at the Edinburgh Festival) and as the mother in Brian Howard’s Kafka opera, Metamorphosis, in 2019, after returning from surgery and cancer treatment.
As well as being a natural Mozart singer, her clarity of sound, warmth and stylistic affinity made Baroque opera a particular strength. She performed Belinda in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas for Opera Australia and appeared in Barrie Kosky’s lavishly brilliant staging of Handel’s Saul for the Adelaide Festival. She made her debut with Pinchgut Opera with Cavalli’s L’Ormindo in 2009 produced by Masel.
“She was in equal parts a singing actress and an acting singer,” recalls conductor and Pinchgut artistic director Erin Helyard, with whom she also shared a talent for vocal mimicry. “What made Taryn stand out was her total commitment to the art form. She never gave anything less than complete engagement with all aspects of her music-making: technical surety, expressive nuance and dramatic intent. She would sometimes come into rehearsals straight from chemo and would throw herself into the role and engage with her colleagues with a remarkable energy and drive. She was always driven by the text and her formidable artistry was forged in the blending of her lyrical approach with a meaningful engagement with the words she was singing.” The importance of the text was a principle she also drove home in her teaching.
In December 2017, while in Vienna with her second husband, New Zealand baritone Jud Arthur and his two children, Taryn discovered she had ovarian cancer, forcing her to pull out of productions of La Boheme and The Cunning Little Vixen with West Australian Opera. But she insisted that Arthur continue with Brett Dean’s Hamlet for the Adelaide Festival “because I want to go and see it”.
The experience only redoubled her appetite for hard work. As she described to Jo Litson for Limelight, “I work myself very hard and I’m very hard on myself. It [having cancer] shakes you up, sorts you out. Your get organised and you get organised emotionally, the things you don’t want you address because you don’t want them in your system any more.”
Her return to the stage after this ordeal was impressive and her role as the mother in Metamorphosis revealed new depths of vocal characterisation. During the pandemic in 2020 she paired with Anna Dowsley, Pinchgut opera and Helyard in a hauntingly beautiful film of the madrigals of seventeenth century composer Barbara Strozzi.
As the end drew near, she wrote to friends and colleagues without fear or bitterness. To her ‘enry ‘iggins, Richard E. Grant, she said she was reaching “the pointy end” of her life and that “though short in number, I feel like I’ve lived three people’s lives”.
Those and countless more in the memories of her audience.