Sara Flower


Sara Elizabeth Flower was a British-born contralto singer who became Australia's first opera star. She began a musical career in London in the 1840s but decamped to Australia late in 1849. In 1852, she appeared in Sydney in the first production in Australia of Bellini's opera Norma.

Origins

Flower was born in Grays, Essex, an English market town on the River Thames and situated on the edge of the Tilbury marshes. In 1821 it had a population of 742, supporting six public houses. Flower's maternal grandfather, Daniel Granger, had the Rising Sun public house. However, close by, overlooking the Thames, the 18th century Belmont Castle exerted considerable influence upon the social and cultural life of the wider region, more specifically, it was the focus of an influential musical circle of metropolitan status.
Sara's father, William Lewis Flower, was recorded in the Essex Directory in 1823 as a draper, grocer, and agent for Phoenix Fire & Life. In 1841, upon the entry of his daughter Sara to the Royal Academy of Music, he could declare that he had 'no occupation', hence, the status of gentleman. His elder brother, Robert Flower, was by 1824 foreman of the local brickworks but had been described in the parish records in 1817 as a yeoman, which suggests an earlier lineage of tenant farmers or small proprietors, and also a drop in social status. With the enclosure movement after the Napoleonic Wars, conditions for this socio-economic group were particularly difficult, which probably explains Robert's change of occupation.
Her mother, Ruth Flower, was the daughter of Grays publican, Daniel Granger. Nothing more is known of her, except for the possibility that she may have been the prototype in Alice Diehl's first published novel Garden of Eden for the mother of a fictional opera singer whose sad fate she prophetically foretells.
Sara was not the only professional singer in the family. Her elder sister, the soprano Elizabeth Flower, also became a public singer, and both sisters had considerable London and regional concert careers in the 1840s, performing, often as a duo, to much acclaim, especially for Sara, with her startling voice. In 1847, Elizabeth married a prominent lawyer, Timms Augustine Sargood and withdrew from public life. However, in the 1860s at their home in London's Bloomsbury district, she and her husband were the hosts of quite an elevated musical circle in which Alice Diehl took part and which she recalled in her two autobiographical works already cited.
These two musical daughters of William Lewis Flower were frequently confused with the two very talented daughters of political writer Benjamin Flower, Sarah Fuller Flower Adams and Eliza Flower, acclaimed as poet and composer respectively. It was a confusion which followed Sara to the grave and beyond. It is not impossible, considering their similar economic, social, and regional backgrounds, that there may indeed have been a blood connection between the two families although none has ever been established.

Education and training

From late October 1841, Flower was trained, or at least, 'finished' at the Royal Academy of Music under Domenico Crivelli, who, via his teacher-father, the singer Gaetano Crivelli, presumably passed on some of the 'secrets' of the 'golden age' of Italian castrati, among which, almost certainly, the exploitation of falsetto, technical skills which probably account for Flower's protean ability to cross the entire range of the operatic singing voice, as in Bellini's Norma, from the dramatic soprano of Norma. through the mezzo of Adalgisa; and, not least, the tenor role of Pollioni. She also performed baritone roles and could delight provincial colonial audiences with her 'remarkable' yodeling songs.

Early career

Flower first came to public notice, however, within the Psalmody Movement of the 1830s and 40s in London when, on 4 November 1839, the Musical World noted that Sara and her sister Elizabeth had both appeared at a lecture given at the Hoxton National School Room in inner North London by Charles Henry Purday, engaged, presumably, in order to demonstrate the argument of Purday's lecture, entitled, 'The Proper Object of Music'. The Movement in Britain was associated with such names as Sarah Ann Glover, John Hullah and John Curwen. It had strong Independent, or Congregationalist non-conformist religious leanings, and a powerful utilitarian sociology. Flower was also believed to be connected with John Hullah's extraordinarily successful singing classes in London's Exeter Hall, and possibly with "Music for the Million", the singing school of Joseph Mainzer as a means of teaching large masses of often illiterate working people to sight-sing from notation sheets. While it was socially rather than musically motivated, and was largely a non-conformist socio-religious project, it had the effect in the long term of revitalizing musical education in the wider sphere, not least, within the established Anglican Church itself.
If the Purday/Hullah connections suggest Flower's links with non-conformism and/or the Psalmody Movement, it might also suggest a pathway to a musical career, consistent with parental anxiety about the snares of a more public profile, as a teacher within the Movement rather than as a professional, let alone operatic, soloist. However a post-1847 Flower family memorial plaque on the walls of the Grays parish church of St Peter and St Paul does not suggest any powerful non-conformist link. Nor does her R.A.M. career under the dictatorial rule of its President, John Fane, Lord Burghersh.

Voice

There follows a selection of 19th-century attempts at describing Flower's voice and vocal affect derived from British and Australian newspaper reports of the period:
Volume; melody; compass; resonance; sonorousness; simplicity; cultivation; powerful; exquisite; flexible; rich; full; distinct; nervous; rare; delicious; sweet; mellow; liquid; welling; gushing; wonderful; expressive; clear; enchanting; perfect; delightful; wonderful; extraordinary; thrilling; electrifying; melancholy; noble; pure; magnificent; splendid; glorious; astonishing; commanding; great; masterly; force of expression; sensation; harmony; charm; liveliness; ease; heart-pathos; depth of feeling; emotional power; tenderness; a host in itself; divine; beyond praise; heaven; a treasure; the great contralto.
When she made her debut in opera in London, 'anonymously', at Drury Lane on 7 January 1843, as an all-but non-singing Felix to Sabilla Novello's Annette in a hybrid Macready production of Rossini's opera La gazza ladra 'little more than a melodrama with a few airs interspersed', at her first musical entry — a phrase of recitative introducing the duet 'Ebben per mia' with Annette:
'her notes were so exceedingly full and rich, her articulation so admirable, rare qualities in an English singer of recitative, that the audience were literally taken by surprise, and uttered loud and continuous applause, which was frequently reiterated as the very superior quality of her voice was exhibited in the course of the duet'.

The reviewer described her voice then as 'a mezzo-soprano of singular volume, with some excellent contralto notes, which she touches with firmness'. She was probably not yet 23 at this time. Unusually though, he went beyond his own critical autonomy to call, not upon an actual description of the voice, but upon the reaction of an audience. It was an audience which cried out spontaneously over a few bars of recitative.
Contemporary London comment associated Flower's voice with that of Marietta Brambilla as possessing a 'contralto voice of delicious voluptuous quality'. Six years later in Australia, Flower's voice was described as being
like one of those boy-voices that one meets with once in one's life and remembers for ever after, so clear, so full, and nervous, and of such volume and compass.

British professional career: 1843–48

SF = Sara Flower
Dates for theatrical roles are for first performances only.