Over three decades, Merlyn Quaife has performed with every major Australian opera company, enjoyed a busy recital schedule, made significant recordings and become one of Melbourne’s leading vocal pedagogues. Antoinette Halloran, meanwhile, is entering a golden phase in her career, the last five years seeing her emerge as one of the country’s hottest operatic talents: regular principal roles with Opera Australia and a star attraction in productions by Melbourne Opera and Victorian Opera.

Quaife’s big break came in 1979, a Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst scholarship enabling a study year at Munich’s Hochschule für Musik. Chancing upon a noticeboard advertisement, Quaife decided it was time to take a risk, “For four years before the scholarship, I was teaching in a secondary school, having lessons once a week. I was imagining I’d go overseas and have a career there. Another part of me dreamt of being one of the best singers in Australia”. At that time, operatic study in Germany was an uncommon aspiration. “I didn’t want to go to London or America like a lot of people. I wanted to learn the German language, and to push myself properly out of my comfort zone”.

Once there, Quaife discovered just how serendipitous her choice had been. “It gave me the shot in the arm to say ‘I’m going to quit being a school teacher’, the courage to say ‘I’m going to give singing a go’. I lucked in with the right teacher at the right time and it helped catapult me to the next level. It was about getting my technique consolidated and just thinking about being a singer. But the biggest luxury was that I was paid as much as money to study as I was earning as a schoolteacher. For six months it was weird and then I got used to it and really flourished.”

As European career opportunities emerged, Quaife reflected on her future. “My time in Munich left me with an option. I’d done some auditions and could have stuck around and done more. But looking at what I saw around me I thought, ‘some of the musical values I see happening back in Australia are as good as anything happening here’. Not perhaps in the top houses but in the kind of houses I would’ve been singing in to begin with. Until you go over there and experience it, you don’t realise that there’s a lot of bad stuff going on as well as a lot of good stuff. I think because of the tyranny of distance, we do have a perception that it all must be better. The early 1980s was actually a real heyday Australia – there was money around and lots of opportunities. I decided I would prefer to have a go seeing what I could do back here”.

“I also chose to come back to Australia because it allowed me to have more variety in my career. In Germany, you already had to be famous as an opera singer to be able to sing concerts. My basic, innate nature is that I need variety, I need that cross-pollination of concert work, opera, modern, early: the full gamut”.

Quaife returned home with vocational clarity. “The first decision I made was to stop doing competitions, to be a professional. That was an attitude change. Technically, I could have done the Sun Aria again, because I hadn’t won it. But I told myself, ‘No, you’ve decided to be professional, be professional’. I did auditions, and started getting gigs”.

Halloran’s breakthrough came in 2004, when she won the Acclaim Awards’ Australian Puccini Foundation Award. This enabled her to travel to Italy and perform in the annual Puccini Festival at Torre del Lago – metres away from Puccini’s onetime home. She had been waiting several years for such an opportunity. “I went back to Melbourne University for Honours after finishing at VCA, because my voice wasn’t quite ready for the opera companies. I studied with Merlyn Quaife, consolidating technique. After that I was ready for understudies and smaller roles, but it was a waiting game.”

The Puccini Foundation Award provided the needed impetus. “The turning point was winning the Acclaim prize, going to Italy, and being recognised as a voice that sings Puccini. Before that I’d had an eclectic background, filling in time doing music theatre and straight theatre. I was pigeon-holed as a musical theatre actress trying to sing opera. Singing in Italy alongside leading Puccini singers, I made my name as a legitimate Puccini singer”.

Halloran’s time in Italy altered her perceptions. “Initially, I thought I might have to apologise for being a little girl from the backwater of Australia. But at Torre del Lago I was one of the voices people were noticing. Principals from Rome Opera were saying ‘Why aren’t you singing at our company?’. That was empowering. It was amazing to work in an A-house European theatre but I saw that it was no more professional than Opera Australia. I think we have a little cultural cringe here: we think overseas opera houses must be so much better. And there’s this feeling that if you have international experience you’re somehow ‘a better singer’”.

Returning home, Halloran found her Italian experience had opened doors. “The opera companies noticed me and my break arrived – I was still in Italy when I got the first email offering a major role. Since then it’s been a steady slog: role after role and lots of understudying”. I ask her who most assisted in that process and receive the cheeky, quick-as-lightning response, “The opera singers I was covering who got sick!”.

Having found success, how would Quaife and Halloran characterise the challenges and opportunities facing aspiring singers and opera’s general health in this state?

Halloran is upbeat, “I think the singers are here, the resources are here, and the schools are here as long as they don’t mess around too much with VCA”.

Head of Voice at Melbourne University’s Faculty of Music from 1995 to 2007, Quaife cautiously agrees, “I think the teaching offered is of a very high standard and the potential for the industry in Victoria is incredibly exciting, if people can get the new developments right” by providing “calibre teaching and variety of experience”; here referring to Victorian Opera and the postgraduate opera courses the University of Melbourne plans to offer in coming years.Nevertheless, both acknowledge the need for improvement. Halloran believes training is not at issue, “The training’s there – it’s the opportunities afterwards.

Amazing friends who’ve done young artists programs have just six weeks work next year. Performing opportunities don’t provide enough work for our skilled singers.

The companies are doing all they can, and they’re providing some full-time work, but we need bigger audiences to warrant more performances. If the football crowd came to the opera, there’d be more work for everyone!”.

Quaife believes training also needs attention, to better shape expectations and reate pre-graduation performance opportunities for young singers. “When I went through university, there was a small group of voice students and you had to be self-motivated. These days, people go through courses designed to train them, vocationally, as singers. They come out at the end thinking, ‘I’m ready. I’m owed something’, and that’s not quite the way it works.”

“There also tends to be a one-sided push towards opera, forgetting oratorio, concert work, and recitals. Not enough is done to make young students aware of the varied opportunities that are available.”

“There’s exciting talent coming through. But we have few people with track records, to be guides and mentors – we have a talent shortage in the middle-aged racket. We need more hands-on mentoring, senior artists put alongside young artists: put a young tennis player with a better player, they lift their game.”

“And we’re lacking a full-time opera company. Seriously, if we’re going to expect people to have a vocation in this country we’ve got to have jobs for them. The Victorian Opera, for example, could become a full-time company instead of a very part-time company. Richard Gill does an amazing job trying to spread things

around, but that can only go on for so long. It would be wonderful to have a company that could truly grow. That would probably involve encouraging Opera Australia to become Sydney-centric and a local company upping the ante to take over all activities that Opera Australia currently does down here, including employing a full-time chorus. Whether we have the audience to sustain it, who knows. But I’d like to see it happen. The funding level would have to be huge and the biggest issue is the need for a home. Ideally, you’d do what they do in Germany: the opera company actually owns the opera house. Then you could base a proper training school there, alongside the opera company, feeding the opera company, and providing a post-tertiary structure and career path”.

“I think there’s a responsibility to encourage our best talent, and that means don’t let them starve. Too many talented people end up becoming disgruntled and jaded because they’re fighting all the time to pay rent and feed themselves. It’s not easy”.

Quaife’s message for young singers aspiring to a career in opera? “They need to now it’s the most wonderful and rewarding career. You have to be firm and strong enough to take rejection. Have faith in yourself but always make sure that you’re doing the best job you possibly can. Then, all things being equal, if you’re meant to do it, it will work out”. Halloran adds a final thought, “You can’t expect to go onstage once and have a company sit back saying ‘This girl’s amazing’. You just have to keep going, keep slogging at it”.

Dr Eamonn Kelly is the Melbourne Music Critic for The Australian Newspaper