The following is an article written by Henning Viljoen, and taken from Scenaria magazine (August 1986)
FIONNUALA McCARTHY – A PROFILE
Fionnuala McCarthy, Irish by birth, is a young up-and-coming South African singer who is set to be launched on a brilliant operatic career, judging by her magnificent and riveting portrayal of Rosina in The Barber of Seville (Rossini) during the opening season of the new Secunda Theatre.
Born in Newry, Northern Ireland in 1960, she immigrated to South Africa with her parents at the age of ten after residing in Zambia for three years. Coming from a very musical family, she considers herself to be a late starter because she only developed a true interest in music after having started cello lessons at the age of fourteen. Previously, whilst still in Zambia, she took piano lessons, but hated every moment. It was the cello lessons that instilled in her the ambition to become a professional musician. Fionnuala matriculated at the Rosebank Convent before enrolling for a B.Mus. degree at the University of the Witwatersrand (WITS). She feels very fortunate that the late Professor Anton Hartman accepted her as a music student because her standard of playing the cello was not very high and she did not keep up her piano lessons. Although Joyce Barker, who had heard her sing at an Eisteddfod, tried to persuade her to take up singing as a subject she instead decided to concentrate on improving the standard of her cello playing. It was only during her second year, when she had to stand in for an indisposed singer in one of the productions of the Opera School that she realised singing was great fun, and that she would prefer to major in singing. In her third year she changed to singing as a major subject and started singing lessons with Joyce Barker. After obtaining her degree she furthered her studies by enrolling for the Performer’s Diploma in Singing at WITS. This enabled her to gain a lot of experience singing in numerous student productions such as Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro, Serafina in Donizettis’ Il Campanello, Amelia in Menotti’s Amelia Goes to the Ball, and Prince Alexis in Offenbach’s L’ilé de Tulipatan.
Fionnuala’s remarkable talent stole the limelight when she took part in the concert Mimi Presents at Roodepoort in which Weiss Doubell introduced promising young artists to the public. In this concert her rendering of Dido’s Lament from Dido and Aeneas and ‘Non so piu’ from The Marriage of Figaro evoked high acclaim from both the audience and the press.
In 1984 Fionnuala decided to further her studies in London. Unfortunately her application as a student was too late to be accepted. However, James Conrad of NAPAC [Natal Performing Arts Council] came to her rescue after hearing her sing at one of Joyce Barker’s master classes in Durban, where he learned about her predicament. He advised her to go to Germany to Helmut Kretschmar, a former colleague of his who is a singing teacher at the Hochschule für Musik at Detmold. Kretschmar is at present a colleague of Professor Lindenbaum, the teacher of another South African singer, Marita Napier, who also studied there in Detmold.
At the Hochschule, Fionnuala not only created a sensation with the rare and beautiful quality of her voice, but also a controversy as to whether she is a soprano or a mezzo-soprano. Kretschmar, her singing teacher, believes her to be a budding ‘jugendlich-dramatische’ soprano whilst her Lieder coach, Rainer Weber, is convinced that she is a mezzo-soprano. Personally she feels more comfortable in the soprano fach, but she would not mind singing the German ‘hosen-rolle’ such as the Composer in Ariadne auf Naxos, Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro, or Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier.
James Conrad invited Fionnuala back in 1985 to make her professional opera debut as Cherubino in NAPAC’s production of Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, also feauturing Dewet van Rooyen (Figaro), Eugenie Chopin-Couzyn (Susanna), Virginia Oosthuizen (Countess), and Dawie Couzyn (Count). This year he brought her back to sing Rosina in NAPAC’s presentation of Rossini's The Barber of Seville.
PACT [Performing Arts Council of Transvaal] also contracted her to sing Siebel in Gounod’s Faust. Unfortunately this planned production had to be cancelled because too many overseas singers could not see their way clear to honour their contracts, due to the present cultural boycott [against South Africa], and Faust was substituted with Madama Butterfly.
Fionnuala’s immediate future plans are to audition for several agents in Europe with the hope of getting in one of the bigger opera houses in Germany. She would prefer to sing smaller roles at a bigger opera house together with well-known experienced singers, than to be contracted to a small house where one sings almost everything regardless of whether it suits one’s voice or personality. She is very philosophical as to the roles she would like to sing in believing that she will be guided by the further development of her voice, whether it be soprano or mezzo-soprano.
