Obituary Mary Sheridan de Bruin: Gregarious mezzo-soprano

The Irish opera singer Mary Sheridan de Bruin, who has died aged 81, had a gorgeous mezzo-soprano voice that caught the attention of the Italian government and later the superstar tenor Luciano Pavarotti .

“There was a beautiful quality to it. Whenever I heard her on the radio, I never needed to be told who it was who was singing – it was a very identifiable voice,” said pianist and accompanist Veronica McSwiney.

Her talent was apparent from an early age. She was born in Naas, Co Kildare, one of four children of Francis Sheridan, a builder, and his wife, Elizabeth. At the age of four she won first place in a singing competition in her primary school. At a feis ceoil in Newbridge, aged 11, she was noticed by someone from Radio Éireann (now RTÉ) when she again took first place in a similar competition. This led to her making her first broadcast the following year as part of a programme called Children at the Microphone.

Teenager

At the Presentation Sisters’ convent school in Kildare as a teenager, she was taught music by Sister Laserian, a well-known musical mentor in the Ireland at the time.

‘Ugly right-wing views? Is this about my ‘Irish Times’ letter?’

---

Mortal Kombat is back, more violent than ever. Is this a bad thing?

---

Jennifer O’Connell: The three little words every woman wants to hear

---

‘After nine years in direct provision I have never stopped living’

---

On leaving school, Sheridan de Bruin began to commute to Dublin for singing classes with another highly-regarded teacher, Oliver O’Brien, whose father, Vincent, had been voice coach to Count John McCormack from the 1920s onwards.

In 1956, aged just 19, Sheridan de Bruin joined the Radio Éireann Singers, with whom she was to stay for 11 years. She enjoyed strong success at national feiseanna ceoil , winning the Contralto Solo Award, the Oratorio Prize and the John McCormack Cup in 1959 and, in 1960, the Handel and Percy Whitehead Memorial Cups.

Scholarship

This brought her to the attention of the Italian government, which awarded her a scholarship to study in Rome, and at Lake Como with the great Italian singing coach Carmen Milis, who had taught Renata Tebaldi, one of opera’s greatest-ever sopranos.

Back in Ireland from 1961, Sheridan de Bruin's career blossomed, and she quickly became one of the most sought-after sopranos for the Dublin Grand Opera Society (DGOS), making her debut in Tannhauser at the Gaiety Theatre the following year, performances followed by leading roles in Turandot and, in 1964, opposite a young Luciano Pavarotti in La Traviata. Such was the impression she made on the great tenor, that, visiting Dublin in the early 1990s, he called in to the Gaiety, where Sheridan de Bruin's daughter, Nicola, was then working in the administration, to inquire after his former colleague.

Three characteristics of her work from the early 1960s onwards – with the Irish National Opera (INO) and the Wexford Festival Opera as well as the DGOS, and in oratorio with Irish choral societies – stand out today: collegiality, versatility and her warm, open-hearted and humorous personality.

‘Wonderful partner’

The pianist Michael Casey, a regular accompanist of Sheridan de Bruin, said this week “she was a joy to work with – some singers want you to follow them with a ‘I’m going to sing now, and you follow me’ attitude” but that Sheridan de Bruin was different. “She was a natural, wonderful partner in music. It wasn’t ‘the singer and the accompanist’, it was a team effort, like having a good dance partner.”

Casey added, in a nod to Sheridan de Bruin’s training under Carmen Milis and its technical excellence, that “she was the best sight reader of music I ever worked with”.

As a performer she could, and did, turn her hand to different kinds of music, including the making of recordings of Irish traditional songs and, most notably, being cast in lead roles in two of the very few full-length operas composed by Irish composers in the 50 years from 1950: James Wilson's Twelfth Night as Viola, and in Archie Potter's The Wedding.

Tony O Dálaigh, one of the first directors of the Irish National Opera from its inception in 1965, writing in this newspaper's Irishman's Diary in 2010, wrote of her performance as Viola that the recording of that performance, at the Wexford Festival in 1969, now in the RTÉ archives, "explains why many consider her the leading soprano of her time".

Linguistically gifted, she famously sang in Czech, at conductor Albert Rosen's insistence, in Dvorak's Rusalka in 1971, in a performance which Rosen, then chief conductor with the RTÉ Symphony Orchestra and a native speaker of the language, described as better than anything he had ever heard from a Czech singer.

Personality

Sheridan de Bruin's third trick, so to speak, was the noticeable warmth of her personality. McSwiney remembers her "very gregarious nature… she always had an opinion on anything, but never held a grudge", adding that she had a great sense of humour. One newspaper review (in the Sunday Press) of the INO's The Marriage of Figaro from 1965, as Susanna, described her gift for comedy as "captivating".

Mary Sheridan de Bruin enjoyed an especially happy marriage to Rinus de Bruin, a Dutch electrical engineer who spent more than 40 years with the Swedish Ericsson group, nearly all of them in Ireland. Married in 1966, their happy union may have contributed to Sheridan de Bruin’s decision not to seek a career abroad, although she did recordings for several European radio stations, including Vatican Radio. She died on January 8th. Her husband survives her, with their daughter Nicola, and her siblings Mina, Concepta and Francis jnr.