Joan Cross

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Joan Cross as Elizabeth in Britten's Gloriana. The portrait by Joanna Dunham was a gift to the Britten-Pears Foundation.

Joan Cross (September 7, 1900 in London-December 12, 1993), was a British soprano, closely associated with the operas of Benjamin Britten.

She attended St Paul's Girls' School where her music teacher was Gustav Holst. She studied singing at Trinity College of Music, and in 1923 joined the chorus of the Vic-Wells opera company at the Old Vic, later taking on a wide range of solo soprano roles for the Sadler's Wells company and a few at the Royal Opera House, including Mimi in La Bohème and Desdemona (to Lauritz Melchior’s Otello in 1934). In this period she was also a noted Marschallin, Sieglinde and Brunnhild, Elisabeth, Elsa, Madame Butterfly, Aida, Donna Anna and Tatiana.

During the Second World War Joan Cross undertook the direction of Sadler’s Wells Opera Company, which was forced to become a touring company as its theatre was requisitioned by the government. The theatre reopened on 7 June 1945 with the première of Britten’s Peter Grimes in which Joan Cross created the role of Ellen Orford.

The other Britten roles she created were:

Female Chorus in The Rape of Lucretia (Glyndebourne 1946)
Lady Billows in Albert Herring (Glyndebourne 1947)
Elizabeth I in Gloriana (Covent Garden 1953)
Mrs Grose in The Turn of the Screw (La Fenice, Venice 1954)

In the series of Decca recordings of his operas Britten conducted, Joan Cross appeared only in the 1955 mono recording of The Turn of the Screw, the other operas being recorded after her retirement from singing (Peter Grimes in 1958, Albert Herring in 1964 and The Rape of Lucretia in 1970; Gloriana was not commercially recorded until 1992, when Cross was 92). However, archival recordings of her Ellen Orford and Female Chorus became available in the 1990s.

Because of rifts within the Sadler’s Wells Company, Joan Cross left to become a founding member of the English Opera Group in 1946/7. She sang comparatively little in the post-war years and retired from singing in 1955.

Joan Cross began directing opera in 1946 with Der Rosenkavalier at Covent Garden and in 1950 she staged La Traviata for Sadler’s Wells. In addition to directing in London she also worked abroad, primarily in the Netherlands and with the Norwegian National Opera.

She founded the Opera School (later the National School of Opera, then London Opera Centre) with Anne Wood in 1948.

Joan Cross died in Aldeburgh on 12 December 1993, and is buried in Saint Peter & Saint Paul's churchyard, Aldeburgh, where her associates Britten, Peter Pears and Imogen Holst are also buried.