Grace Bumbry meets Lennox and Freda in Chelsea

Our loyal member Robin Berkeley, who has known the Lennox Berkeleys for fifty years, recently found in an old family album this charming photograph of Lennox and Freda with the American opera singer Grace Bumbry. The photograph was taken after a dinner party given by Robin and his wife Alice at their home in Tite Street, Chelsea, in the early 1980s.

Although Grace Bumbry began her career as a mezzo-soprano, singing the ‘Black Venus’ in the controversial 1961 Bayreuth production of Tannhäuser, she later decided – like her 19th century predecessors Grisi, Pasta and Malibran - that she was also a high soprano, and by the time this photograph was taken she was at the height of her fame as a dramatic soprano, singing such roles as Salome, Tosca, Eboli, Norma and Turandot. But in 1997 she returned to her mezzo range as Klytemnestra in Strauss’s Elektra in Lyon in 1997, and as recently as January 2013, more than half a century after she began her extraordinary career, she was singing the title role, the gambling Countess, in Tchaikovsky’s Pique Dame at the Vienna State Opera. When Robin spoke to her after the last of her three acclaimed performances, she was ‘full of life and good humour’ and commented that learning the Russian libretto had been a bit of an effort – singing it, apparently, none.

The photographer was no less than Clive Barda, who has been taking memorable portraits of musicians (including Lennox Berkeley), actors and artists for forty years. On this occasion, as old friends of Robin and Alice, Clive and his wife Rozzie were guests, and Clive, with a pocket camera to hand, recorded the occasion as they were all leaving.

Robin Berkeley first met Freda Berkeley at a costumed Opera Ball in London in about 1962, when they were both guests of Lady (Charlotte) Bonham-Carter. The theme of the evening was Elektra, and Robin, who had only recently come down from Cambridge, recalls with wry amusement that his scanty Grecian tunic caught the admiring attention of the director Franco Zeffirelli, who was judging the costumes.

The following year Robin went to tea at 8 Warwick Avenue and met Lennox for the first time. Through these new friends he met Lennox’s great-aunt, Molly, Countess of Berkeley, during her annual autumn stay at Claridge’s in London. In 1965, when he was working for BP in Milan, he went to stay with Molly Berkeley at San Lorenzo, her villa in a former monastery at the peak of Assisi – and on one occasion ‘I had the temerity to try Di Provenza il mar [the baritone aria from Verdi’s La Traviata] in her music room’. Five years later, to celebrate Molly’s 80th birthday, Robin took her to the Royal Opera House to see Il Trovatore – and afterwards he introduced her to the Leonora, Martina Arroyo, and then whisked them both off to a party at Ava Gardner’s flat off Park Lane.

In 1972 Robin married Alice Dodge, and his work with BP took them to Central Africa and Singapore for six years. On leave one year they returned to Europe and Alice was introduced to Molly, coincidentally a compatriot, at lunch in another of Molly’s grand Italian homes, an apartment in the Palazzo Borghese in Rome. They remain in occasional touch with Freda, and, through the Berkeley Society, with Lennox’s music.