First meeting

“We first met in the 1940s in Sydney, and we were very companionable, but didn’t really know each other all that well. I went to London in 1950 and she came a year later – that’s when it suddenly caught fire. Apart from anything else, we became great friends. We did everything together: we loved to go to the theatre, the ballet, the opera… It just became a part of our life: we spent our whole lives together from that moment on.”

The big break

“That was the Lucia di Lammermoor in Covent Garden in 1959, a gloriously tasteful production – Covent Garden went all out. The conductor Tullio Serafin was a great maestro of bel canto, and director Franco Zeffirelli as a young man was just brilliant. This was also one of
the first roles in Covent Garden that Joan had sung in Italian, which was interesting.

“I was sitting in the audience with my mother-in-law, both very nervous. I think we actually held hands! And it was a very, very moving experience, I can assure you – something not to be forgotten. I don’t remember how long the ovation was exactly, but it seemed to go on forever.

“That production changed things not...