Amy Sherwin, the 'Tasmanian nightingale', was Australia's first big international opera singer

By Loretta Lohberger

December 7, 2024

Amy Sherwin. (Photo courtesy Tasmania Times)

Before Nellie Melba captivated international audiences, another Australian soprano rose to international fame.

Lesser known today, Amy Sherwin, who grew up in rural southern Tasmania, was one of the greatest sopranos of her era.

"Most people think Melba was the first [international] Australian [opera singer], but it wasn't so. Amy Sherwin was before Melba," Bel Canto Young Opera artistic director Suzanne Ortuso said.

Ortuso is organising a concert celebrating Sherwin's career, as part of fundraising efforts for a life-sized statue of the singer.

The singers will be performing pieces from the repertoire Sherwin sang during her career.

Ortuso said Sherwin loved performing in "all the classical operas".

"Don Pasquale … was one of her favourites, but she sang in all of them — La Traviata, La Boheme, all the standard operas she loved," she said.

"And she spent a lot of time in Germany singing in German operas, and likewise, in French operas as well … and also in Russia."

Suzanne Ortuso has put together a program of music that Amy Sherwin sang. (ABC News: Loretta Lohberger)

The Tasmanian nightingale

Sherwin was born in 1855 and grew up in the Huon Valley, south of Hobart with her four siblings.

Ortuso said it was Sherwin's mother who noticed her daughter had a talent for singing.

"Her mother would teach her the piano and singing, and it got to the stage where she needed to have some singing lessons."

She started having singing lessons in Hobart — several hours away by horse and cart — when she was about 15 years old.

In 1878, she was invited to join the Pompei and Cagli Italian Opera Company.

"Amy loved singing, and every day she'd go down to the river and sing at the river, hoping somebody would hear her. And eventually, when she was 23, somebody did hear her, and that was the people from the opera company," Ortuso said.

In May of that year, Sherwin made her debut at the Theatre Royal in Hobart as Norina in Donizetti's Don Pasquale.

The Mercury newspaper reported:

"Her conception of her character gained after only a week's study, during which the whole opera has been learnt, is considered faultless; and her rendering of it of great brilliance and refinement."

She performed with the company in Hobart, Victoria and New South Wales, and, later, New Zealand. 

Admiring critics interstate referred to Sherwin as "the Tasmanian Nightingale".

The Ballarat Courier described Sherwin as having "a grand soprano voice of great range and power, and almost perfect purity of tone".

While in New Zealand with the company, Sherwin married Hugo Gorlitz. The couple would go on to have two children, Louis and Jeanette.

'Many successful tours in all parts of the world'

In 1879, Sherwin left the company and sailed with Gorlitz to the United States. She made her debut as Violetta in La Traviata at the Grand Opera House in San Francisco.

She performed in other US cities and then made a name for herself in Europe.

Whenever Sherwin returned to Hobart, she was warmly welcomed home.

After she retired from the stage, Sherwin continued living in London.

In November 1935, the West Australian newspaper reported Sherwin's death:

"She sang in opera at Covent Garden and made many successful tours in all parts of the world, commanding big fees.

"At the end she had no money to pay for the nursing home where she lived her last days," the newspaper reported.

"Attention was called to her plight last year while she was a patient in one of the free wards of Charing Cross Hospital.

"She sang one day as she lay in bed and the doctors and nurses were amazed at the beauty of the voice which years before had enraptured King Edward when Prince of Wales."

A US newspaper, the Rochester Journal, reported her death “at 81, penniless”.

"The singer, who once filled the concert halls of the US with her golden voice and earned as much as 3,000 pounds sterling yearly, died almost forgotten, lonely and penniless. Living in a fine style had depleted her resources and charges of the nursing home where she died had to be paid by charity."

Keeping Sherwin's memory alive

The Amy Sherwin fund was set up earlier this year to give Sherwin "the hometown recognition she deserves".

Sculptor Peter Schipperheyn has been commissioned to make the $200,000 life-sized marble statue of Sherwin.

The fund hopes the sculpture will be placed near Hobart's Theatre Royal.

The concert is part of the fundraising efforts. Singers from Bel Canto Young Opera will be joined by established Tasmanian singers.

A Concert for Amy will be held at the Hobart Town Hall on December 21.

Singers Avalon Teirney and Coco Pavlides will both be representing Amy Sherwin as a child during the concert. 
(ABC News: Loretta Lohberger)

First published at ABC News, December 7, 2024