Anne Howells
Glamorous British mezzo with a mischievous twinkle who wrote of a late-life affair with ‘Clyde’
ANNE HOWELLS, who has died aged 81, was a popular British lyric mezzo-soprano and mainstay of both Glyndebourne and Covent Garden during a career that took her to almost every major opera house and concert hall in the world.
Slim, elegant and attractive, she was a stage natural, celebrated as much for her acting gifts as for her voice. In 1969, early on in her career, a Daily Telegraph critic described her as “very much at ease in her music and gifted with a voice of true mezzo-soprano colour”.
Her natural wit and intelligence made her a director’s dream. As she observed: “If you’ve got someone with a wonderful voice who isn’t necessarily terribly bright, the whole thing falls apart because they don’t know what the director’s talking about.”
Anne Howells made two notable debuts while still in her mid-20s: she scored a great success at Glyndebourne as Erisbe in Cavalli’s L’ormindo , then as Violetta’s friend Flora in the Visconti/giulini Traviata
at the Royal Opera House. She went on to sing most of the rather limited mainstream leading roles for the lyric mezzo voice.
She was a “charmingly gauche” Cherubino at Covent Garden, and was an acclaimed Octavian in Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier – her favourite role and one she sang on the Solti/schlesinger DVD.
At various times she was “appealing” as the Composer in Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, an unusually sexy Melisande in Debussy’s Pelleas and Melisande, a “delightful” Poppea, and in “lustrous and richly expressive form” as the Venetian courtesan Giulietta in Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffman.
She took part in many contemporary operas, creating the role of Lena (“at once touching, elegant and vulnerable” according to the Telegraph
critic) in Richard Rodney Bennett’s Victory, based on Joseph Conrad’s novel, for the Royal Opera House; Cathleen in Nicholas Maw’s The Rising of the Moon for Glyndebourne, and Lady Hautdesert in Harrison Birtwistle’s Gawain, again for the Royal Opera House.
The Telegraph critic Michael Kennedy wrote that her presence in supporting roles was “a guarantor of excellence”, and she was particularly noted for her portrayals of Dorabella in Mozart’s Così fan tutte, sister and foil to numerous big-name Fiordiligis, though it was not her favourite role. “There comes a time when you just think you’d love to sing something else because the beauty of the music and the writing begins to be lost on you from sheer boredom,” she once observed.
Both on stage and off she was more of a Despina or Zerlina, susceptible to male charms but always with a twinkle-eyed awareness of masculine foibles – a quality that was apparent in 1967 when she was, wrote a Telegraph critic, “a witty Fenella Fielding of a Beatrice” in Berlioz’s Beatrice and Benedict in a Cambridge University Opera production.
Hugh Canning wrote in The Sunday Times that Anne Howells “tells the best jokes of any opera singer I know, most of them against herself and a lot of them unrepeatable in a family newspaper”.
Her sense of humour informed her 1975 debut in the title role in La Belle Hélène, Offenbach’s satire on Greek mythology, at the Coliseum. There was no mistaking her meaning on her character’s first encounter with Paris, disguised as a shepherd, when she enquired: “How big is your [pause] flock?”
“If you are lucky enough to be born with the sort of voice that has the penetration of a Black & Decker drill,” Anne Howells once observed, “the ‘old bat’ roles await.” It was hardly a fair description of her own voice (she did not, to her regret, have the sort of heavy mezzo that would have suited her for Wagner or Verdi), but she made the best of the “old bat” roles on offer.
In 1989 as Baba the Turk, the “bearded lady” in Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress at Glyndebourne, she gave “a vocal performance that discreetly matched the grotesqueness of her outward appearance”.
When, aged 54, she was invited to reprise her role as La Belle Hélène for Scottish Opera, she asked the producers whether they were thinking Diana Rigg or Nora Batty: “And they said, ‘Well, we rather had Catherine Deneuve in mind.’ Right on target, I thought.”
Nor did she mind singing the mother, Adelaide, in Strauss’s Arabella, explaining in 1995 that she did it for the line in Act II “when one of the young men at the ball says to me, ‘You’re more beautiful than your daughter!’ And I usually am!”
Anne Elizabeth Howells was born on January 12 1941 in Southport, which was then in Lancashire, to Trevor Howells and Mona, née Hewart, and was educated at Sale County Grammar School for girls, where she became a member of the Sale Choral Society, and at the Royal Manchester College of Music, where she studied under Frederick Cox and Vera Rosza.
She began her career in the chorus at Glyndebourne in 1964, before her breakthrough role as Erisbe.
After retiring from the opera and concert stage, Anne Howells was a professor at the Royal Academy of Music from 1997 to 2011.
In later life she found an outlet for her mischievous sense of humour in The Oldie magazine, causing some excitement in 2009 with an article in which she described how in 2005 she had been propositioned by an Australian called “Clyde’’ whom she had first met in the 1960s while she was performing with the “Oxbridge Operatic Society’’ and he was a “duffel-coated student’’.
In 2005 “Clyde”, who had subsequently found fame as a “distinguished writer and critic”, had asked her over to his “pad” in London’s Docklands and invited her to be his mistress.
“Is there a vacancy then?” she claimed to have responded... “All right, I’ll give it a go.”
The singer then went on to describe their affair in excruciating detail, claiming that on one occasion, as she prepared for action wearing a negligée, “Clyde” greeted her with the immortal line: “I’ve been eating shortbread – so you can start by sucking the crumbs out from between my teeth.”
She described how their relationship was already “losing its appeal” when her lover “disclosed that he could Berlioz no more” – after which she had “moved on to a partner whose grasp of Berlioz is remarkable and who does not talk with his mouth full”.
All the circumstantial evidence pointed to “Clyde” being Clive James, though Anne Howells would neither confirm nor deny the suggestion and James claimed to be “absolutely mystified”.
Anne Howells was married to the Welsh operatic tenor Ryland Davies from 1966 to 1981, then to the English bass Stafford Dean from 1981 to 1996.
In the section about her marriages, her Who’s Who entry mysteriously lists “3rd, 1999”, though without giving a name or any other details.
She had a son and a daughter.
Anne Howells, born January 12 1941, died May 18 2022