Lifelong learner's high notes

Judy Bellingham in her office at Marama Hall: "I never cease to thank the Lord for making me a musician". Photo by Craig Baxter.

A fourth-form teacher told her she had no ability in music and should give it up but Judy Bellingham proved her wrong. The Dunedin soprano and singing teacher has recently celebrated 40 years of public performances.

In a career that has taken her around the globe, Bellingham has set a world record, coped with a tonsillectomy that changed her voice, and found innovative ways to attract people to recitals.

But, even now, she recalls the fallout from the words written on a school report by Miss Margaret Hinchcliff.

"At the end of the fourth form, I moved to a new school and on the basis of what she had written, I wasn't allowed to do music for school certificate. So I did no academic music at school whatsoever."

Bellingham, herself a former high school music teacher, has been the senior lecturer in voice at the University of Otago since 1993.

While students cross the leafy campus to the sound of piano music, Bellingham voices unswerving views on a variety of subjects, from the name plate on her office door — "I prefer Miss. I think Ms is an absolute cop-out" — to her decision to give up schoolteaching after 21 years — "Had I wanted to be a facilitator, I would have gone into the trade union movement."

She is also against the "current American fetish over singers, particularly women, being small and stylish", saying there doesn't seem to be a similar move against those who are tiny or exceptionally tall.

Between coffees - dehydrating stuff that she wouldn't touch on the day of a big performance - she describes a life that in some ways is a contradiction in terms.

She collects beautiful crystal and antique china but also loves cricket.

She adores dangly earrings but is too scared to have her ears pierced.

She drives a Nissan Sentra but wants to travel through Europe in the sidecar of a BMW motorbike.

She also says she is shy but hides it with a thick veneer that makes her appear an extrovert.

One subject off limits is the health problems that have taken their toll in the past two years and that have contributed to her decision to take stock.

Once the next six months' singing commitments are out the way, she will decide if she will continue performing.

Born in England, Bellingham arrived in New Zealand with her parents as an 8-year-old.

Her father was a commercial traveller who decided later in life to train for the Anglican priesthood.

Neither he nor his wife were particularly musical but when 11-year-old Judy asked if she could learn to play the piano, they scraped together £25 to buy one.

"It was held together with Sellotape and the only place it would fit was in my bedroom," she recalls.

"I had to climb over the keyboard to get into bed."

At first, her mother taught her to play hymns but later she had "proper lessons" in both piano and singing from the church organist.

Bellingham hated being the local vicar's daughter and when she finished school, decided to move as far away from her Opotiki home as she could.

She enrolled at Canterbury University and, unaware there was such a thing as a degree in performance, did a BA in music and languages while studying singing privately.

Students did not have to work then and had more time to enjoy themselves, she says, adding her participation in comic operas staged by the university music students' society led to "one of the wackiest things" she has done.

Fellow students discovered that the record for the world's longest cadenza (an improvised passage at the end of an aria) had been set in 1815 by a tenor in Italy.

They then decided that Bellingham should try to better the 25-minute record as a publicity stunt at the next concert.

Watched over by a first-aid team, she managed 28 minutes and 23 seconds before laughter got the better of her.

Her first professional performance in 1974 as soprano soloist in Bach's St Matthew Passion was not so happy: "I came off the stage and said I was never, never going to do it again. I was so scared."

But the fear was short-lived and soon she was heading overseas, first to study with Antonio Moretti-Pananti in Melbourne and then with Otakar Kraus in London.

Kraus was a "sensitive" man who took her to the pub for gin if she was not in the mood to sing and who told her that her personality was better suited to being a big fish in a little pond than a little fish in a big pond, she recalls.