Dora Labbette

Dora Labbette (4 March 1898 – 3 September 1984) was an English soprano. Her career spanned the concert hall and the opera house. She conspired with Sir Thomas Beecham to appear at the Royal Opera House masquerading as an Italian singer by the name of Lisa Perli. Away from professional concerns she had an affair with Beecham, with whom she had a son. Biography Labbette was born Dorothy Bella Labbett in the London suburb of Purley, the daughter of a railway porter. She studied at the Guildhall School of Music, where she won the Melba scholarship, the Knill challenge cup for the best student of the year, and the Heilbut scholarship. She also studied with Liza Lehmann, who took her to sing to the music publisher and impresario William Boosey, who gave her a contract to sing songs published by his company, at "Ballad concerts, Promenades and Sunday evening concerts". She made her Wigmore Hall début in 1917, and in April 1918 married a soldier, Captain David Rogerson Strang of the Royal Engineers, son of the painter William Strang. The couple had one child, Joan Strang, born 18 April 1919, but Strang wanted his wife to abandon her musical career; she refused and left him after nineteen months of marriage to continue singing. She had a long recital and oratorio career in which she appeared in London and in the provinces. She was the soprano soloist at the first performance of Delius's Idyll in 1933. She made her operatic debut under her own name in Oxford in 1934, in Rameau's Castor et Pollux, which was followed in March 1935 by Gounod's Romeo and Juliet with Heddle Nash for the London and Provincial Opera Society, with John Barbirolli conducting. She then, with Beecham and the agent Harold Holt, participated in a "brilliant publicity stunt". Beecham, publicising Covent Garden's autumn 1935 season, announced that it would include "the first appearance in this country of an outstanding Italian soprano, Lisa Perli", singing the role of Mimì in La bohème. Beecham forbade interviews with her and made a great mystery of the whole affair. Before very long, though, it was an open secret amongst musical London and the press that the newly discovered singer was in fact Labbette, wearing a blonde wig and using the mock-Italian name "Lisa Perli", after her birthplace, Purley.