The Australian soprano, Una Hale was born in Adelaide on November 18th 1922 and, in 1946, won the South Australia ABC Concerto and Vocal Competition in Adelaide. Her family moved to London and she was awarded a two-year scholarship at the Royal College of Music and was soon singing leading roles with the Carl Rosa Opera. She appeared with the Carl Rosa Opera Company from 1949 to 1954.Her début at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, was as a guest in the first post-war production of Carmenand she joined their full-time ensemble in 1954, appearing in fifteen major roles, and many minor ones. In her second season there, she sang fifty-six performances!

It is universally accepted that her finest role was as the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier (her début in the role was in 1958) but she was also particularly noted for her portrayals of Ellen Orford in Peter Grimes, Eva in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Countess Almaviva in The Marriage of Figaro, Elisabeth in Tannhäuser, Mimi and Musetta in La bohème, Madame Lidoine in Dialogues of the Carmelites, Antonia in The Tales of Hoffmann, Micaëla in Carmen, Liu in Turandot and Cressida in Walton’s Troilus and Cressida. She repeated her Marschallin during her last season there in 1961. In 1956, she portrayed Naomi in the world première of Lennox Berkeley’s opera, Ruth, mounted by the English Opera Group.
In 1962, Hale returned to Australia as a guest for the Elizabethan Trust Opera and sang the title role in the Australian première of Richard Strauss’s Ariadne on Naxos on March 23rd of that year. That same season, she also portrayed Donna Anna in Don Giovanni and Alice Ford in Falstaff. Returning to the UK, she sang Ellen Orford in a new production of Peter Grimes. The production opened in April 1963 in Oxford, arriving at Sadler’s Wells Theatre on 16 October. It was a memorable night in the theatre – where the opera had been premiered eighteen years before – with the composer in the audience and fellow Australian tenor Ronald Dowd
as Grimes. From 1963 to 1964, she sang Ellen Orford and Tosca with the Sadler’s Wells Opera, and Tosca and the Marschallin with the Romanian National Opera. This excerpt - performed in English - of her beloved Marschallin comes from an early BBC Third Programme in the late 1950s. Una Hale's two other colleagues are unknown - as is the conductor!

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