'Cara helped me be more confident': Majella Cullagh on carrying the memory of her dear friend
Majella Cullagh takes to the stage of Cork Opera House again. Picture: Clare Keogh
“I can tell you, if everybody in the world was singing, there would be an awful lot less aggression in the world.”
There have been countless losses due to Covid, but for soprano Majella Cullagh, the restrictions on singing have hit professionals and amateurs alike to the core.
“I think people really underestimate the social aspect of choirs. I see it when I am involved in the Cork Operatic Society concerts, they are all dressed up to the nines and having great fun. There is such a sense of achievement and collegiality. They make lifelong friends. It is very important and it is good for your soul. Man doesn’t live by bread alone. People forget how important it is to nurture and feed your soul, and your spirit.”
Cullagh has been feeding the souls and spirits of audiences for three decades now, something that she views very much as a privilege.
“I didn’t think that 30 years after starting that I would still be singing. It is not a given because life can take you on a different road. The fact that I still have a functioning voice that people still want to listen to and that I am still working with amazing colleagues, having fun and making music, is not something I take for granted.”
There is no doubt that Cullagh is a diva in the truest, operatic, sense of the word. She has forged an illustrious career as one of Ireland’s foremost sopranos and even during lockdown, she continued to perform for online audiences.
“I have been so lucky, all through. Things really clamped down but I had a gig in The Everyman in October, doing Rodgers and Hammerstein with [conductor] John O’Brien. Then I had a Diva Christmas concert in the Opera House, then the Christmas concert there. Then in April, I recorded the performance for the Cork Orchestral Society. The only gap was January, February, March, so that was only three months. I don’t know how but I have been extraordinarily fortunate.”
Cullagh will be channelling her inner diva once again this month, with two performances scheduled for this Saturday — the first, DIVA, is a recorded streamed performance at Triskel Christchurch for the Cork Orchestral Society featuring Cullagh, Emma Nash and Kelley Lonergan Petcu with pianist, Michael Joyce, performing a variety of classics; the second is Casta Diva, an evening with Cullagh, Nash, mezzo soprano Niamh O’ Sullivan, tenor Gavan Ring and baritone Brendan Collins in which they will perform some of the world's best-loved arias and duets.
Casta Diva is a pilot event in association with Irish National Opera, which will have a limited live audience, a prospect that Cullagh is hugely excited about.
“That will be extraordinary because it is such a different energy. I know it is a wonderful convenience to be sitting in your kitchen or sitting room and the music comes to you but there is nothing like being in the same room and having that flow of energy from performer to audience. It heightens everything, the whole experience is on a completely different level,” says Culllagh.
This emotional and spiritual connection with the music is something that we have been missing out on, she adds.
“Even just to finish singing an aria and to hear someone clap instead of hearing dead silence…that thing of being connected. When people are connected to each other, they feel happier and safer — that’s the danger about this pandemic, when people are isolated, that is when people get more fragile, vulnerable and depressed. Singing and connecting to real living people, that is everything.”
Cullagh has also been kept busy with her new role as a lecturer in the Cork School of Music, which she took up last September. She had previously been teaching in the Montfort College of Performing Arts.
“I started full-time hours, with 22 new students so I was pushed to the pin of my collar to get to know their voices and find repertoire for everybody and steer them in the right direction. It is working out very well, and every day I think how lucky I am.
"It doesn’t follow just because you are a performer, you are going to be a good teacher. It is obviously a different skill. But I found out, thanks to the Montforts, that I had an affinity for teaching. I had no idea until I started teaching there how bossy I was and how I loved telling people what to do,” she laughs.
While the pipeline of singing talent is as strong as ever, Cullagh does worry about the opportunities that are available for emerging performers.
“There are extraordinary singers and musicians, and amazing directors, producers and technicians out there. It is just that there are fewer opportunities, so it is more difficult for people to have a livelihood than before. It is a civic responsibility really, for society at large to keep valuing not only opera, but art in general.”
However, she adds that opera has been under threat for as long as she can recall.
“I worked once with Charles Mackerras, a famous Australian maestro, and he said he remembered when he was starting out, conducting his first opera at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden and turning around and seeing so many grey heads in the audience, and he thought ‘Oh my God, I’m in a dying art form’.
"Then, 50 years later, he turned around and saw all these grey heads in the audience and was thinking, ‘well, they can’t all be the same grey heads’. His point was that everybody thinks because it is a bit of a niche genre and because it tends to appeal to older people, for 100 years, people have thought opera is a dying art form.”
The recently announced Cara O’Sullivan Associate Artist Programme from Cork Opera House will go some way to supporting performers, providing opportunities for four artists to perform for local audiences throughout this year. Cullagh says it is fitting that the programme is named after her late friend, who died in January, 2021.
“It is right and fitting because across the board, Cara just helped everyone. She was such an inspirational, iconic figure.”
It is a loss that continues to affect Cullagh deeply.
“I don’t know how many smaller pieces my heart could have broken into because… Cara never hurt anybody in her whole life. She was a good person and larger than life — with that amazing, world-class voice. I used to envy her confidence, that she would just strut on to a stage and knock ‘em dead.
"We both started out at the same time and we were a great support to each other. We were also very different, there was a bit of yin and yang. Cara helped me be more confident and braver, and I helped her think for ten seconds before something came out of her mouth.
"There is a massive vacuum in my life. Every time I sing, I feel Cara, she is totally with me, it is the most extraordinary feeling.”
- DIVA can be viewed free of charge at www.corkorchestralsociety.ie from 6.30pm on Saturday, Jul 10, where it will be available for a month.
- Casta Diva, An Evening with Majella Cullagh and Guests, Cork Opera House, 8pm, Saturday, Jul 10, www.corkoperahouse.ie
