Bernadette Greevy

Published Tuesday 7 October 2008 at 13:15 by Michael Quinn

Bernadette Greevy, the Irish mezzo-soprano and founder of the Anna Livia Dublin International Opera Festival, has died at the age of 68.

Born in the north Dublin suburb of Clontarf on July 3, 1940 Greevy was one of seven children. She began her musical studies with Jean Nolan and, subsequently, with Helene Isepp at London’s Guildhall School.

Success in competitions led to her professional debut as Siebel in Faust in 1958 at the Gaiety Theatre, although she had to wait until 1982 for her first appearance at Covent Garden, as Genevieve in Pelleas et Melisande.

Although her operatic repertoire was wide, ranging from Gluck and Handel to Verdi, Saint-Saens and Massenet, Greevy was not a natural stage animal. She excelled, however, on the concert platform, acquiring a particular reputation for Berlioz and Mahler, whose cycles and songs she sang to considerable acclaim at the Teatro Colon de Buenos Aires over a four year period in the nineties.

In the late eighties, she was a prominent part of the first cultural exchange between Ireland and China.

Greevy regularly conducted masterclasses for aspiring young singers in her native Dublin, and in 2000 she launched the Anna Livia Dublin International Opera Festival to present grand opera to her operatically under-resourced hometown.

She died on Friday September 26, just two weeks after a public ceremony in which she left her hand prints outside Dublin’s Gaiety Theatre, and is survived by her son Hugh.