Sophie Wyss

Sophie Adele Wyss (5 July 1897 25 December 1983 ) was a Swiss soprano who made her career as a concert singer and broadcaster in the UK. She was noted for her performances of French works, many of them new to Britain, for giving the world premieres of Benjamin Britten's orchestral song cycles Our Hunting Fathers and Les Illuminations (1940), and for encouraging other composers to set English and French texts. Among those who wrote for her were Lennox Berkeley, Arnold Cooke, Roberto Gerhard, Elizabeth Maconchy, Peter Racine Fricker, Alan Rawsthorne and Mátyás Seiber.

Life and career Wyss was born to a musical family in La Neuveville, Canton of Bern, Switzerland. She studied at the Geneva Conservatoire and the Basle Music Academy. In 1925 she married a British army officer, Captain Arnold Gyde, who had retired from the armed forces and become a publisher in London.

Making her home in England, Wyss embarked on a career as a soloist. By the 1930s her notices had improved from reserved to enthusiastic. The Times said that Wyss "possesses a soprano voice of an exquisitely yielding quality ... a singer so completely satisfying that we would not trust ourselves to say how much of the pleasure we derived from her performances was due to her or the music itself."

In 1936, together with Adolph Hallis, Benjamin Britten, Alan Rawsthorne and Christian Darnton, Wyss was a founder of the Hallis Concert Society, which gave a number of innovative concerts in London in the period 1936–1939. These included British premieres of both contemporary and historical British and European music, including works of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, François Couperin, Alban Berg, Paul Hindemith, Elisabeth Lutyens and Elizabeth Maconchy.

Wyss encouraged British composers to set French texts for her to perform. Wyss was equally at home with English texts, such as those in Britten's Our Hunting Fathers (1936) |group= n She gave the first performance of his 8 French Folksongs, in a 1942 National Gallery recital with Gerald Moore, and she and Britten later recorded five of these songs. However, by 1942, Britten's knowledge of voice and vocal technique had greatly increased, and he preferred Peter Pears's interpretation of Les Illuminations to Wyss's performance, which he described to a close friend as "hopelessly inefficient, subjective & (of all things) so coy & whimsey!!!" Though Wyss was keen to resume her professional relationship with Britten, he was no longer interested but confessed to Pears that he was "too fond of her to be rude, & not interested enough to be critical".

As a near neighbour of Gerald Finzi's, from 1941 Wyss performed in several of his concerts involving the Newbury String Players, singing the Aria from Finzi's Dies Natalis as well as works by William Byrd, Henry Purcell, George Frideric Handel, Ivor Gurney, and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Wyss gave many first performances of works in French or English by composers including Lennox Berkeley, Arnold Cooke, Roberto Gerhard, Elizabeth Maconchy, Peter Racine Fricker, Alan Rawsthorne, George Enescu, Antony Hopkins and Mátyás Seiber.

Recordings Wyss recorded for Decca Records from 1941 to 1946. The works she sang included some by English composers: Bliss's "The Hare" and "The Buckle" from his Three Romantic Songs; Britten's sets Two French Folk Songs and Three French Folk Songs, and Rawsthorne's Three French Nursery Songs. From the French repertoire she recorded Chabrier's "Villanelle des petits canards" and "Les cigales"; Debussy's "L'échelonnement des haies"; Duparc's "Chanson triste"; Fauré's La bonne chanson, "Aurore" (Op. 39/1), "Les roses d'Ispahan" (Op. 39/4) and "Les berceaux" (Op. 23/1); and Ravel's "Nicolette". Her accompanists included Britten and Kathleen Long. In 2012 Symposium Records released recordings made by Wyss in the 1950s. They were: Louis Durey's Images à Crusoé; George Enescu's Sept chansons de Clément Marot; Arthur Honegger's Six poésies de Jean Cocteau; Frank Martin's Trois Chants de Noël; and Jules Massenet's Poème d'Avril.

Notes, references and sources