John Cargher
Australia’s voice of opera and operetta, John Cargher, has died at the age of 89.
John Cargher was a unique presence on ABC radio, hosting Singers of Renown each week since it began in 1966. After Alastair Cook’s Letter From America, Singers of Renown is thought to be the longest continuously running program in the world. It brought opera into the lives of millions of Australians in a way that was painless, idiosyncratic, entertaining and comfortable.
John Cargher was not a bland professional broadcaster, rather he was a man sharing his passion for the singers and the esoterica of their lives and careers while chatting into a microphone in his distinctive mysteriously-European tones. You might well have been sitting around a fire in a cosy study with a gramophone crackling away beside a favourite, rather crusty but twinkly great-uncle, so relaxed and intimate was his delivery.
Unlike most specialists nowadays, John Cargher did not play a musical instrument and was not a professional musicologist. What he did bring to the airwaves was an unwavering interest and apparently endless enthusiasm for fossicking for unknown, forgotten and otherwise obscure facets of opera and operetta.
When I became arts editor of The Bulletin in 1991 John Cargher was already a redoubtable presence as its Melbourne opera critic. Meeting him for the first time, for lunchat the Sydney Opera House, (he often flew up for performances) was to realise first of all how tall he was and then, how charming in the way of olde worlde gentlemen. Nevertheless, his charm did not survive a management edict that reviews of opera had to be short or not at all. Happily, his radio program and he survived by many years that typically inept generation of Bulletin management.
It is customary to say that “we will never see his like again” but in John Cargher’s case, it’s true. There is virtually no possibility of another broadcaster having the stamina, knowledge and passion to keep such a show on air for more than four decades. And that’s presupposing managements would allow it. Australia’s listening public will miss him. As one listener wrote on the ABC’s website: “weekends will never be the same again.” He is survived by his wife, Robyn, and daughter, Penelope.
