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Dora Labbette (4 March 1898 – 3 September 1984) was an English soprano. Her career spanned the concert hall and the opera house. She conspired with Thomas Beecham to appear at the Royal Opera House masquerading as an Italian singer by the name of Lisa Perli. Away from professional concerns she had an affair with Beecham, with whom she had a son.
She made her operatic debut under her own name in Oxford in 1934, in Rameau's Castor et Pollux, The Times, 19 November 1934, p. 10 which was followed in March 1935 by Charles Gounod Romeo and Juliet with Heddle Nash for the London and Provincial Opera Society, with John Barbirolli conducting. She then, with Beecham and the agent Harold Holt, participated in a "brilliant publicity stunt". Beecham, publicising Covent Garden's autumn 1935 season, announced that it would include "the first appearance in this country of an outstanding Italian soprano, Lisa Perli", singing the role of Mimì in La bohème. Beecham forbade interviews with her and made a great mystery of the whole affair. Before very long, though, it was an open secret amongst musical London and the press that the newly discovered singer was in fact Labbette, wearing a blonde wig and using the mock-Italian name "Lisa Perli", after her birthplace, Purley. The general public was not long deceived by the pseudonym either - reporting on her 28 September 1935 stage premiere as Mimì, the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail both disclosed the real identity of "Lisa Perli" - and she was rapidly accepted as an opera singer.Lucas, p. 224Ayre, Leslie, The Proms, p.170Less than a month after Labbette's first performance as "Lisa Perli", her dual identity was so much a matter of public knowledge that the Radio Times, listing a broadcast, would write, "JOHN BROWNLEE and LISA PERLI sing in the Royal Opera Covent Garden Company's production of La Bohème which will be relayed from the Empire Theatre, Liverpool, this evening at 7.25. Lisa Perli is perhaps better known to listeners as Dora Labbette." [2] When the hoax was revealed, The Gramophone published a short verse which included the lines:
In a later interview, Labbette explained that she had found it impossible to break out of the concert and oratorio repertoire into opera. "As for the Messiah, the Creation and Elijah, I must have sung the leading soprano parts in these oratorios hundreds of times, until I felt I would shriek if I were asked to do them again.... But it seemed quite hopeless and against all tradition that a singer who had been identified with the concert platform should desire to appear on the operatic stage." Lisa Perli, The Gramophone, September 1939, p. 15 The critic Neville Cardus wrote of her, "Lisa Perli is the best of our Mimis. She has a genius for diminutive pathos and in the closing scene she can bring moistness to the throat of the hardened critic." The Manchester Guardian, 1 December 1937, p. 3
After this operatic success, she went to Paris and studied Debussy's Pelléas and Mélisande, subsequently singing Melisande at Vichy and Bordeaux and at Covent Garden the following summer. In the autumn of 1937 she sang Mimì in La Bohème at Berlin, Munich and Dresden. After the first performance in Berlin, she was engaged to sing Mignon in German. Her other operatic roles included Desdemona in Otello, Juliette in Roméo et Juliette, The Times, 20 January 1936, p. 10 and Marguerite in Faust. The Times, 11 October 1938, p. 12
The New Grove Dictionary of Opera said of her: "Her voice was true, pure and youthful, and she was an outstanding actress." Labbette made many gramophone records, including the first complete Messiah, conducted by Thomas Beecham, with whom she had an affair lasting thirteen years, which produced a son, Paul.Lucas, p. 212
World War II cut short her London career, and her last operatic performances were on tour with the Carl Rosa Opera Company.Lucas, p. 281 Among her last concert performances was in The Creation, with Beecham, in Sydney in 1940.
Lucas, John. Thomas Beecham – An Obsession with Music, Boydell Press, 2008,
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