Louise Kirkby Lunn

[1] She was trained as a dressmaker, but took singing lessons with the choirmaster of her local church, and in 1890 she obtained a place at the Royal College of Music (RCM) in London and studied for three years with Albert Visetti.

[1] She adopted her stage name at that time.The following year, also under the baton of Stanford and the direction of Richard Temple, she played the Marquise de Montcontour in Delibes' Le roi l'a dit at the Prince of Wales's Theatre.

[3] In March 1896 she made her professional operatic début as Nora in Stanford's Shamus O'Brien at the Opera Comique, London, again under Wood, a production that ran for 100 nights.

[4] Augustus Harris, who ran the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, gave her a five-year contract in 1896, and she made her début there in June as one of the Valkyries in Wagner's Die Walküre (sung in French).

In The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Tully Potter writes: The Times considered her greatest achievement at Covent Garden was in Aida: At Covent Garden her other roles included Pallas in Saint-Saëns's Hélène, Hérodiade in Massenet's Hérodiade (staged in this production under the title Salome), La Haine in Gluck's Armide, Olga in Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, and Orfeo in Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice.

Kirkby Lunn's only operatic appearances in continental Europe were guest performances in 1906 at the Hungarian Royal Opera House, Budapest, playing Orfeo, Dalila and Carmen.

In March 1904 she was a principal soloist in the Elgar Festival concerts given at Covent Garden, appearing on the first night with John Coates and David Ffrangcon-Davies in The Dream of Gerontius, and on the second with them and with Agnes Nicholls, Kennerley Rumford and Andrew Black in The Apostles.

Her last major London appearance was at the Albert Hall in a Royal Choral Society performance of Handel's Messiah in April 1927, conducted by Malcolm Sargent.

The acoustic recording process of the day was not always kind to Kirkby-Lunn's voice although it is better caught in some pieces such as the Gounod "Entreat me not to leave thee", or the Arthur Goring Thomas "A Summer night".