Anna Russell (born Anna Claudia Russell-Brown; 27 December 1911 – 18 October 2006) was an English–Canadian singer and comedian. She gave many concerts in which she sang and played comic musical sketches on the piano. Among her best-known works are her concert performances and famous recordings of The Ring of the Nibelungs (An Analysis) – a humorous 22-minute synopsis of Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen – and (on the same album) her parody How to Write Your Own Gilbert and Sullivan Opera.
Russell was born in London, England, though her long association with Canada meant that her birthplace was sometimes given as London, Ontario. Her father, Claud Russell Brown, was an enthusiastic pianist; her Canadian mother, Beatrice, had a difficult relationship with her only child, referring to her as "Toad". But the family soon noted Anna's musical abilities. Taken to the premiere of William Walton's Façade in 1923, she was entranced by Edith Sitwell's nonsense lyrics, and started to compose and write songs herself.An accident on the hockey field at St Felix school, Southwold, resulted in a fractured nose and cheekbone, which "had to be reconditioned from the inside, and it ruined my acoustics". At the Royal College she studied composition with Ralph Vaughan
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Williams. Another of her teachers was Arthur Benjamin, but it was the principal, Sir Hugh Allen, who suggested she would be better off auditioning at the London Palladium.
Although she made some appearances as a concert singer in the 1930s, it was a disastrous experience as an understudy in a touring production of Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana that first showed Russell what could be made of operatic parody. As the tragic heroine, she was supposed to be cast to the floor by the diminutive tenor; not anticipating her to be so heavy, he fell himself, bringing down part of the scenery, and causing such merriment that the performance came to a halt.
At the start of the second world war, she went to her mother's family in Canada, and after one false start in the chorus of a musical comedy, found her first celebrity on a radio programme entitled Round the Marble Arch. As a comic folksinger, she launched such songs as Don Bonzo Alfonzo the Matador (with castanets) and I'd be a Red-Hot Mama if I hadn't got these Varicose Veins. Christmas Box concerts with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra were followed after the war by a New York debut at the Carnegie Recital Hall and a one-woman show at the Vanderbilt theatre.During these early touring seasons, Russell launched some of her most famous skits: How to Write your own Gilbert and Sullivan Opera, For Loud Singers with no Brains (introducing the aria, Ah, Lover, from the mythical operetta The Prince of Philadelphia), For Singers with Tremendous Artistry but no Voice (with a German lied, Schlumpf, and a French chanson, Je n'ai pas la plume de ma tante).
When challenged by Wagnerites who felt she was ridiculing sacred art, she replied: "I merely tell the story as accurately as possible and play the bits of music exactly as written. I can't help it if the story is absurd." The doyen of Wagner critics, Ernest Newman, complimented her accuracy, and Birgit Nilsson, the foremost Brünnhilde of the time, recommended her
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students to listen to Russell in order to lose their inhibitions. Russell received the Canadian Women's Press Club Award in 1956 as the best Canadian comedy writer of the year.
Later parodies included a folksong, I Gave my Love a Cherry Without a Pit, in which she accompanied herself on an Irish harp. When the instrument was unexpectedly confiscated at US customs, she went on stage and mimed it, thereafter including this as part of the act. In Wind Instruments I have Known, she claimed to have learned to play the the bagpipes - "a most unsanitary instrument" - from the Encyclopedia Brittanica.
Here’s “For Singers With Tremendous Artistry But No Voice: Schlumph; Ja N'ai Pas La Plume De Ma Tante” from above EP.
Not everyone was enchanted. The American composer Ned Rorem, for example, bracketed Russell with Liberace as a "musical grotesque". None the less, she toured the world, always returning to Canada. She announced her retirement in 1986, but as late as 1998
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made a guest appearance at the Ford Centre, Toronto. By then she had moved to Unionville, where a street was named after her. Her books include The Power of Being a Positive Stinker (1955), The Anna Russell Songbook (1960), and I'm Not Making This Up, You Know (1985), the last her Wagner catch-phrase.
Both her marriages ended in divorce. Her happiest association was with Deirdre Prussak, a fan who became her secretary and a "sort of adopted daughter" and who cared for her in her final years. They were friends for 51 years. In her last years she moved to Australia where she lived in Batemans Bay, New South Wales, until her death from natural causes on October 18 2006 (aged 94).
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(Edited mainly from article in The Guardian by Patrick O'Connor with a sprinkling of Wikipedia)