Marjorie Thomas

Marjorie Gwendolen Thomas (5 June 1923 – 12 September 2008) was an English opera and oratorio singer for almost three decades.

Thomas sang at the Royal Opera House and was a regular performer at the Promenade Concerts and the Three Choirs Festivals and, for many years, a professor of singing at London's Royal Academy of Music. A favourite soloist of Sir Malcolm Sargent's, she also participated in a number of recordings of Gilbert and Sullivan operas.

Thomas was born in Sunderland, England. Her father was a Welsh tenor, and her mother, an amateur pianist, was Scottish. When Thomas was two years old, her family moved to Oldham, Lancashire. She was educated at the Hulme Grammar School for Girls, then the Manchester High School for Girls from 1934 to 1939 and became a member of the choir at St Paul's Church in Oldham. She studied piano with her mother beginning at age 5, and later with William Walton's brother Noel. In 1940, at the age of 17, Thomas won a scholarship to the Royal Manchester College of Music to study piano. There, in her second term, she began to study singing with Elsie Thurston, which became her principal study, graduating in 1944. After this, she taught music for a year at Stockport Convent High School for Girls.

After World War II, Thomas' warm, lyrical contralto voice was heard in opera and concerts in England for almost three decades. In 1945, Thomas debuted with the Hallé Orchestra under conductor John Barbirolli, in Edward Elgar's Sea Pictures. The same year, she sang the role of Konchakovna in Thomas Beecham's radio production of Alexander Borodin's Prince Igor. Beecham asked her for "more emotion" when he heard her audition but then added: "But how could you have experienced emotion – 22 and living in Manchester?" Nevertheless, he invited her back to perform at his 1946 Delius festival and for his second recording of George Frideric Handel's Messiah in 1947. Thereafter, she was often heard in Messiah. While rehearsing for Prince Igor, she met Edwin "Teddy" Gower, the sound engineer for the broadcast. The couple married in 1947.