What’s New: January 2025
January 9, 2025
Welcome to the 118th update of the Oxford DNB, featuring the lives of operatic and theatre singers. This update adds biographies of seven women and men, accompanied by one new portrait likeness. The update also includes 82 updated Reference Lists, and identifies over 1,500 biographical anniversaries in 2025.
From January 2025, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford DNB) offers biographies of 63,079 women and men who have shaped the British past, contained in 65,326 articles. 12,255 biographies include a portrait image of the subject—researched in partnership with the National Portrait Gallery, London.
Most public libraries across the UK subscribe to the Oxford DNB, which means that you can access the complete dictionary free of charge via your local library. Libraries offer ‘remote access’ that enables you to log in at any time at home (or anywhere you have internet access). Elsewhere, the Oxford DNB is available online in schools, colleges, universities, and other institutions worldwide. Full details of participating British public libraries, and how to gain access to the complete dictionary, are available.
Introduction by Andrew Lamb and Christopher Webber: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Opera and Musical Theatre Singers
As advisory editors on the second stage of this Oxford DNB project, it has been our privilege – together with our colleague Raymond Holden – to help further broaden the dictionary’s range of operatic and theatre singers. We thank our editors at Oxford University Press for the opportunity to introduce seven more great performers.
Three D’Oyly Carte legends, creators of many world-famous roles in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Savoy operas – Jessie Bond, Leonora Braham, and Rosina Brandram (memorably played by Dorothy Atkinson, Shirley Henderson, and Louise Gold in Mike Leigh’s film Topsy-Turvy) – are joined by their contemporary Florence St. John, the luminary diva of Victorian operetta. Binnie Hale was musical theatre’s reigning West End Queen between the two world wars, while the handsome leading actor-singer of opera, operetta, and oratorio Dennis Noble could almost be said to have invented the idea of crossover. Similarly versatile, in an astonishing career which took her from diva in pre-revolutionary St Petersburg to Wigmore Hall recitalist in her seventies, via variety at the London Palladium, the soprano Oda Slobodskaya made London her home for the last four decades of her eventful life.
In their time all these singers touched chords in the national consciousness, bringing pleasure and spiritual uplift to countless lives, while dissolving barriers of age, class, and locality.
Andrew Lamb is a music historian with a particular interest in musical theatre; he was a member of the advisory board of the New Grove Dictionary of Opera and is the author of fourteen books, including 150 Years of Popular Musical Theatre (2000) and studies of Jerome Kern, Leslie Stuart, and William Vincent Wallace.
Christopher Webber is a playwright, actor, and theatre director, musicologist, and writer on horse racing; his books range from Bluff Your Way in Racing (1989) to The Zarzuela Companion (2002) and he is currently editing the Cambridge History of Spanish Opera and Music Theatre.
January 2025: summary of new articles
After a studying music in England and Italy, Rosina Brandram (1845–1907), born in London, joined the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company in 1877, playing Lady Sangazure in The Sorcerer and Little Buttercup in HMS Pinafore, before appearing with the company in New York and creating the role of Kate in The Pirates of Penzance. She is noted almost exclusively for her memorable creation of the so-called ‘heavy contralto’ roles in seven Gilbert and Sullivan works.
The actress and mezzo-soprano Jessie Bond (1853–1942), born in London, was ‘discovered’ by the impresario Richard D'Oyly Carte, who heard Bond singing at the St George's Hall in Liverpool. In May 1878, he offered her the part of Cousin Hebe in the first performance of HMS Pinafore. Bond’s remarkable career with D’Oyly Carte spanned more than two decades and included a tour of New York and other American cities in performances of HMS Pinafore and The Pirates of Penzance.
Another much-loved singer and actress affiliated with the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, the London-born Leonora Braham (1853–1931) originated several leading roles in popular Gilbert and Sullivan works such as Patience, Iolanthe, and The Mikado. Like Bond, Braham toured in successful musical shows on both sides of the Atlantic, though her travels were somewhat more harrowing; in the 1890s, she survived a shipwreck while visiting South America with her company.
The singer and actress Margaret Florence St John (1855–1912), born in Plymouth, gained fame in the late 19th century for her roles in operetta and musical burlesque, with notable performances in Offenbach’s Madame Favart and Audran's Olivette. Her wide vocal range enabled her to take both soprano and mezzo-soprano roles; such versatility, and her charm, made her a favourite in London and on tour across the globe. She continued to perform in leading roles until her retirement.
After fleeing the Russian Revolution, the mezzo-soprano Oda Abramovna Slobodskaya (1888–1970), born in Vilnius, Lithuania, gained widespread acclaim in Europe and the United States, performing at prestigious venues such as Carnegie Hall in New York and Wigmore Hall, the Royal Albert Hall, and the Royal Opera House in London. Slobodskaya was also a dedicated teacher, influencing a new generation of singers through her work at the Royal College of Music.
With a career spanning opera, oratorio, and musical comedy, William Ewart Noble (1898–1966), born in Bristol and known professionally as Dennis Noble, became one of the most prolific and respected baritones of his time. In 1937 alone, he took part in three British and world premières, including Busoni's Doctor Faustus, Respighi's Maria Egiziaca, and Goossens's Don Juan de Mañara, with the British première of Hindemith's Mathis der Maler following two years later.
One of the West End’s most famous names between the two World Wars, Binnie Hale (1899–1984), born in Liverpool, achieved outstanding success as a singer-actress and dancer in operetta, musicals, and revue. Her popularity soared in the 1920s and 1930s, owing especially to her roles in Vincent Youmans’s No, No, Nanette and Vivian Ellis’s Mr Cinders. She continued to entertain audiences on stage and screen for several decades through the 1950s.
A likeness is added to the article on Sarah Bates (c. 1755–1811), the Lancashire-born singer who gained prominence in the late eighteenth century for her powerful contralto voice.
The update also contains 82 updated Reference Lists, mainly of office-holders, and also uses the Oxford DNB’s ‘advanced search’ function to identify over 1,500 biographical anniversaries in 2025: births and deaths in 1625, 1725, 1775, 1825, 1875, and 1925, covering a timespan from the death of James VI and I to the birth of Margaret Thatcher.
The Oxford DNB is updated regularly throughout the year, giving you access to the most up-to-date and accurate information available. Nearly all public libraries in England, Scotland, and Wales—and all in Northern Ireland—subscribe to the Oxford DNB. This means you can access tens of thousands of biographies, free, via your local library—anywhere, anytime. Full access to all biographies is also available by individual subscription.
Discover a full list of entries added this year.
