Jill Gomez (1942-2026)

The Trinidadian and British soprano Jill Carnegy, Countess of Northesk (better known as Jill Gomez) has died at the age of 83. Growing up for the first thirteen years of her life in Port of Spain, Trinidad, where she won early acclaim in music festivals, she subsequently moved to London and began her musical studies in earnest - both voice and piano at the Royal Academy and the Guildhall.

Although her main teacher was Lieder specialist Walther Gruner, opera swiftly exerted its pull on the young Gomez; by her mid-twenties she was singing with the Glyndebourne Festival Chorus, and in 1968 made her solo debut as Adina in Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore to critical acclaim. Her chorus audition itself could perhaps act as a piece of encouragement for those daunted by the prospect of breaking into the singing world - though one suspects that it might not work today. Sight-reading the taxing role of Concepción from Ravel’s L’heure espagnole while claiming to know it was a decision that Yes, Minister might have archly called ‘courageous’; the head of music Jani Strasser of course saw straight through the ruse instantly, but admired Gomez’s daring so much that she admitted her into the chorus. 

Over the 1970s Gomez not only expanded her range of roles significantly - from Mozart’s Pamina and Countess to Bizet’s Leïla and Stravinsky’s Anne Truelove - but also created several new roles in her own right; Flora for Michael Tippett in The Knot Garden, Miss Julie for William Alwyn, and the Countess in Thea Musgrave’s The Voice of Ariadne. Along the way more and more roles accumulated - the Governess in Britten’s Turn of the Screw, Tatyana in Eugene Onegin, Massenet’s Thaïs and more. 

A brush with danger came in the form of an appearance as Cleopatra in Handel’s Giulio Cesare, where as a gesture of exoticism she was accompanied by two live boa constrictors. These, she had been assured, had just been fed and would therefore be docile. This turned out not to be entirely true, but Gomez would later recall that her Caribbean upbringing came to her rescue - staying resolutely calm and indeed directing her song at the snakes themselves, to the delight of the audience who thought it was all part of the show.

Tippett’s Flora undergoes an attempted rape midway through the opera, in which the character’s bikini top is ripped off by an attacker. Predictably this hit the headlines, but it was as nothing compared to the role that has regrettably come to rather overshadow much of Gomez’s stellar career - the troubled Duchess of Argyll in Thomas Adès’s Powder Her Face, which at its 1995 premiere scandalised the Cheltenham Festival with its on-stage depiction of oral sex in the middle of an aria. Perhaps inevitably, as news broke of her death, several major newspapers’ obituaries focused heavily on these two rather ‘X-rated’ moments in her long and illustrious career.

Despite her vast catalogue of successful roles, Gomez always remained wary of the major opera houses - openly expressing her reservations about the ‘international opera circus’ and indicating a preference for the more generous rehearsal schedules of smaller venues, in particular Zürich. 

Having spent her entire career as Jill Gomez, in 2010 she married her long-time partner Patrick Carnegy (no stranger to music and opera himself, as a published author on Wagner and a regular music critic), who survives her. In doing so she adopted not merely his surname but also his aristocratic title, which creates a rather apt symmetry - now the wife of the fifteenth Earl of Northesk, having portrayed any number of fictional countesses on stage she spent her final decade and a half as a real one. 

Jill Gomez - a selected discography