Obituary: Dr Jane Manning, OBE (1938-2021)

As a soprano, Jane had more than half a century of international performing experience and was especially celebrated as an interpreter of new music. She worked closely with many leading composers throughout her career and gave more than 350 world premières, including works by Oliver Knussen and John Cage, and the one-woman opera King Harald’s Saga by Judith Weir, which was written for her in 1979 and has become something of a contemporary classic.In 1988, Jane and her husband, composer Anthony Payne, formed the ensemble Jane’s Minstrels, a group which championed young performers as well as new work in concert and on recording, but also presented established repertoire, including Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, a piece with which Jane was particularly closely associated. She performed it over 100 times – early on at the Queen Elizabeth Hall with Daniel Barenboim, Jacqueline Du Pré, Pinchas Zuckerman and Zubin Mehta – recorded it three times, and in 2012 published a performer’s study of the work entitled Voicing Pierrot.

As a writer, Jane was also known to generations of singers for her guides to contemporary vocal music, New Vocal Repertory (An Introduction) and New Vocal Repertory 2, published by Oxford University Press. And at the end of last year, two new volumes, Vocal Repertoire for the 21st Century, were published, again by Oxford. Jane was awarded an OBE in 1990, honorary doctorates from the Universities of York, Keele, Durham and Kingston, was a Fellow of both the Royal Academy and Royal College of Music, lectured at major universities in the US, among them Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton and Columbia, and taught classes for singers and composers around the world.

We were honoured by Jane’s long association with Guildhall School, particularly over the last ten years during which she led multiple new-music projects in the Vocal, Keyboard and Composition Departments. She drew on her unrivalled network of composer connections to introduce students to new work, devising potpourri concerts that celebrated the vocal music of our time as part of our Voiceworks series, and brought students into contact with an extraordinary range of repertoire and musical personalities. Jane’s Guildhall projects also included a survey of Messiaen’s complete vocal music in 2011, the first performance in 2015 of a new commission, Schoenberg in Hollywood, from composer Matthew King, in which Jane performed alongside students, and in 2013, A Party for Ernst Krenek, devised to honour the Austrian composer by recreating an impromptu party that Jane herself had hosted for him at her home many years before.

We pay tribute to Jane’s extraordinary performing career as well as to the tireless passion, energy, imagination, kindness and generosity she showed in her teaching. Her knowledge of contemporary vocal music was incomparable and her impact on generations of singers and composers immense. Jane will be deeply missed by all those whom she inspired at Guildhall and beyond. Our thoughts are with her husband, Anthony Payne.