THE AUSTRALIAN lyric soprano Una Hale will be remembered as one of the most attractive singers to grace the Covent Garden company in the 1950s and 1960s. She was born in Adelaide, the daughter of a well-known Unitarian minister and, having won a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Music, she landed at Southampton with her family in 1946.

On leaving the college she joined the Carl Rosa Opera Company and quickly established herself in such roles as Marguerite (Faust), Violetta (La traviata), Micaela (Carmen), Mimí (La bohème) and Donna Anna (Don Giovanni), invariably with success. Of a disastrous production of Tannhäuser, The Times wrote: “The one redeeming feature was the Elisabeth of Una Hale.”

In 1954 Hale joined the young Covent Garden Company as a principal and during the next ten years her talent blossomed and she was heard in a wide variety of parts, including Mimí and Musetta, Mme Lidoine (Poulenc’s Carmélites) and the Countess (Le nozze di Figaro) in a cast that included Geraint Evans and Eberhard Waechter, Liù (Turandot), and Elisabeth once more. Best of all were perhaps her Eva (Die Meistersinger) under the baton of Kubelik, and her Marschallin (Der Rosenkavalier) which she sang often between 1958 and 1961 with Kempe and Downes conducting.

Hale became a famously sympathetic Ellen Orford in Peter Grimes, and in 1956 created the role of Naomi in the premiere of Lennox Berkeley’s Ruth, conducted by Mackerras. She was also the first English-speaking soprano to sing Cressida in Walton’s then-new Troilus and Cressida. In 1962 she appeared with the Elizabethan Opera Trust in her native Australia, and was the Ariadne in Adelaide of the Australian premiere of Ariadne auf Naxos. Apart from these and a few appearances in Brussels, she sang little outside Britain. Flagstad and Kempe were known to have recommended her to Bayreuth, and she was rumoured to have been asked to replace Silja in Hamburg, but for various reasons both proposals came to nothing.

With the birth of her second son in 1965 Hale retired from opera but continued to broadcast and to appear on the concert platform and in recital, and it was perhaps the call of family life which inhibited the pursuit of the sort of international career her talents might have gained her.

In retirement she lived quietly near Bath with her husband and created a notable garden, as well as finding time for music and good cooking.

In 1960 she married Martin Carr, a stage director for the Royal Ballet, with whom she had two sons. All three survive her.

Una Hale, opera and concert soprano, was born on November 18, 1922. She died on March 4, 2005, aged 82.