Olivia Read Free

singing as soon as she could talk.’
    Olivia’s infant ears became accustomed to the sound of music ringing around her home almost from the day she was born. Brin and Irene would regularly take it in turns to sing to her, often in different languages, as they held her in their arms. She would be lulled to sleep by ballads soothingly sung by one or other of her multi-lingual parents, or sometimes both, in English, German or French.
    By the time she was fifteen months old, Olivia was capable of recognising a musical note sung to her and was able to imitate it accurately. Furthermore, by the age of two, she could vocally echo every note of a musical phrase with seemingly perfect pitch and true clarity. Such a precocious feel for music gave early hints of a life to come and Irene felt sure, even at that tender age, that Olivia would become a singer. ‘But it never occurred to me she would be the kind of singer she is,’ she once said. ‘When I thought of singers, I thought of opera. My husband had a beautiful voice and he used to sing with my father.’
    Brin had originally trained to become an opera singer, an ambition that met with the approval of Irene’s father, the German Nobel prize-winning physicist Professor Max Born, who had long had a passion for opera. In fact, the professor, Olivia’s maternal grandfather, just happened to have been the best of friends with Albert Einstein, whose favourite pastime apart from sailing was classical music, especially the works of Bach and Mozart. Einstein was a more than proficient violinist and he and Max Born would rope in other music-loving scientists and play string quartets together for their personal enjoyment. It was Einstein who nominated Born for the Nobel Prize in 1954, and it was in a letter to Olivia’s grandfather in 1926 that Einstein made his famous remark that ‘The Old One does not play dice’, meaning that God does not play with the universe.
    Although he was Christian, Professor Born was forced to flee the Nazis because of his Jewish heritage. He moved his family to Cambridge, where he had studied as a young man. There, his daughter Irene met Olivia’s father, who was by now an honours student at Cambridge and spoke excellent German. Irene and Brin were married in 1937, soon after he had completed his studies.
    Olivia never had the good fortune to meet her illustrious grandfather Max, who returned to Germany several years after the war had ended and died in 1970. Irene, who had studied mathematics at the university where he was the director, spoke fondly of him to her often, and made sure Olivia understood that she was immensely proud of him and his achievements, and that her daughter should be too.
    In years to come, Irene often urged Olivia to find the time to go to Germany to see him. For one reason or another she never managed it, but she did travel to Germany in 2007 to sing at a dinner to mark the 125th anniversary of her grandfather’s birth. ‘He was kind, a good person, as well as a wonderful mind,’ Olivia reflected. ‘He helped many Jews leave Germany during World War Two.’
    Brin’s early ambitions of becoming an opera singer may have been ultimately unfulfilled, but his passion for music nevertheless endured. It was ever present in the Newton-John household while his children were growing up. Although Brin never achieved his personal dream, he came close to it by making a record. Unfortunately he was his own severest critic, and was mortified to discover on the playback of the recording that he had sung a wrong note. It was just one error, but being something of a perfectionist, Brin viewed this solitary vocal inaccuracy as enough of a blemish for him to shatter the record into a dozen pieces in disgust.
    When he decided his bass baritone lacked the range to warrant a place among the top ranks of the world’s opera singers, Brin abandoned his ambitions. He was not content simply to be one of the forty best in his field, and he chose to