Joan Carden AO OBE (born 9 October 1937) is an Australian operatic soprano. She has been described as "a worthy successor to Dame Nellie Melba and Dame Joan Sutherland" and was sometimes known as "the other Joan" (a reference to Sutherland and Dame Joan Hammond) or "The People's Diva". She was a Principal Soprano with Opera Australia for 32 years, and was particularly associated with the title roles of Giacomo Puccini's Tosca and Madama Butterfly. However, she sang over 50 other roles, from the 18th century, including virtually all the Mozart heroines, through to works by contemporary composers. Biography Joan Maralyn Carden was born in Melbourne, an only child, in 1937. Her parents were Frank Carden (1902–1967) and Margaret Carden née Cooke (1896–1997). She attended Lee Street State School, North Carlton, and Ormond State School, Melbourne, and was dux of Prahran Technical Girls' School in 1955. Her first experience of opera as a child was hearing Mozart's The Magic Flute, and then Richard Strauss's Salome sung by Joan Hammond. She would later become a friend of Hammond, singing at her funeral in Bowral, and at her memorial concert in Melbourne, and she also received the Dame Joan Hammond Award. In Melbourne, her first singing teacher was the English Wagnerian soprano Thea Phillips, then briefly Henri Portnoj. She was a private student at Trinity College of Music in London and won a Stuyvesant Scholarship tenable at London Opera Centre, 1966/7, where her singing teacher was the West Australian expatriate Vida Harford (1907–1992), with whom she studied for the remainder of her teacher's life. She won a major prize in the Munich International Music Competition in September 1967, before graduating from the London Opera Centre that year. She performed in the United Kingdom, and Germany. She returned to Australia in 1970, joining in 1971 the Australian Opera (now Opera Australia) as a major principal till retiring from that company in 2003. Her debut with OA was in 1971 as Liù in Puccini's Turandot in 1971, then Marguerite in Gounod's Faust. In the first season at the Sydney Opera House (1973–74) she sang Pamina in The Magic Flute. At the Royal Performance in October, she sang Natasha in Prokofiev's War and Peace. Her career with OA saw her sing such other roles as Tosca and Madama Butterfly many times, as well as Marguérite (Faust), Gilda (Rigoletto), Queen Elizabeth (Maria Stuarda; opposite Deborah Riedel