[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":218},["ShallowReactive",2],{"person-en-vivienne-de-silva-boralessa":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"artistId":6,"birthYear":7,"body":8,"born":181,"description":182,"died":183,"era":184,"extension":185,"heroImage":186,"imageCredit":187,"imageLicense":188,"imageSource":189,"meta":190,"navigation":191,"notable":192,"path":193,"roles":194,"seo":196,"sources":197,"stem":216,"translated":191,"url":200,"__hash__":217},"peopleEn\u002Fen\u002Fpeople\u002Fvivienne-de-silva-boralessa.md","Vivienne de Silva Boralessa",335,1930,{"type":9,"value":10,"toc":172},"minimark",[11,28,31,36,39,42,45,48,52,59,62,65,69,72,83,86,90,136,146,156,160,166,169],[12,13,14,15,19,20,23,24,27],"p",{},"In 1938 a Colombo businessman put on two of his own plays — ",[16,17,18],"em",{},"Election Echo",", and one whose title is given variously as ",[16,21,22],{},"The Dreadful State of Lanka"," and ",[16,25,26],{},"The Sad State of Lanka"," — and had his eight-year-old daughter sing the welcome songs before the curtain. Her uncle was in the audience. He was so taken with the voice that he went to her father afterwards and asked permission to take the child to Radio Ceylon and sing duets with her on air.",[12,29,30],{},"That is the beginning of a career that ran, without a serious break, for very nearly eighty years. Vivienne de Silva Boralessa would end it as the voice that Sri Lankan Buddhists heard in their heads when they thought of a devotional song.",[32,33,35],"h2",{"id":34},"a-father-who-hired-the-orchestra","A father who hired the orchestra",[12,37,38],{},"She was born on 24 November 1930, the only child of G. F. de Silva and Dona Leela Sahabandu. Her father was a surveyor at the Chamber of Commerce, a general manager at the De Zoysa Company and managing director of the Safety Tours bus company, and — the part that mattered — a playwright, producer and patron of the arts. Her uncle, G. R. Edward, made the introduction to Radio Ceylon in 1938.",[12,40,41],{},"In 1940 she went before an audition panel of Gunapala Malalasekera, S. L. B. Kapukotuwa and B. S. Wijeyratne, wearing a sari for the first time in her life with her hair in two pony-tails, and was picked as the best singer there. She was promoted to A-grade artist the same year and paid ninety rupees for a thirty-minute programme, which meant about five songs.",[12,43,44],{},"What that actually involved is worth spelling out, because she spelled it out herself in 2010. Broadcasts were live. There was one microphone for the singer and the whole orchestra. \"We would practice for hours at a time before the programme and we never made a mistake,\" she said, and then paused to let it land: \"We couldn't afford to make a mistake.\"",[12,46,47],{},"Singers of that period had to supply their own orchestras, and hers were paid for by her father, who accompanied her to every session. If he had another appointment the recording was cancelled and rescheduled. He gave her a Hillman Hunter as a wedding gift, at a time when a woman at the wheel in Ceylon was rarer than the car; she used to drive it herself from Matara to Colombo.",[32,49,51],{"id":50},"ralla-naginne-and-the-year-she-signed-to-hmv","Ralla Naginne, and the year she signed to HMV",[12,53,54,55,58],{},"The turn in her career came in 1946, when Sunil Santha — then the most successful recording artist in the country — came to her house in person to ask her father whether he might sing a duet with her. The song was ",[16,56,57],{},"Ralla Naginne",". The chorus behind them, as she recalled it, was W. D. Amaradeva, C. T. Fernando, Kanthi Wakwella and Percy Wijewardena, which is as good an index as any of where she already sat in that world in her mid-teens.",[12,60,61],{},"She was signed to His Master's Voice, then handled locally by Cargills, and became one of very few artists on the label to hold the ownership of her own catalogue. Accounts differ on when this happened. English Wikipedia's opening paragraph says she was signed at the age of twelve, which would put it around 1942 or 1943; the body of the same article, and the 2010 interview it draws on, both say that Gabrielle Gunaratne approached her father for permission to record her in 1950, when she was nineteen. The two statements cannot both be right, and no source consulted for this article settles it.",[12,63,64],{},"She trained under H. W. Rupasinghe, Lionel Edirisinghe and the man everyone called Eddie master, and sang duets with H. R. Jothipala, Dharmadasa Walpola, Sisira Senaratne, Haroon Lanthra and eventually with C. T. Fernando, whom she had grown up admiring. Her lyricists included Karunaratne Abeysekera, Premakeerthi de Alwis, Dharmadasa Dias and Sarath Wimalaweera; her composers B. S. Perera, Victor Perera, Premasiri Khemadasa, Sanath Nandasiri and Clarence Wijewardena.",[32,66,68],{"id":67},"the-boat-she-could-not-board","The boat she could not board",[12,70,71],{},"There was one door that did not open, and it did not close for musical reasons.",[12,73,74,75,78,79,82],{},"Boralessa wanted playback work — the singing behind actors in Sinhala films, which in the 1940s and 1950s was the most lucrative and visible work available to a woman with a voice. The recording had to be done in India, in the studios of Madras and Calcutta, and that meant travel. Her parents objected, and that was the end of it. Both the ",[16,76,77],{},"Daily Mirror"," and the ",[16,80,81],{},"Daily News"," profiles record the refusal in a single flat sentence, with no elaboration; she never seems to have complained about it publicly.",[12,84,85],{},"She was not alone. Latha Walpola's father raged when her film work required the same voyage. The gatekeeping against women performers in Ceylon was not only about respectability in the abstract — it was geographic, and a respectable daughter could not sail.",[32,87,89],{"id":88},"the-buddhist-repertoire","The Buddhist repertoire",[12,91,92,93,97,98,101,102,97,105,108,109,97,112,115,116,97,119,122,123,97,126,101,129,97,132,135],{},"What she did instead is what she is remembered for. No Sinhala singer has recorded more Buddhist devotional songs, and the best of them have not been displaced in seventy years: ",[94,95,96],"strong",{},"සම්බුදු මංගල්‍යය"," ",[16,99,100],{},"Sambudu Mangalle",", ",[94,103,104],{},"බුදු මගුල ලගම ඒවි",[16,106,107],{},"Budu Magula Langama Ewi"," (\"the Buddha's festival draws near\"), ",[94,110,111],{},"මා සංඝබෝධි ස්වාමිනේ",[16,113,114],{},"Ma Sanghabodhi Swamine"," (\"my lord Sanghabodhi\"). Alongside them sit the secular songs that people of a certain age can still start singing at the first bar — ",[94,117,118],{},"දුර පෙනෙන තැනිතලා",[16,120,121],{},"Dura Penena Thanithala"," (\"the plains seen far off\"), ",[94,124,125],{},"නවතින්න තිස්ස",[16,127,128],{},"Nawathinna Tissa",[94,130,131],{},"නංගි නංගි රූපිකා",[16,133,134],{},"Nangi Nangi Rupika",".",[12,137,138,139,141,142,145],{},"She holds a distinction nobody else can: she sang at the 2500th Buddha Jayanti, at the 2550th in 2006, and at the 2600th Sambuddhatva Jayanti in 2011. Sources disagree on the date of the first — the ",[16,140,81],{}," puts it in 1955 and counts from the ",[16,143,144],{},"parinirvana",", while English Wikipedia's lead gives 1956, the year the state commemoration was held. What is not in dispute is the arithmetic of a career: a woman who sang at the first of them in her mid-twenties was still singing at the third when she was eighty.",[12,147,148,149,97,152,155],{},"For the 2011 commemoration she recorded ",[94,150,151],{},"මේ පින් බිමේ",[16,153,154],{},"Me Pin Bime"," (\"on this hallowed ground\"), written by the Venerable Pallegama Hemarathana Thera and set to music by Navaratne Gamage, as a duet with her youngest son Kapila, with a video filmed at Anuradhapura. \"Can you believe it,\" she said at the time, \"I have lived long enough to sing special songs in commemoration of three Sambuddha Jayanthi years.\"",[32,157,159],{"id":158},"late-years","Late years",[12,161,162,163,165],{},"Almost her entire output was made for gramophone and radio, which is why, for most of her life, there was no album to buy. That was corrected only in 2009, when at seventy-eight she launched her first CD, ",[16,164,100],{},", at the John de Silva Theatre in Colombo with Prime Minister Ratnasiri Wickremanayake as chief guest and Manoj Peiris conducting the live show. She was awarded the Kalabooshana by the state.",[12,167,168],{},"She had married C. D. S. Boralessa in 1953 at the Galle Face Hotel — he had introduced himself to her at her uncle's wedding as one of her fans — and they had six children. She entrusted the rights in her recordings to her son Kapila and her daughter Indrani, and said, in the same 2010 interview, how much it hurt her that newcomers to the field belittled the work that had gone into the songs.",[12,170,171],{},"Vivienne de Silva Boralessa died on 2 April 2017 at the Sri Jayewardenepura General Hospital, and was buried at Borella. She was eighty-six.",{"title":173,"searchDepth":174,"depth":174,"links":175},"",2,[176,177,178,179,180],{"id":34,"depth":174,"text":35},{"id":50,"depth":174,"text":51},{"id":67,"depth":174,"text":68},{"id":88,"depth":174,"text":89},{"id":158,"depth":174,"text":159},"24 November 1930","The gramophone-era child star who became the defining female voice of Sinhala Buddhist devotional song, sang at three Buddha Jayanti commemorations, and never made it to the Madras studios.","2 April 2017","1930s-2010s","md","\u002Fimages\u002Fpeople\u002Fvivienne-de-silva-boralessa.webp","Dayan Witharana, via HumaliArchives","CC BY-SA 4.0","https:\u002F\u002Fcommons.wikimedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FFile:Vivienne_De_Silva_Boralessa.jpg",{},true,false,"\u002Fen\u002Fpeople\u002Fvivienne-de-silva-boralessa",[195],"Singer",{"title":5,"description":182},[198,201,204,207,210,213],{"title":199,"url":200},"Vivienne de Silva Boralessa — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FVivienne_de_Silva_Boralessa",{"title":202,"url":203},"විවියන් ද සිල්වා බොරලැස්ස — සිංහල විකිපීඩියා","https:\u002F\u002Fsi.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002F%E0%B7%80%E0%B7%92%E0%B7%80%E0%B7%92%E0%B6%BA%E0%B6%B1%E0%B7%8A_%E0%B6%AF_%E0%B7%83%E0%B7%92%E0%B6%BD%E0%B7%8A%E0%B7%80%E0%B7%8F_%E0%B6%B6%E0%B7%9C%E0%B6%BB%E0%B6%BD%E0%B7%90%E0%B7%83%E0%B7%8A%E0%B7%83",{"title":205,"url":206},"Aditha Dissanayake, 'Keeping the past beautifully present' — Daily News, 22 September 2010 (Internet Archive)","https:\u002F\u002Fweb.archive.org\u002Fweb\u002F2018\u002Fhttp:\u002F\u002Farchives.dailynews.lk\u002F2010\u002F09\u002F22\u002Fart02.asp",{"title":208,"url":209},"Aditha Dissanayake, 'Too good to miss' — Daily News, 25 May 2011 (Internet Archive)","https:\u002F\u002Fweb.archive.org\u002Fweb\u002F2018\u002Fhttp:\u002F\u002Farchives.dailynews.lk\u002F2011\u002F05\u002F25\u002Fart21.asp",{"title":211,"url":212},"'Vivienne Boralessa launches maiden CD' — Sunday Times, 17 May 2009","http:\u002F\u002Fwww.sundaytimes.lk\u002F090517\u002FMagazine\u002Fsundaytimestvtimes_03.html",{"title":214,"url":215},"'Vivienne de Silva Boralessa no more' — Daily Mirror, 2 April 2017","http:\u002F\u002Fwww.dailymirror.lk\u002F126608\u002FVivienne-de-Silva-Boralessa-no-more","en\u002Fpeople\u002Fvivienne-de-silva-boralessa","FSB7FYByYbFvhXvq9OKEQhA3SLl4_G-Nl6-Y_HVyj_4",1787999334071]