Joan Sutherland: La Stupenda

(CBS)  She is called "La Stupenda," one of the most beautiful sopranos in history. Even though she retired from singing in 1990, her voice is legendary.

It is not often that the Kennedy Center honors non-Americans, but this year, Australian Joan Sutherland was among the honorees, and, if you ask any fan of opera, very deservedly so.

"I'll never forget the first time I heard Joan sing," recalls opera singer Marilyn Horne, "I heard this recording; it absolutely slayed me and I thought: My God, who is this singer?"

It was a question the whole world was soon asking. After Sutherland's debut in Donizetti's "Lucia Di Lammermoor" at Covent Garden in 1959, she had triumph after triumph.

All this, from very humble beginnings

As a shy girl in Australia, Sutherland would sit under her mother's piano, mesmerized by the music.

"And I used to sit at her feet and copy what she did," Sutherland says. "I used to sing all the arias and songs which she did. She was a mezzo-soprano. So it kept my voice very much in the middle range."

And that is where it stayed as she started her career - as a part time secretary. When she was 19, Sutherland won a voice competition, which launched her full-time singing career.

But it wasn't until she met her husband-to-be, Richard Bonynge, did Sutherland start to reach her greatest heights.

She says, "I didn't realize that I had as much top to the voice as I did have until my husband started working with me, thinking now you've gotta let top of the voice there. What are you singing mezzo-soprano for? So then changed. Not just from a secretary to a singer, but to a different kind of singer."

And higher and higher she went, reaching notes so high, most singers don't dare to try.

After her Convent Garden debut as Lucia, Sutherland let her voice take her into the stratosphere, joining other great opera stars and vocalists of her generation from Marilyn Horne and Luciano Pavarotti to Ella Fitzgerald and Dinah Shore.

She claimed her place among the best singers America - and the world -have ever heard.

What does this Kennedy Center honor means to her?

Sutherland tells The Early Show co-anchor Julie Chen, "I feel really highly honored because it isn't given to so many non-American subjects. And coming as it is at the end of my career, obviously very much after the end of my career, it's rather wonderful to sit back, be reminded of some of the things I did, especially here."

The Kennedy Center Honors will be broadcast on CBS-TV on Dec. 21.