Biography|Simone Young — The Gothic Stables Where She Learned Piano and Composition

The castle on Macquarie Street was not built as a music school.

Francis Greenway designed it in the 1810s as the Gothic stables for Government House, at the edge of the Royal Botanic Gardens.

In 1915 the state turned those stables into the New South Wales Conservatorium of Music.

Simone Margaret Young walked into the building as a student of piano and composition after she finished high school at Monte Sant'Angelo Mercy College in North Sydney at the end of 1978.

She was born in Sydney on 2 March 1961.

Her father, Harry Young, was a teacher who later practised as a solicitor.

Her mother, Simone Ann Young, née Šimica Klamus, had taught textiles before the marriage.

The family story is an immigrant one: Irish on his side, Croatian fishing families from the Dalmatian coast on hers.

Manly, on the northern beaches, was the suburb of her childhood.

As a teenager she took piano with the French teacher Leila Chalmers in Manly, and from about the age of twelve she also sat theory classes at the Conservatorium.

A scholarship later paid for composition lessons with Martin Wesley-Smith.

When she enrolled in the full course after high school, composition was the principal study, with piano and flute beside it.

The Con's paperwork and her impatience with it did not survive the first year intact.

She left the course in 1979, taught, waited tables, and played for amateur companies including Gilbert and Sullivan groups and the Lane Cove Light Opera Company.

She later returned for postgraduate répétiteur training, the trade that puts a pianist in the rehearsal room with singers and a full score.

That second pass through this building is what made the Opera House job possible.

The Conservatorium still occupies 1 Conservatorium Road.

Verbrugghen Hall, the old stable block recut as a concert room, is where the school performs.

The pin is the public campus, not a private house.

A visitor standing on Conservatorium Road is looking at the same Gothic silhouette she used as a workplace and a classroom.

The pianist who learned scores here would spend the next forty years in opera pits on three continents.

Photo: Jason Tong, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Andreas Praefcke, public domain, 2007.