Melba

A question lately cropped up in connection with Madame Melba as to whether fame and celebrity are not essentially the same thing. My feeling is that they are different. The Oxford English Dictionary is undecided: “famous, adj. 1a” persons are “celebrated in fame or public report; much talked about, renowned,” while persons of “celebrity, n. 4” are much extolled or talked about; famous, notorious. Nowadays I think there is a more nuanced distinction to be made. Surely today celebrities, simply because so many people aspire to that dubious condition, are not often hugely or even genuinely famous―in other words immediately recognizable to millions. And certainly not all famous people could ever be described as celebrities. That Melba, however, was both extremely famous and almost the embodiment of musical celebrity cannot be disputed. With people such as Bernhardt, Pavlova, and Mrs. Langtry, I would argue, Melba helped to create our modern concept of a celebrity, extending in her case far, far beyond the footlights of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. According to the Argus (Melbourne) on Saturday, November 17, 1906 (p. 6):

In the last Issue of the World to hand is a very interesting sketch of Madame Melba―one of the series of “Celebrities at Home.” The following are extracts:―

It was when she was 13 that she first expressed a wish to become a public singer. Although her parents were very musical―and to this day her father has an excellent singing voice―the family rose up in opposition, and the very mention of the stage or platform was avoided in her presence. Still, her dreams of a public career were not disturbed, and at every possible opportunity she got audiences together, and into her schoolgirl efforts “put all the enthusiasm of a prima donna,” to use her own happy phrase. Once during the holidays she was staying in a seaside resort in Victoria, a picturesque little place named Sorrento. There she ruffled the family calm by proposing to organize a concert for a new fence to the local cemetery. The cause appealed to the sympathies of her father, and she obtained from him a certain amount of money for preliminary expenses. Hints not few or far between from friends that this course was sure to result in her ending as a professional singer caused the strings of the paternal purse to be drawn at a critical moment. The bills had been printed, but there was no money for posting them, and all applications for an advance for the purpose were met with a blunt refusal. There was only one way out of the dilemma. The future prima donna went to the kitchen of the hotel in which she was staying, made friends with a maid, who mixed a bucket of paste, and that night, with a pail and brush in one hand and a bundle of bills in the other, she went out and “billed” Sorrento, not forgetting the fence of the cemetery in whose honor the entertainment was eventually held, with splendid results both financial and artistic.

That Mme. Melba is the most brilliant, as she was the favorite, pupil of Mme. [Mathilde] Marchesi everyone knows. When she resolved to come to Europe to study, the wife of the Austrian Consul in Melbourne offered her a letter to the great teacher, and it was gratefully accepted. Before going to Paris, however the diva came to London. She was introduced to Sir Arthur Sullivan, and sang the great air from Traviata to him. He nodded approval. “You have a very good voice,” he said. “If you will study for a year you may be able to sing in my Mikado.

Then Mme Melba went to Signor [Alberto] Randegger, who was unable to find a place for her, a fact on which, with the musician’s real generosity, he has always prided himself, for he declares it was far better for the young singer to go abroad, as nobody could then have done for her what Mme. Marchesi did. When the then Mrs. Armstrong―for the name of Melba had not been thought of―first had her voice tried, Mme. Marchesi was in ecstasies. “Salvatore, Salvatore!” she cried to her husband in the next room, “viens, viens: enfin une étoile!” Then came the question of lessons. Mme. Marchesi got out her book and looked down her lists. “I have no room for you, Mrs. Armstrong, in this class.” She turned over the page. “No room in this class.” She turned over the page again. “No room in this class.” “Oh, but Madame, you must take me,” cried the would-be pupil. “Well, my dear,” said Mme. Marchesi, “you must come into the opera class.” And in the opera class Mme. Melba immediately began her studies with Rigoletto. It was a case of working every day and all day, and the result of nine months’ work was that the prima donna had a repertoire of 10 operas. She was not only the most brilliant but the quickest pupil Mme. Marchesi ever had.

It is a striking characteristic of Mme. Melba’s that for the last 19 years she has never signed a contract with any operatic management. She gets a letter asking if she will sing a certain number of times. If she replies in the affirmative the matter is considered settled, and no further steps are taken on either side to make the contract binding. Except to go to sing her parts she troubles herself in no way with the arrangements, yet such is the irony of fate that she gets the credit for doing everything at Covent Garden. If a prima donna does not come up to expectations and is not re-engaged, the champions of the lady invariably declare that it is “because Melba won’t have her there.” If someone succeeds, her detractors declare she ought not to be there, for she is not fit for the position, and “she would not hold it if it were not for Melba.” The amusing thing is that the same is said with regard to the basses and the baritones, in whose coming or going the prima donna could have no possible interest whatever. These insinuations might affect a less large-hearted woman. They only amuse Mme. Melba, who shrugs her shoulders and remarks: “I don’t care what people say, so long as I sing well and I am happy.”

Sound

Assisted by the vastly learned Richard Warren, I have been systematically working through the extraordinarily rich collection of rare early sound recordings in the collection of the Sterling Memorial Library here at Yale, gradually assembling a representative program to offer through headphones to visitors to our forthcoming Edwardian Opulence exhibition. I wish the relevant laws of copyright would allow us to make this program more widely accessible on CD, possibly even include it in the catalogue, but outside the university I am afraid this will be prohibitively expensive, and administratively unachievable thanks to the relevant provisions of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act 1998 (U.S. Public Law 105–298). Nevertheless, it has been a fascinating task, not least because of those moments of genuine surprise when an occasional tic or habit of British speech or pronunciation stands out as completely different not merely from “received pronunciation,” as it is now known, but from any other even vaguely recognizable variant. I do not speak of those relatively familiar locutions that were discernable at least until fairly recently in the voice of H.M. The Queen, e.g. gawn awf for “gone off,” crawss for “cross,” lawst for “lost,” Awstralia for “Australia,” or sawft for “soft,” though these are plentiful and charming. When Somerset Maugham said petrol he laid exactly equal, seesaw emphasis on both syllables, of which the second was pronounced exactly like “doll”—with an especially short, clipped “o.” E. M. Forster, meanwhile, said articulayte for “articulate” (the adjective); motionliss, useliss, chickin, and Athins (Greece), for “motionless, useless, chicken, and Athens,” as well as sincewity, weeweeniss, mystewiousniss, and murmewing—though naturally these were caused by a slight speech impediment. He also enunciated very carefully the “p” at the beginning of “psychology.” Describing an Ethiopian dignitary at the coronation of King George V and Queen Mary in Westminster Abbey in 1911, Vita Sackville-West later recalled watching this person with “rurl fescinairtion,” more particularly his “high yepple green hyet” with a “lahrn’s mane wined a-rind it” because, she said, every time he turned his head, the lion’s mane tickled “the neauze of his next-daw nebba.” And in a broadcast recorded in 1935, Max Beerbohm makes the perplexing aside: “Mayfair and Westminster and St. James’s were grand, of course, very urban, in a proudly unostentatious way...They were places of leisure—of leesure, one might almost have said, in the old-fashioned way.” Old-fashioned? Presumably he meant late Victorian, or even earlier. And in the scratchy old phonograph recordings Nellie Melba made for the Gramophone and Typewriter Company in the comfort of her drawing-room in Cumberland Terrace (ca. 1904), you can clearly hear the voice of the sound engineer from behind a screen give the diva her cue by shouting “Go!” when the clunky recording apparatus was successfully set in slightly arduous motion. Incidentally, the purpose of the screen was to enclose the equipment, and keep the wax of the cylinder well heated and comparatively soft, to avoid creating a harsh whistle in the track. Some engineers were evidently better at doing this than others. At any rate, the knack here is to demonstrate what, if any difference the extraordinary proliferation of sound recording (and motion pictures, for that matter) made to the visual culture of Edwardian Britain, and why we should care. However, I am working on it.

More Pavlova

Two melancholy, non-chromatic footnotes to the 1926 visit to Melbourne of the great ballerina Anna Matveyevna Pavlova, one equine and the other culinary:

During the 1926 foaling season the name of Pavlova was co-opted (perhaps inevitably), and as a two year-old, on May 26, 1928, this Pavlova ran in the novelty pony race at Maffra in East Gippsland, carrying a seven-pound handicap. According to the Canberra Times of March 11, 1929 (p. 4), Pavlova won the highweight handicap at Rosehill by 2½ lengths. He was ridden on that day by the well-known jockey E. (Ted) Bartle. This was evidently Pavlova’s only victory, and apart from running at Sandown Park and Rosehill again in 1930 he seems to have diminished into obscurity shortly afterwards.

Meanwhile, anticipating by at least a year the advent of the canonical New Zealand delicacy, the Argus (November 17, 1928, p. 5) carried an unfortunate, celebratory report of Auguste Escoffier’s most recent effort in myth-making, which is doubly unfortunate for the company the two women are obliged to keep, and the expediently demotic flavor of what for the time being was Anna Pavlova’s only culinary referent:

Mussolini has been honoured by the great chef, M. Escoffier, who has produced a new dish entitled “Supremes de Poulet Mussolini.” “Il Duce” will be able to claim that he is one of the only three living personages whose names have been given to table delicacies other than those concocted for special occasions. Dame Nellie Melba, of course, has found fame apart from her art in the famous sweet composed of peaches and cream, while Mme. Anna Pavlova lends her name to a popular variety of American ice-cream.

Australian Newspapers beta

I cannot think of any single resource for the study of Australian history that has in my lifetime come as close to providing almost overnight such an enormous sweep of access as does the National Library of Australia’s brilliant Australian Newspapers beta service—“Historic Australian Newspapers, 1803 to 1954.” Hurry: sign up; subscribe for free, and join the happy throng of we obsessives who are busily and selflessly correcting as we go the full electronic transcripts of such brilliant articles as “Matters Feminine: Are You Beautiful?” (Northern Territory Times and Gazette, Saturday, March 8, 1919, p. 19), or, even better, “‘Wild Eelin:’ Her Escapades, Adventures, and Bitter Sorrows, by William Black, Author of ‘A Daughter of Heth,’ ‘A Princess of Thule,’ ‘Macleod of Dare,’ ‘The Strange Adventures of a Phaeton,’ ‘Briseis,’ ‘Highland Cousins,’ &c. &c. (Copyright). Chapter XIII: Playing With Fire,” Brisbane Courier, Tuesday, May 3, 1898, p. 7.

I am wholly and happily addicted, and Australian Newspapers beta has already shone an important sidelight onto one or two pressing matters to do with fingernails that will feature in my next book. The keyword searchability can at times be a little hit or miss, but that is neither here nor there. Because if you want to monitor the imminence of the colonial reputation of Queen Maud of Norway, or find and document the career of a particular racehorse, or study the incoming shipments to the Sydney agents of certain Paris milliners, or gauge the progress of irrigation in the Riverina, or take soundings of German espionage in the 1890s, or find someone who has hitherto been completely invisible to most if not all other published sources—Australian Newspapers beta will henceforth need to be your first stop.

For our Edwardian Opulence exhibition, for example, I picked up the scent of an object that was represented in this splendid photograph, but has since then gone to ground. I refer, of course, to “Melba’s Diamond Tiara: Mysterious Disappearance,” Argus, July 19, 1932, p. 6:

Much interest has been aroused by the difficulty experienced by the trustees of the estate of the late Dame Nellie Melba, the Trustees, Executors, and Agency Co. Ltd., to trace a diamond tiara, valued at ₤20,000 which belonged to Dame Nellie Melba. One report stated that the tiara had been detained illegally in Europe, and that the executors had evidence to support this theory. The general manager of the Trustees, Executors, and Agency Co. Ltd. (Mr. G. M. Smibert) said last night that the report was without foundation. Mr. Smibert added that he was unable to indicate whether the tiara would be traced, but there was no reason to believe that it had been detained illegally overseas.

God, I adore the National Library of Australia. So many hearty congratulations and sincere thanks to the director-general and everyone in Canberra who made this colossally precious gift so widely and generously available to every citizen of the world to harness, enjoy, and learn from, no matter where you happen to live. 

Now please let us scan all the rest, especially the especially wacky regionals such as the dear, wonderful Gippsland Times and Gippsland Mercury, neither of which ever fails to yield treasure in abundance.