The rocky road from prodigy to star

 

One of those Australian pianist pupils of Leschetizsky, Fritz Müller, particularly aroused my curiosity.

 

Raised in Melbourne in an immigrant German-Australian home, his early years followed the usual path – fêted child prodigy at eleven in 1899; a committee of the great and good formed to fund his further development in Europe; and he left for Berlin, where he was heard later that same year by the great Australian diva Nellie Melba, who was bowled over by his talent, writing to her sister in Melbourne: ‘I don’t wonder you rave about him. He is a wonder.’

By this time young Fritz was under the wing of the conservatoire head, one of the greatest violinists of the era, Joseph Joachim. All predicted a glittering future for the boy.

But what then? Following a return to Melbourne to raise further funding and a move back to Vienna to finish his studies with Leschetizky – virtually nothing. I even came to the tentative conclusion that he might have been killed in the First World War (in which he did in fact serve in the German Army).

But not so. Eventually I found some answers in Patricia Fullerton’s biography of the Australian artist Hugh Ramsay. The Ramsays and the Müllers were close friends in Melbourne. To the disappointment of his Melbourne siblings, who had made great sacrifices to support his career, it seems that Fritz never made much of a splash on the concert platform in Europe, being content to earn a living playing in the hotels of Munich.

Perhaps Melba had had an intuition that he might not make the expected grade, noticing that he was ‘rather like a butterfly’. And another contemporary, the pianist-composer Percy Grainger commented that Fritz lacked ‘a strong mother behind his career.’

Are those factors still the secret to success in making the transition from prodigy to stardom – driven focus and a strong mother?

 

The ghastly Dance Moms on current TV suggests that they might still represent a potent cocktail.

The dawn of modernism?

I was thinking about what I’d missed in 2013. Lots of things, for sure. But, reading the perceptive blogpost From the Choirboy Motel on the Young Vic’s production of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House* made me ache with regret that I’d not taken the trouble to go and see it.

It made me think of the impact that the play had in Melbourne when it first opened at the Princess Theatre in 1889. Perhaps expecting the usual sort of drawing room comedy, there were rowdy scenes following the première. The critics were universal in their condemnation of the supposed moral degeneracy of the drama. “Excessively didactic,” noted The Argus in Melbourne, “… insufficiently dramatic… the character of Nora… unnatural,” and so on.

The play had originally opened in Norway ten years earlier, the first English translation being commissioned from William Archer by Janet Achurch** and husband Charles Charrington, who took the lead roles, initially in London, then in Australia and New Zealand. It caused ructions wherever they took it.

Was this play the dawn of modernism?

Curiously, another less controversial play taken on the Australasian tour by the Charringtons was an adaptation of a Rider Haggard story entitled Devil’s Carefoot by the upcoming (now substantially forgotten) Australian playwright, Haddon Chambers.

*http://choirboymotel.com/2013/08/18/from-a-dolls-house-to-parliament/ 
**Janet Achurch photographed by H Walter Barnett (probably in Sydney), 1889  

Imaginative escape

I’m currently re-visiting the poet and music critic, WJ Turner. I’ve collected his books over many years. Although his writings on music were highly esteemed (by the great pianist Artur Schnabel among others) and his poetry too (by Yeats, Aldous Huxley, Sassoon etc), he has more or less sunk without trace currently.

This is an early Turner poem that I learned by heart at school. It’s about recognising the need to escape imaginatively from childhood (in his case in Melbourne)…

Romance

WHEN I was but thirteen or so

I went into a golden land,
Chimborazo, Cotopaxi
Took me by the hand.

My father died, my brother too,

They passed like fleeting dreams,
I stood where Popocatapetl
In the sunlight gleams.

I dimly heard the master's voice

And boys far-off at play,
Chimborazo, Cotopaxi
Had stolen me away.

I walked in a great golden dream
To and fro from school--
Shining Popocatapetl
The dusty streets did rule.

I walked home with a gold dark boy,

And never a word I'd say,
Chimborazo, Cotopaxi
Had taken my speech away:

I gazed entranced upon his face

Fairer than any flower--
O shining Popocatapetl
It was thy magic hour:

The houses, people, traffic seemed

Thin fading dreams by day,
Chimborazo, Cotopaxi
They had stolen my soul away!

His father, a leading musician in the city, and his brother both did die (within a few months of each other in 1899/1900). The school he refers to is Scotch College in Melbourne.

You can listen to his voice reading the poem here (but you might prefer to look away from the ghastly “animation”): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pi7-Yf_I2P8

Does anyone still know it? Did many of us have this kind of moment?

Adland and collective memory

Things always seemed to be so urgent and important in the advertising business. It never occurred to me that adland’s collective memory was virtually non-existent.

I was to teach creative problem-solving to a group of young admen and women at Lintas in Melbourne. At the start of the first day, getting to know each other, one of the women asked me a series of questions.

“Have you been to Australia before?”
“Yes, indeed.”
“And to Melbourne?”
“Oh yes.”
“What do you think of it?”
“Great city. Love it.”
“Ah… Have you worked with ad agencies here before?”
“Absolutely.”
“Well, have you been to this agency?”
Pause.
“I started this agency some ten years ago.”
Longer pause.
Was I bullshitting?
Apparently not.

Henry Handel in Lyme Regis

We went away for a few days last week – to beautiful Lyme Regis on the Dorset coast. Joyfully, I started reading a proper book for the first time in several weeks (since my sojourn at the John Radcliffe).

I found the book itself in the tiny but excellent second-hand bookshop down on The Cobb – The Way Home by the Australian novelist Henry Handel Richardson. It’s the second part of her triple-decker, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony.

It opens in Lyme Regis. Her house and garden, Westfield in Cobb Road, still stands, rather neglected. She was so rude in the book about the snobby natives in the town. No wonder she's not much celebrated there. One wonders how much things have changed in that department in the intervening century.

Born Ethel Richardson in Melbourne in 1870, she was educated at Melba’s old school, the Presbyterian Ladies’ College, before going to Germany as a young woman to study at the Conservatorium of Music in Leipzig. She was to write a damning novelised version of her schooldays at PLC, The Getting of Wisdom, .

Deciding that she was not going to make it as a musician, she went on to become Australia’s first really significant novelist.

By the way, she wanted to be judged as a writer, not as a woman writer, so Ethel was ditched in favour of Henry Handel (which she borrowed from a cousin).

Helena Rubinstein and the Sheep of Australia

I have recently been discussing with Facebook friends the apparent shortage of women innovators. Among the many contributory factors, one is that so many of the trained engineers and scientists in the western world have always been men.

But innovation comes in many forms and one woman that I find fascinating is the legendary Helena Rubinstein.

Born in 1870 in Krakow, Poland, she moved to Australia in 1902. She had very little English and no money. But she did have family there – her uncle was a shopkeeper in Coleraine, a small town some 350 kilometres west of Melbourne. This was Big Sheep country and there was an unending supply of lanolin, the grease secreted by the sheep to keep their woolly coats in good condition. Rubinstein used the lanolin as the basis of her own skin creams, disguising its unpleasant odour with lavender and other fragrances.

Later she moved to set up business in Collins Street, still the smartest place for shopping in Melbourne, then Sydney, then London, Paris and New York. She was a brilliant marketer of her products, creating the whole concept of “problem skin” and discovering that, if sales were flagging, raising prices was a good way to get things moving again. Her pushy mantra was: “There are no ugly women, only lazy ones.”

She was to become the first self-made female millionaire.

(I see that there’s a new book out by Ruth Brandon about Rubinstein and the founder of L’Oréal, Eugène Schueller, which I’ve not yet seen.)

Melba at 150

In two weeks time from today (19 May) it will be the 150th birthday of Helen Porter Mitchell. She was born in Melbourne, Australia, and was destined to become the leading opera singer in the world in the Golden Age - and a household name - Dame Nellie Melba.

There were a number of special qualities that separated Nellie from her contemporaries:

With the help of three teachers – Ellen Christian, Pietro Cecchi and Mathilde Marchesi – and the requisite “10,000 hours”, she developed a technique that enabled her to perform at the highest level over four full decades. “Salvatore, viens,” Marchesi called to her husband on first hearing the girl, “j’ai trouvé une étoile.”

In an age when married women were expected to give up work, she decided that instead the husband should go.

She had a wonderful sense of pitch and always sang in tune.

She learned many of her greatest roles with the composers themselves – Verdi, Massenet, Gounod, Puccini among them. And she promoted avant-garde songs by Debussy, Duparc, Chausson and others.

She took responsibility at all stages for managing her own career, bringing in a series of helpers, but never delegating the authority.

She was a brilliant entrepreneur, always ready to do what was necessary to maintain her profile and fill houses. “There are plenty of duchesses, but only one Melba,” she said.

“If you wish to understand me, you must understand first and foremost that I am an Australian,” she wrote. This attitude enabled her to break through the rigid barriers of British society of her day, speaking plainly with everyone at every level.

She was a catalyst in building the newly-emerging recording industry, negotiating a pioneering royalty arrangement.

When she died in Sydney in 1931, her coffin was carried by special train to Melbourne, stopping at towns and villages on the way so that crowds of people could pay their respects. Her grave at Lilydale carries a brief phrase from her most famous role, Mimì in La bohème: “Addio, senza rancor.” Farewell, no hard feelings.

Here she is at 65, singing that very aria , recorded live at her Farewell from Covent Garden in 1926: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEhr_3E3XEA