Riding into the funeral pyre

Girls brought up on the farm in country Victoria in Australia are usually fit and healthy, learning to ride very young. Certainly Marjorie Lawrence from Dean’s Marsh had no problems in this department.

So in January 1936, when she had her chance to make her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in one of operas’s most demanding roles, Brünnhilde in Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods, she thought that it might be a good idea to follow the composer’s specific instructions – to mount and ride her horse, Grane, on-stage into Siegfried’s blazing funeral pyre, the climax of the opera.

Perhaps, she thought, it would be only polite to check this out with the director and conductor in advance. Under no circumstances, they responded. It would be much too risky.

And why take the risk? It had never been done. Unthinkable. Just do what your illustrious predecessors have done – at Bayreuth and Covent Garden, in Vienna and Paris, here at the Met. Lead the horse quietly off-stage behind the bonfire.

For many of those predecessors, to do what she was proposing would be a physical impossibility – several would have been just too large and most of the rest wouldn’t have been able to ride anyway.

Of course, to the astonishment of the audience, the critics and not least the stage director and the conductor, she leapt adroitly aboard and rode Grane confidently exactly as the libretto instructs, singing all the while.

The New York newspapers reported the event in full. She had sung magnificently. And now she was a star.

The performance was recorded live and was issued on CD in 2004. Here she is singing Brünnhilde, recorded in Paris and in French:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8UmfC-6ToA

Sadly she was struck down by polio in her prime at 32. But that's another story.

The rise and rise of La bohème

I’ve been aware for many years that the catalytic role of Nellie Melba in turning Puccini’s opera La bohème from something of a flop into one of the world’s favourite operas has not been understood. One could read any of the multiplicity of biographies of the composer or the diva without grasping this.

So I was thrilled to be asked to write an essay covering the way she went about it for this year’s programme for Glyndebourne. And delighted to be invited with my wife and ten year old daughter (her first opera) to the dress rehearsal of David McVicar’s superb production on Saturday.

Briefly, this is what happened.

Although La bohème had its première in 1896 in Turin with Toscanini conducting, it was something of a flop. Several other productions followed, including one in England given by the Carl Rosa company.

Melba somehow had decided that Puccini was “the coming man” and arranged to go to Lucca, where the composer lived, to study the role of Mimì with him. There are various versions as to how long she was there, but she worked with him every day on the rôle.

She was already the most famous opera singer in the world and could so easily have taken the opera into any of the leading houses in the world. But she did not do this. Instead she formed a company of her own in the USA and toured La bohème from coast to coast in 1898/99, starting at Philadelphia in the east and finishing in San Francisco.

Only then did she feel ready to take it to Covent Garden, where it was “the hit of the season”, according to Punch.

Then she went on tour with it a second time, again from coast to coast in America, but this time with the Metropolitan Opera, starting in Los Angeles, and arriving triumphantly at the company’s home base in New York on Boxing Day of 1900.

The opera never looked back.

The question is: why is this story not better known, even to opera buffs?

Here she is, singing the duet from Act 1 with Enrico Caruso, recorded in 1907:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COXFBMoTgSw