Why so many Great Aussie Singers?

 

Last Tuesday Tony Locantro and I did a joint talk to the Recorded Vocal Art Society in London entitled ‘More Australian Singers on Record’.

‘More’ because this was Tony’s second go with them – he had previously done the premier division Aussie singers (Nellie Melba, Frances Alda, Florence Austral, Peter Dawson, Joan Hammond, Joan Sutherland and so on).

This time around we featured a new range of singers, many of them just as good as the first lot, but who had been substantially forgotten (including the first recording of a female singer in Britain, Syria Lamonte in 1898, the popular radio baritone Clem Williams, and two discs which may well be unique: one of Australia’s most successful composers, Alfred Hill, singing his own most famous song, ‘Waiata Poi’, and the great baritone, Harold Williams, in a rousing Cobb and Co song, ‘Old John Bax’).

As is usual on such occasions, I was asked why it is that Australia has produced such an amazing and continuous line-up of terrific vocalists. And, as usual, I responded, ‘Well, I don’t really know.’

Is it because there was not so much to do by way of entertainment before the advent of television, so that people had to make their own? Although the population was quite small, Australia had the highest per capita ownership of pianos in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Is that a relevant factor? Did singing become compellingly fashionable as a social asset? Was vocal skill seen as a way of escaping from poverty? Is the climate in some way relevant?

Did the extraordinary success of Nellie Melba provide a major sustaining role-model? Or was it perhaps connected with the vowel sounds produced by Australians and the resulting embouchure? That was the theory of the great teacher of so many successful young Australian singers in Paris, Mathilde Marchesi. Maybe all of these were factors in the rise of outstanding singers over a century and more.

When our set of four CDs, ‘From Melba to Sutherland’, is published in a few months’ time, you’ll be able to answer that question for yourselves!

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.

Ten Aussie tenors

While Australia has produced a regal procession of sopranos over the course of a century and more, the tenors are not so well-remembered, none being in the Caruso/Pavarotti class, but here are ten that we’re including in ‘From Melba to Sutherland: Australian Singers on Record’:

Browning Mummery (above)
Alfred O’Shea
Lionello Cecil (Lionel Cecil Sherwood)
Max Worthley
Harold Blair
Ronald Dowd
Kenneth Neate
John Lanigan
Donald Smith
Albert Lance

As a young man, the earliest of them, Browning Mummery, sang with Nellie Melba at her famous 'Farewell' to Covent Garden in 1926, and the latest, the wonderful Albert Lance, sang with Maria Callas at her equally famous debut at the Opéra in Paris in 1958.

Here’s Albert Lance in Tosca: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KoGaCvdYVs

Divas and urban myths

It’s over twenty years since I started researching and writing about the life and work of the great Australian diva, Dame Nellie Melba. Throughout that time, when I asked professional singers and other musicians about her, they would smile knowingly, and there would be a pause…

“Don’t you know that she was into oral sex?… In the intervals of operas… in her dressing room… said it was good for her vocal cords.”

I must have heard it dozens of times. And yet, of course, there seems to be no real evidence, beyond the fact that it’s an urban myth.

So I was quite surprised to read in Rupert Christiansen’s column in the Daily Telegraph recently that she would “haul stage hands into her dressing room…” Someone had told him that it was true – and Christiansen’s story at least has the embellishment of the stage hands.

How can one possibly know the truth at this distance in time? And only recently I was told that the original story was not about Melba at all, but about her great competitor, the Italian soprano Luisa Tetrazzini.

Of course, there’s no actual evidence for that either, unless, of course, someone in the know told you…

All the world before you

I seem to be in the midst of an intensive Australian phase here in England currently. The exhibition at the RA I’ve written about, but in parallel with that I’ve been doing some judging of young Aussie musicians, applicants for scholarships from the Australian Music Foundation.

What an amazing array of talent is out there. We started this year with fifty-eight, whittling them down to ten for the finals at the Wigmore Hall. We were looking not only for talent and capability, but also for potential – something much harder to assess.

Young Australian musicians still come in droves to study and launch their careers in Europe and America, as they have for over a century. If Nellie Melba thought they had potential, she sent them off to study with her own teacher in Paris, Madame Marchesi. Percy Grainger sent them to New York, to the Juilliard School, to study with the then dean of the school, fellow-Aussie composer-pianist, Ernest Hutcheson.

The winners this year were an extraordinary recorder player who specialises in contemporary composers, Rhia Parker; two brilliant violinists, Suyeon Kang and Sally Law; and a big-voiced tenor, Gerard Schneider. Past and present scholarship winners then gave a brilliant recital at Christie’s (heralding their auction of Australian art).

Although there has been a steady stream of Australian sopranos, contraltos and basses ‒ from Melba to Sutherland and beyond ‒ good Aussie tenors have always been a rare breed, so it was good to be able to help one in the early stages of his career.

Having said that, what a fine tenor Stuart Skelton is – brilliant as Britten’s Peter Grimes (above) under Vladimir Jurowski in Birmingham and London, and at the same time singing the taxing role of Florestan in Fidelio for ENO at the Coliseum.

Dame Kiri as Dame Nellie in Downton Abbey

My friend Robert Reitano was not happy from the start. “Undeserving” was how he described Dame Kiri Te Kanawa (actually that was the least offensive word he used), when it was announced that that she would be appearing as Dame Nellie Melba in Downton Abbey.

Certainly Kiri has a quite different sort of voice from Nellie, but aside from that mere detail, they do appear to have several things in common. In the 1920s, when the current series is set, Melba was in the evening of her career – as Kiri is now. They were both major operatic stars and household names. And both conquered Europe and America, having grown up in Australasia.

However, now it’s clear that Kiri will be singing “O mio babbino caro” (O my beloved father) from Puccini’s comic opera Gianni Schicchi, Robert is positively outraged.

“Have you seen the trailer?” he asks.  “Gianni Schicchi was only premièred at the Met in December 1918 and the aria was virtually unknown outside of the opera until Joan Hammond’s famous recording in English in 1941. Surely Melba would have sung ‘Home, Sweet Home’, or ‘Comin’ thru the rye’ or ‘Annie Laurie’ or something by Hahn or Bemberg or Tosti. An operatic aria is unlikely on such an occasion in such a venue. Yet another Downton solecism, surely.”

What’s right about the re-enactment is that Melba did indeed sing at evening soirées in aristocratic houses, as did many of the opera stars of her era. The difference was that they all arrived by the tradesmen’s entrance, sang behind a velvet rope, did not mingle with the guests and left by the same door.

Melba, on the other hand, entered and departed through the front door, cleared away the velvet rope and chatted freely with the guests, many of whom were close personal friends. Her charge for such an occasion was £500, equivalent to around £40,000 in today’s money. And for this consideration she would sing perhaps three songs.

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

Walter Barnett at 150

I missed Walter Barnett’s 150th birthday. He was born on 25 January 1862.

Walter who? H Walter Barnett. Australia’s first world-class portrait photographer. I was lucky enough to rediscover him and his fine work and thought Something Should Be Done about it. But what?

So on a trip to Sydney, I went to see my friend Leo Schofield, at that time director of the Sydney Festival. Leo knows everything worth knowing about the arts in Australia.

“What do you think of Walter Barnett’s work, Leo?” I asked as innocently as possible.

“Walter who?”

“You know, the Australian portrait photographer,” I replied.

“No. Don’t think I know of him,” said Leo.

Cue for me to lay out on Leo’s desk a dozen or so photocopies of Barnett portraits – the writer Robert Louis Stevenson, the great pianist Paderewski, Mark Twain, the “father” of Australia Sir Henry Parkes, artists Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton and Charles Conder, Dame Nellie Melba, actress Sarah Bernhardt (above), sculptor Auguste Rodin and so on.

There was a pause.

“Will you curate an exhibition for the Festival?” asked Leo.

“Well yes. I’d be delighted to.”

That morning, Leo called Andrew Sayers, director of the recently-opened National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, and so Legends: The Art of Walter Barnett became an NPG project that ran in Sydney, Canberra and the Mornington Peninsula.

Overall it was visited by some 186,000 people.

Nellie Melba and The Star Spangled Banner

As we all know, a vital ability in life is to respond creatively to an unforeseen threat quickly and decisively.

The great Australian diva, Nellie Melba, was set to sing Rosina in The Barber of Seville in San Francisco in 1898. Nothing unusual about that. It was one of her regular and best roles.

The problem was that the opera is set in Spain and, at that moment, Spain was threatening to invade and lay claim to Cuba. War appeared imminent and anti-Spanish feeling in the USA was running high. At the performance, although Melba herself was treated courteously by the audience, the barber, Figaro, was roundly booed.

What to do?

It so happens that in Act 2 there is a singing lesson where the composer, Rossini, allows Rosina to perform a song of her own choosing “ad libitum”. In San Francisco, the piano was pushed on stage, and Melba, a fine pianist, accompanied herself singing one of America’s favourite songs of the day, Stephen Foster’s “Old Folks at Home”. And, when the applause had died down a little, she followed up immediately with “The Star Spangled Banner”.

A local reporter noted: “People rose in their seats and cheered themselves hoarse.” The audience wept – the diva with them. Problem solved.

Sadly there are no recordings by her of those songs, nor of The Barber of Seville, so here she is singing (dazzlingly) the Jewel Song from Gounod’s Faust in 1905: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxrgX729kZA

Passing of Nellie Melba’s granddaughter

Sad to note the death in Australia at 92 of Pamela, Lady Vestey, at her home, Coombe Cottage at Coldstream in Victoria’s Yarra Valley.

She was the adored granddaughter of the great Australian diva, Dame Nellie Melba. Coombe Cottage had been built by Melba in 1910, and Lady Vestey lived there, guardian of Melba’s legacy, for the last four decades of her life.

I met her some ten years ago at a talk on Melba’s recordings at the Athenaeum Theatre in nearby Lilydale. I had been advised that she was quite deaf and would probably not hear much of it. But, of course, the difficulty in hearing among the elderly is at its most severe in social situations, where there is a lot of ambient noise. I noticed this chatting with her before the talk.

Then, when I started, the theatre fell silent and her face turned towards me. And when I played the first of the Melba recordings – the “Mad Scene” from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor – she positively beamed with pleasure. Clearly she heard it well enough, the memory of her grandmother’s voice flooding back.

We have lost a gracious lady, one of the last links with that Golden Age.

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