 |
| Melba by Henry Walter Barnett |
In an age when so many Australians are
world famous it’s hard for Australians to understand just how famous Nellie Melba was
during the 25 years either side of the turn of the 20th century. As her
biographer Ann Blainey says, ‘In an era when no woman was prime minister, chief
justice, or head of a great church or financial house...Melba was - apart from
a few queens and empresses - perhaps the best-known woman in the world.’
Born Helen Mitchell in 1861 in Melbourne,
Melba assumed her stage-name from the home town which was, in the year of her
birth, a wooden shanty-town in a far-off corner of the Empire. Her career,
however, took her to the world’s great opera houses and, via recordings and
pioneering broadcasts, to people all over the world. She was on familiar terms
with royalty.
The story of Melba’s discovery is often
recounted. After receiving some grounding in vocal technique from Pietro Cecchi
who taught above Allan’s in Collins Street, she auditioned for Mathilde Marchesi
in Paris who, legend has it, ran from the room to get her husband saying, ‘I
have found a star.’ Thereafter Marchesi coached Melba in the bel canto style, making her one of its
greatest exponents.
Melba achieved her fame principally in the
French and Italian repertoire. Tonight’s excerpts are taken from two of her
greatest roles, Marguerite in Gounod’s Faust
and Ophélie in Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet.
Few parts were written for her. Saint-Saëns created the title role for her in
his 1904 one-act opera Hélène. Melba
believed that Madam Butterfly was created for her though she never sang it, but
Puccini did coach her as Mìmì in La
bohème, which she sang in the Royal Opera’s first in-house production and
at the Monte Carlo premiere paired with Caruso.
We must depend on recordings to get our own
impressions of Melba’s singing. Unfortunately recording techniques earlier in
her career gave only intermittent sense of the ‘starlike brilliance’ of her
tone that critics like W.J. Henderson spoke of. Her farewell concert at Covent
Garden in June 1926 was captured by a new electrical method she wished had been
around at the beginning of her career but there, finally, you can get a sense
of the richness contemporaries praised, although by this stage the 65 year-old
was concentrating on roles that favoured her middle range.
It’s in the written word that we can still
get a sense of ‘Melbamania’, the mass clamouring that would greet her on trips
across America in her own railway car or to remote towns of Australia. Some might
have derided her as a snob (‘Sing em “muck”,’ she is supposed to have said when
Clara Butt asked for advice on her Australian repertoire), but she also made
sure she visited out-of-the-way places. Were these concerts inspired by
memories of Mackay in Queensland where she lived as a young woman?
Melba retained a great love of Australia.
Bringing opera to Australia as part of the Melba-Williamson seasons she saw as
patriotic acts. Her autobiography Melodies
and Memories (though probably ghost-written by Beverly Nichols) gives some
indication of her deepest longings. It begins with a description of the ‘long
white road’ leading out from Melbourne toward the ‘great Australian Bush’ and
the township of Lilydale, where she had built Coombe Cottage, her final ‘home
sweet home’ (to cite one of her favourite encores). Melba died in Sydney in
1931. Her memoir goes on to say that in Lilydale when she was a child ‘there
were no firm white roads over which motors speed by from a vast city, no
telephones straggling through burnt-up branches of the gum trees...’ Knowing
that, it’s astonishing how far she went in the wider world.
Gordon Kalton Williams, ©2014
This article first appeared in a program booklet published by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra
