Prima Voce Party









The following is an extract from 'Some Autumn Leaves', the memoirs of diplomat, traveller and raconteur Sir Neville Lushington, and it is reproduced by kind permission of the publishers, Minerva Press Ltd. of London WC2.

In the first half of the 20th century Britain was fortunate in the number of its artistic patrons. In the world of opera one thinks of such dazzling figures as Emerald Cunard, so often the pilot who steered the ship of Covent Garden through choppy waters, but there is no doubt in my mind as to who was the greatest Maecenas of them all - Algernon, 7th Earl of Bloomsbury. Without his financial support many a triumphant career would have failed to take its first faltering steps, and many an operatic production would have failed to find its way onto the stage. It was my privilege to enjoy the friendship of this fascinating man during the last decade of his unusually long life - the exact date of his birth was shrouded in mystery, but he was certainly very near his century when he closed his eyes for the last time - and one particular evening, spent with him in his London home, a house of impeccable elegance in a Nash terrace overlooking Regent's Park, left a lasting impression on my mind.

Although by then a very old man, Lord Bloomsbury still had a healthy appetite for a good dinner, a pedigree vintage port and a fine cigar, and it was in a mood of mellow contemplation that he answered a question which I had just put to him. 'Of all the great musical occasions which you have attended', I had asked him, 'which do you rate as having been the most extraordinary?' A dreamy smile suffused his aristocratic features. 'Funnily enough', he replied, 'that is not as hard a question as you might suppose. It was the occasion of my 50th birthday - I'm not going to tell you which year it was, or one of my last little secrets will be out of the bag - and I opened the doors of my country home to any of my singer friends who might have the time and inclination to take dinner with me. The guest list turned out to be a roll-call of all the talents. I can safely say that no such variety of vocal artistry has ever before been gathered together under one roof - I am just so grateful that it should have been mine!'

'After dinner', Lord Bloomsbury continued, 'my guests decided to reward me for any little assistance I may from time to time have given them, by one after the other rising to their feet and providing a song - most of them, in view of the informal nature of the occasion, from what one might call the more relaxed end of their repertoires. Their improvised programme opened with a remarkable curiosity. I had noticed that the Swiss tenor Hugues Cuenod had slipped out of the room, and now back he came in the costume of a serpent - unlike most tenors he was conspicuously tall and thin - and carrying a ladder! He then proceeded to reenact a scene which he had recently been playing in the Paris production of an operetta called Philippine by the French composer Marcel Delannoy, and blow me down if he didn't writhe in and out of the rungs of his ladder while singing the number! Cuenod's voice was (and happily still is) a most unusual instrument, and he has done sterling work as an interpreter of many of the great composers of the 20th century - Stravinsky, Milhaud and Frank Martin to name but a few. Well, when Cuenod had finished his vocal and physical contortions to the delight of all present, up stood the one and only Rosa Ponselle. Now, how can you describe a voice like hers? The critics used to fall over themselves trying to avoid the expression "a flow of liquid gold", but they could never keep away from it for long. Lotte Lehmann once asked Geraldine Farrar "How do you get a voice like Ponselle's?" and received the reply "By special arrangement with God." She made her debut at the Met, you know, at the age of only 21, singing Leonora in La forza del destino alongside Caruso - can you imagine a more amazing way to launch a career? And who could ever forget the sensation she caused with her Norma and her Traviata at Covent Garden? On this occasion she chose a favourite song of hers called ä l'aimé, (To my beloved), and I like to think that the wealth of emotional intensity which she packed into it was principally beamed at me! Most of the song lay in those wonderful bottom and middle registers of hers, which made you feel that you were listening to a contralto. But then up she went, with a leap of almost an octave, and the full richness of the voice was still there at the top. Phenomenal!'

'Well', the old gentleman continued after another sip of his port, 'Rosa was not an easy act to follow, but that sort of thing never worried Richard Tauber. With his customary happy chuckle he announced "Now is my turn and I make for you a little trick already, ja? I and my twin brother will sing you a duet!" Well, we all knew that he did not have a twin brother, but to our amazement he stepped with that slightly limping gait of his in front of a full-length mirror, screwed his monocle firmly into his right eye, and proceeded to sing Mendelssohn's Ich wollt' meine Liebe ergösse sich in harmony with his own reflection! How he did it none of us ever fathomed, but I swear to you that every little nuance in the one voice was faithfully mirrored in the other. He was of course a great musician, but even for him this was a 'tour de force'. Next, if my memory serves me aright, came that rather mysterious figure Miliza (or occasionally Militzia) Korjus. Nobody ever quite knew what nationality she claimed. Her father was a Swedish military attaché, her mother reputedly a Countess of Russian-Polish extraction, and her early life was spent travelling from one country to another. About two aspects of Miliza, though, there could be no doubt at all, namely that she was an unusually attractive young woman - she would scarcely have been chosen by Hollywood to star in 'The Great Waltz' if she hadn't been - and secondly that she possessed an extraordinary dexterity when it came to coloratura singing. This provided her with a string of brilliant successes in the opera houses of Berlin, Vienna, Munich and Paris, after which she settled in the United States and turned her attentions to revues, concerts, the radio and so forth. Anyway, at my party she obliged with a number about a nightingale by the German composer and concert pianist Moritz Moszkowsky, at the end of which Tauber was heard to call out very aptly "So one nightingale sings about another!" '

Lord Bloomsbury chuckled at the memory of this little witticism, and then, leaning back contentedly in his capacious leather-covered armchair he said to me 'I suppose you can't really compare any male singer to a nightingale, but if I were to do so the man I'd choose would be Beniamino Gigli. Not that he could twitter like Korjus, of course, but just like a little bird he always gave me the feeling that if he didn't sing he would burst. Beniamino was born, you know, in Recanati, in the Marche, where that succulent Verdicchio wine comes from, and to me his singing was half Verdicchio and half Mediterranean sunshine - he was simply sent into the world to sing. At my party he strolled, so to speak, down to Naples with di Capua's 'O sole mio', and despite the fog outside the dining-room windows I can assure you that for a couple of minutes the sun shone on us all. Nor did it hide its face as my next guest rose to her feet - the enchanting Elisabeth Schumann. Now I have a sneaking feeling that after Tauber's remark about Korjus, Elisabeth may have been keen to prove that she too could stand comparison with any nightingale, because she elected to pinch the tenor aria from the last act of Zeller's operetta Der Vogelhändler, (The Bird Seller), in which a nightingale singing down in the valley has an important part to play. Not only that, but she sang it surprisingly in English to make sure that I could understand the words, and she capped Miliza's birdlike coloratura with her own inimitable party trick of whistling with the precision of some feathered warbler. Did you ever see her as Sophie in Der Rosenkavalier? No? Then you may never know what is really meant by the word 'charm' - though come to think of it, where vocal charm is concerned it would not be easy to beat my next guest, the immortal Tito Schipa. Of all the tenor voices I have heard his was perhaps the most individual, the most instantly recognisable in timbre. It had a plaintive quality all of its own, something akin to the haunting tones of the oboe, and where others enjoyed raising roofs he was happy to beguile the ear with his immaculate artistry. Even so his voice had no trouble carrying to the furthest corners of the old Met or of the various enormous South American houses in which he was such a favourite. At my party he too pursued the nightingale theme with Rimsky-Korsakov's The Nightingale and the Rose. The minstrel in the poem receives as little response when he sings to his lady friend as the nightingale receives when it serenades a rose, but I can assure you that the response which greeted Schipa's rendering was not so negative! He formed a famous stage partnership with the coloratura soprano Amelita Galli-Curci, and they were close friends off stage as well as on. They were the joint toasts of the Chicago Opera for many seasons, and she was godmother to Schipa's daughter Elena. At the party, when the applause for his solo had died down, Tito called out "Adesso, Amelita, tocca a te - it's your turn," whereupon Galli-Curci obliged with Yradier's popular ditty La Paloma, (The Dove) phrased in that deliciously swooning style which always placed her gramophone records amongst the world's best sellers.'

At this point a look of infinite sadness crossed the old man's face. 'The next of my guests,' he continued, 'was the most tragic figure of all the 20th century's outstanding singers. Joseph Schmidt, born in what is now part of Romania, never had a chance in opera as he was only just over 5ft tall. As a recording and radio star, however, and in several German-language films, he achieved tremendous popularity, which alas was no use to him when the Nazis started hounding him from one country to another. When he died in wretched circumstances in a Swiss refugee camp he was only 38 - terrible to think of, especially when I remember the 'brio' with which he sang a concoction of Strauss waltz tunes on that memorable evening. Well, 'brio' wouldn't be the word for the contribution which followed Schmidt's. I don't think anyone but a Russian can really plumb the melancholy of None but the Lonely Heart', and of the great Russian sopranos of my lifetime Nina Koshetz was the Czarina. What a legato, what a majestic flow of tone - no wonder Rakhmaninov thought the world of her! Some voices can carry a great weight of emotion, you know, while others can't, and funnily enough, though in a totally different way from Koshetz, my next guest, Paul Robeson, was another who most definitely could. Let's not compare Trees with None but the lonely heart - I can't imagine Goethe perpetrating the couplet 'Upon whose bosom snow has lain/Who intimately lives with rain' - but listening to the dignity which Robeson conferred on that song one could not fail to understand why it enjoyed the vogue that it did. And talk about vogue - did ever a theatrical couple embody the image of a decade more vividly than Gertrude Lawrence and Sunk in his memories of that matchless son of Naples Lord Bloomsbury paused awhile, then, pouring each of us another glass of port he continued his account. 'Nobody wanted the task of following that colossal rendering, but after a few minutes' general conversation Sigrid Onegin took the plunge. Although born in Stockholm she was really half French and half German, and it was in Germany that she first made a name for herself, one of her earliest successes being a Carmen in Stuttgart with Caruso as her Don José. Anyway, on this occasion she exactly caught the mood of the moment with a skittish little number such as one would not expect to hear from a statuesque contralto of such ample vocal means as Onegin's, and she treated us in the process to two of the longest sustained phrases that I ever remember hearing. Well, lest anyone should suppose that she was the only person present who could harness a massive voice to humorous purposes, Alexander Kipnis, the great Russian bass known to us all as the finest Sarastro and Gurnemanz of his generation, then set the company chuckling with his version of Little Jack Horner, a musical pleasantry dreamt up by a respected publisher and vocal pedagogue named John Michael Diack. I had long been an admirer of Sascha Kipnis' versatility - he was equally at home with the ravings of Boris Godunov and the tenderest of Wolf Lieder - but Sascha the comedian was a revelation! We were then transported into very different territory via the magic of Maggie Teyte, the girl from Wolverhampton who had achieved the unlikely feat of becoming Debussy's favourite Mélisande and the world's most authoritative interpreter of French 'chansons'. She owed the composer Reynaldo Hahn her very first public appearance at the age of only 18 in a Mozart Festival, and she certainly repaid the debt that evening with the rapt intensity of his L'Heure exquise.'

I mentioned just now that dear Elisabeth Schumann had pinched a tenor's aria. Well, the Swiss tenor Herbert Ernst Groh put the record straight by pinching a duet for two sopranos! The Opera Ball, an operetta by Richard Heuberger, one of the leading Viennese music critics and a friend of Johannes Brahms, contains this gorgeous scene in which a young military cadet (a 'trouser role' à la Cherubino) is lured into a 'Chambre séparée' by a mysterious masked lady whom he takes to be a society beauty, but who is in fact his neighbours' housemaid. Borrowing a phrase or two from a different number in the score, Groh, like Joseph Schmidt a favourite radio singer, turned the duet into a highly effective tenor solo. Well, from one Swiss tenor to another. Hugues Cuenod, now back in immaculate white tie and tails, astonished us all by accompanying himself through a version of the Spiritual 'By then there was only one of my guests who had still not sung - Blanche Marchesi - and for two reasons I thought she might be unwilling to do so. One was that she was well on in years, and the other was that Melba had also been invited. It was an accepted fact that the two ladies could not abide one another, and I had had to be extremely cunning with my 'placement', but to my delight Mme. Marchesi volunteered to round off the proceedings. She and Melba, you know, were two of the foremost proponents of the vocal methods of her singing-teacher mother, the fabled Mathilde Marchesi, and she embodied an historic vocal tradition. In any case it was fascinating to hear what she could still do with Amuri, amuri, the song of a mournful Sicilian cart driver, urging his donkey through the last few paces of a harsh and painful day. Our celebration had been neither harsh nor painful, but somehow that splendid old lady, singing in the evening of her days, brought a memorable occasion to a strangely touching conclusion.

'Well, my boy,' Lord Bloomsbury concluded, 'there you have it, the most extraordinary musical event in my long life. And do you know' - he leant forward and tapped my knee for special emphasis as he said this - 'looking back on it there's only one thing that I regret. If only I could have had it all recorded!'

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