Nellie Melba

Note by John Steane











Assiduous collectors of the Prima Voce series may have wondered why there has been no Melba number before now. She is, after all, with Caruso, the most famous singer of what is still commonly represented as 'the golden age'. 'Caruso and Melba': it almost trips off the tongue as a compound noun in its own right. Yet other sopranos - Luisa Tetrazzini, Amelita Galli-Curci, Geraldine Farrar, even Emma Eames (to the extent of half a recital) - have taken precedence in the Prima Voce lists. Melba herself would not have been best pleased: anything with 'prima' in it meant her.

Now, as writer of these notes I can only answer for myself; but if I had been in the producers' place I would have found myself beset by doubts about what to include. This is not because of an embarrassment of riches: or at least, it is not because there are so many records clamouring for inclusion in their entirety. A very strange paradox arises concerning Melba (and it is one of several). She was a singer who could achieve perfection in a way that was beyond the capability of practically every other comparable singer both in her own and in later times; yet she was always spoiling things. While it is true that in most of her recordings there will come a moment - the placing of a high note, the spinning of a trill, or maybe the sweet-toned utterance of a simple phrase - when the heart of anyone with a love of singing will miss a beat, yet, within seconds of affording this glimpse of paradise, she may bring you down to earth with a kind of vocal ungraciousness that was all her own. Sometimes, when introducing her to people who know the name, and the fame of it, but who have never heard her voice on records, one realises that what is really needed is a specially prepared demonstration-tape composed of short passages, phrases or even individual notes. A time will usually come, later on, when one suddenly 'sees' it, and there may follow a severe bout of Melba-addiction. Anything of hers will then be welcome, even (as I seem to remember Andrew Porter saying) 'The Waters of Minnetonka'. But the introduction can be crucial: hence, I fancy, the producers' prolonged pause for thought.

This immense reputation of Melba's: many must have wondered whether it was not inflated, even to some extent manufactured. Her career was long and spectacular, but in a significant way it was also geographically limited. London's Covent Garden, as she said in her Farewell speech there, was always her 'artistic home'. She made her house debut in 1888, appeared subsequently in every summer season save two up to 1914, re-opened the house after the war in 1919, and sang there for the last time in 1926. At the Metropolitan her years were, more intermittently, 1893 to 1910; and the period of her association with Oscar Hammerstein's Manhattan Company, 1906-1909, was also one of legendary vocal splendour. She sang with Caruso first in Monte Carlo where her seasons were 1900 to 1904 (one missing). She also scored a triumph against all the odds at La Scala in 1893, and in 1891 the students spread their cloaks at her feet in the snow when she sang before the Tsar of Russia. Going backwards in her career, we find what would now be called the breakthrough in Paris, seven months after her operatic debut, which took place on 13 October 1887 at La Monnaie in Brussels. Nor did she forget her native Australia, where a particularly dear ambition was fulfilled when she returned with her own opera company which, over the years, had within its ranks such gifted singers as Toti Dal Monte, John McCormack and Apollo Granforte. All of this reads as a spectacularly comprehensive career, which indeed it was; but her appearances in Italy and Russia were confined to single seasons, in France they petered out early in the new century, and she was not (to my knowledge) heard at all in Germany, Austria, Spain or South America, where so many of the world's great singers found their most demonstrative audiences.

With Latin audiences she might have gained admiration, but never for long would they have taken her to their hearts. They liked the vibrant, passionate performances of Gemma Bellincioni, Eugenia Burzio, Ester Mazzoleni and their kind. Melba was their antithesis; with none of that fierce quick-spun vibrato which they found so exciting, Melba's purity would have seemed sexless, frigid. Though her acting sometimes drew praise in the British and American press, southerners would have considered her impersonal, resistant to the emotional abandonment looked for in the heroines of verismo opera. Yet there is no doubt that in the 1890s she had a capacity to excite. She was a beautiful young woman and her voice dazzled not only by its purity and by the technical accomplishment of its usage, but by the brilliance and ease on high and also by its volume. Of all the descriptions of her singing, the one which tells us most about the effect she produced in her prime was written at the time of her death, in 1931, by the veteran American critic W.J. Henderson. He remembered her Metropolitan debut when "the voice was in the plenitude of its glory" and now he sought a way of explaining why it was that she was so special, so decidedly not an early version of Lily Pons or Marion Talley. Her voice, he said, "has been called silvery, but what does that signify? There is one quality which it had which may be comprehended even by those who did not hear her: it had splendour. The tones glowed with a star-like brilliance. They flamed with a white heat."

These are words to bear in mind while we listen to her records. The most extraordinary (and the shortest) among them is also the one which probably does most to reveal her 'splendour'. This is the Distance Test (track 7) made in 1910 and, contrary to usual practice, preserved, though of course never issued till long after Melba's death. It shows her singing two phrases from Ophelia's mad scene in the opera Hamlet, the first in full voice and with notes in the high register, the second a quiet lyrical passage in the lower part of the voice. With each repetition she sings at an increased distance from the recording horn and then rounds off the little exercise with a trill and a return to the key-note at the end. The first and nearest 'take' would have been rejected as likely to 'blast' the instrument itself and to wear too heavily in the finished product. But that is the one we want, the one that has splendour. Later recording processes and reproductive systems would have had no problem, but much was lost to us, especially in the women's voices, in those early days because of such limitations. Even so, listening to the 1907 recording of the complete solo (track 6), we hear enough of the real Melba to comprehend her greatness; and the trio from Faust (track 5), recorded very probably on the same day as the Test, shows formidable power and energy. The 'Sevillana' from Massenet's Don César (track 4) is another that has her singing out as she might have done in the opera house - and it is worth noting that both of these were unissued in their time, probably because they were thought likely to produce that greying of the grooves which in the old days betrayed wear on the record.

Of the remaining operatic items in this collection, only three represent her stage roles. Her Desdemona (10 and 11) and Mimì (12) were greatly admired and, with Juliette in Gounod's opera, were chosen for her Farewell evening at Covent Garden at the age of sixty-five. The title-role in Elaine (20) was written for her, and she sang it at the opera's premiere in 1892. Herman (sometimes 'Henri') Bemberg was a favourite of Melba's both as a musician and a companion, and in all probability she would not have been at all unhappy to find that he is the composer heard most often in this selection (14, 15, 20, 21). Over the years (and, it might be said, not before time) her repertoire of songs grew to include some by Debussy (16 and 17), Chausson (18) and Hahn (19). She also like to have a flautist with her, usually John Lemmoné, who also became her general manager; 'Lo, here the gentle lark', Sir Henry Bishop's setting of four lines from Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, is an example of their collaboration given here (9). Always towards the end of a concert, Dame Nellie would sing for 'ordinary folk', who liked best to hear a familiar song with a good tune sung in their own language. That usually meant 'Home, sweet home', but the last record she made was of a spiritual, 'Swing low, sweet chariot'. By then the electrical process of recording has come in. After the Distance Test, this (22), despite the singer's age, is perhaps the one to go to to bring her close. It is also movingly heard as the last item in our recital.

She was so full of contradictions. Often she has been described as cold, and in some respects she was (her 'Vissi d'arte', (13), is not really sung by Floria Tosca). But coldness is not the abiding memory or association. First, in oneself: it is not possible, I think, to remain cold or indifferent in the face of such loveliness, irreplaceably her own, as characterises particular phrases in (for example) her singing of Louise's 'Depuis le jour' (3). She herself was not 'cold' when she sang Tosti's waltz-song, 'Se saran rose' (Prima Voce Party, NI 7839) like the Queen of the Fairies in a pearly-queen knees-up at Southend. Nor is she cold in that spiritual. It is strange. She could be a hard woman and also a very kind one. Her singing could be rigid and apparently heartless; it could also be intensely moving. To one who knows her voice, the sound of it, suddenly and unexpectedly heard, can be the most moving of all.


© 1997 John Steane

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