Dame Nellie Melba – Ann Blainey

Ann Blainey is an author of five biographies. Her most recent biography is I Am Melba which records anew and with particular detail the life story of Australia’s renowned opera diva, Dame Nellie Melba. The work also reflects Blainey’s fascination with singing and opera. Ann Blainey has served on the council of two Australian opera companies and the council of the Percy Grainger Museum in Melbourne. Ann Blainey addressed The Sydney Institute on Wednesday 16 May 2012 to reflect on the extraordinary personality and talent of Nellie Melba. Opera singer Renae Martin joined Ann Blainey on the night to sing some of Melba’s favourite music.

DAME NELLIE MELBA

ANN BLAINEY

I expect most of you know something of Nellie Melba. What I suspect you may not know is just how famous she was.

Melba was the celebrity of her day. Almost everyone across Britain, Europe and America and Australia knew her name. Her activities were constantly reported in newspapers, and when she appeared in public she was often mobbed by fans. The Americans invented words for the mobbing. They called it “Melbamania” or the Melba Rage.

Melba’s extraordinary fame came basically from the beauty of her voice and the exquisite skill with which she used it. But her fame was also greatly helped by her early emergence as a recording artist. The gramophone had scarcely been invented when Melba decided to record her voice. By doing so, she managed to reach millions of people, a feat that had been impossible for any previous prima donna.

We must remember that, apart from a few queens and princesses, few women had world–wide fame during Melba’s time. No woman was a prime minister, chief justice or head of a financial house, and there were very few female film stars.  In a sense, one could say that Melba was the first of the female popstars.

Helen Porter Mitchell – to give Melba her real name – was born on 19 May 1861, near the comer of Burnley and Victoria Streets in the Melbourne suburb of Richmond. Her parents, David Mitchell and Isabella Mitchell had migrated from Scotland to Melbourne, and soon after arrival David Mitchell bought several acres of land in Burnley Street where he set up his business as a building contractor and brick maker. By the time Melba was born he had built a large house next to his brickworks; and it was here – on the banks of the Yarra River near the Victoria Street Bridge – that she spent the first twenty or so years of her life.

Melba was the eldest in the family, and was musical from the start. Family legend has it that she could never be kept away from the piano, and by the age of eight – thanks to the tuition of her aunt Lizzie – she was an accomplished pianist, and a promising young singer. We know this for certain because that year she took part in two amateur concerts in Richmond, both of which were reported in the local paper. The reviewer was astonished that so young a child could be so mature and brilliant a performer.

Her musical instruction continued under professional teachers when at the age of fourteen she entered the newly opened Presbyterian Ladies College. Overall, she was no more than an average student- academically. However, she was well above average in elocution and English and art and outstanding at piano, organ and singing. At this stage, however, the piano was her chief study: And when she told people that she believed that she could be famous, everyone imagined she was aiming to be a famous pianist.

In 1879 – at the age of eighteen – she left school. That same year her mother became ill, and at the end of 1881 her mother died. As Melba stood beside the deathbed, Isabella Mitchell put the seven younger children in Melba’s care, and spoke especially of four year old Vere, her youngest child. Melba who loved her mother very dearly – saw her mother’s words as a sacred charge, and had Vere’s cot moved into her own bedroom. She was therefore sleeping beside the child when, on 19 January 1882, little Vere became ill. As Melba lay upon her bed, racked with anxiety about her little sister, she believed she saw the figure of her dead mother glide out of the shadows and point to the little girl. Next day, Melba – in some alarm – described the vision to her father and begged him to call the doctor. He brushed her words aside and said he would see how Vere was when he returned home that evening. His decision was tragically ill advised. By four o’clock in the afternoon, Vere was dead.

Melba describes herself as being shocked, bewildered and depressed by this double dose of death. This is probably an understatement – I think she had a nervous breakdown. As well as grieving for her mother and little sister, she must have been carrying a burden of guilt because her mother had left Vere specifically in her care. And that burden of guilt must have been crushing.  We do know that David Mitchell was worried about her – so much so that he decided she must have a change of scene. He owned shares in a sugar plantation Mackay in North Queensland, and he decided to visit it, taking Melba with him.

Despite her sense of guilt and grief, Melba was a huge success in the small town of Mackay. The town and district contained a cultivated group of English pastoralists and planters, and Melba was soon a star performer at the concerts that provided their cultural life. She also attended the performances of a travelling opera troupe that was holding a season in Mackay. These may have been the first operas that she had ever seen, and the excitement generated by those simple performances, left a lasting impression on her.

Melba – who was a strikingly attractive girl – soon found herself courted by Mackay’s young bachelors; and gradually one of these young men began to stand out from the rest. He was Charles Nesbitt Armstrong, the penniless younger son of an Irish baronet. He was tall, handsome, a daredevil rider and the type of young man who acts first and thinks afterwards. His nickname was Kangaroo Charlie, a reference to his boxing prowess. For a girl who was still reeling from the death of two of the best loved people in her life – and who was desperate for a love to replace them – Charlie’s advent must have seemed heaven sent. Within months she was insisting on marrying him.

Charlie and Melba married in Brisbane, returning quickly to Melbourne for their honeymoon. Soon afterwards, Charlie accepted David Mitchell’s offer of a manager’s job on the Mackay sugar plantation, and sailed up north, leaving Melba, now pregnant, to join him two months later. During those two months, Melba took daily singing lessons from a talented Italian teacher named Pietro Cecchi, who undoubtedly laid the foundation of her extraordinarily fine singing technique. It was already clear that the girl – who had decided at sixteen that she would be musically famous – had taken note of the travelling opera troupe, and was stealthily preparing herself for a possible future life.

In due course, Melba returned to Mackay. Her son was born, the wet season set in and everything went from bad to worse. Both she and Charlie had explosive tempers, and their quarrels proliferated. One suspects that Melba’s post natal anxiety was high. After all, it was only eighteen months since infant Vere’s death, and here she was with another infant in her charge, and no sympathetic family to support her. Shut up in a tiny house – which one can still visit – with the rain drumming on the tin roof, she had reached the end of her tether. She wrote a letter to Cecchi, saying that she and her husband needed money, and they had decided she should return to Melbourne to join a travelling opera troupe. (It was a lie – but it is possible that at the moment of writing she had persuaded herself to believe it). A month later, the marriage effectively ended, when she and the baby sailed for the security of Melbourne and her father’s house.

Back beside the Yarra River, she re-commenced singing lessons and began singing professionally in the hope of raising money for a trip to Europe. Her father, who considered a professional female opera singer only a few degrees better than a fallen woman, refused to assist her. But a year later, he was persuaded to change his mind. In 1885, he was appointed Victorian delegate to the Indian and Colonial Exhibition in London and Melba seized her chance.  She argued so long and hard to

accompany him that in the end he gave in, with one proviso. Her husband and child and sisters should come with them. Charlie was summoned from Mackay and the Mitchell party arrived in London in May 1886.

Melba had brought letters of recommendations to well known English musicians and impresarios, but the results were disappointing. Arthur Sullivan auditioned her, but only offered an apprenticeship in the Savoy Opera chorus; and the impresario Carl Rosa did not even remember to keep their appointment. Her father and husband were delighted by her lack of success, but Melba had one last shot to fire. She persuaded her father to finance a trip to Paris, for her to audition for Mathilde Marchesi, one of the most famous teachers of singing in Europe. If that failed, she would agree to return to Australia.

At her audition in Paris, Melba sang “Ah fors’e lui” from La Traviata, with the formidable Madame Marchesi herself accompanying her at the piano. Halfway through the aria, Madame stopped abruptly and ran out of the room. Melba held back her tears, sure that she had failed. A moment later, Madame reappeared tugging her harassed husband behind her. “At Last I have found a star,” she cried out to him. Turning to Melba she said, “I shall make of you something extra-ordinary.”

Madame Marchesi’s teaching was thorough. As well as teaching vocal technique and the opera repertoire, she insisted that her pupils learn deportment, etiquette, fashion, languages and movement. And she rechristened her pupils with exotic surnames names, often inspired by the state or city in which they had been born: For example, an aspiring soprano from the American west became Emma Nevada, and a young Canadian soprano became Florence Toronta – and Nellie Armstrong became Nellie Melba.

Three times a year, Madame held concerts which were glorified auditions: concerts where her best students sang to composers like Gounod and Massenet and impresarios like the manager of the Paris Opera. The newly named Melba absorbed the teaching and was soon a star of those concerts. After eighteen months, she gained a contract to make her debut at the Monnaie Theatre in Brussels.

Melba appeared as Gilda in Rigoletto at the Monnaie on 13 October 1887. I have read the reviews she received in the Brussels and Paris papers. The reviews are rapturous. They hail her as the new soprano star of Europe. The expertness of her technique astonished them and here we must have a thought for Pietro Cecchi in far away Melbourne. He had given her the greater part of her technique, and it is a tragedy that he never received due praise. As far as Europe was concerned, Melba was the product of Marchesi’s teaching.

From now on, triumph followed triumph. The next year, she conquered the Paris Opera and her two sisters, who were visiting from Melbourne, could not believe their eyes when Melba came back and back for curtain calls. In 1889, she conquered Covent Garden, which from then on remained her artistic home. She sang at the Covent Garden Opera House for part of almost every season for the following 37 years.

Nor was her career confined only to England and France. In 1893, she travelled to New York, and thereafter sang in numerous seasons at the Metropolitan Opera. In 1906 and 1908, she sang also for Oscar Hammerstein at the Manhattan Opera for the colossal fee of $ 3000 a performance.  In 1894, she formed her own American touring company which proved so successful that for the next 30 years she toured with it almost annually, putting on operas and concerts across the United States and Canada, and travelling in a private train especially built for her by Mr Pullman .

Melba also sang in Russia, and Spain and Italy.  At her debut in Rome, she sang so badly that many in the audience left at interval: the cause was her nerves.  Knowing the partisanship of Italian audiences, she was intensely apprehensive and her voice was robbed of its ease and brilliance, a fault which critics were quick to point out.  Despite this setback, she was invited to sing at La Scala Opera House the following year.  The critics – remembering her poor showing in Rome – began a vicious campaign against her, even before she stepped on stage. Fortunately, Melba was a fighter. On opening night, she faced the audience with determination, and triumphed.

And, of course, she came to sing in Australia. In 1902 and 1907 she returned on what could only be called royal visits. It was during the 1909 visit that she bought an old farmhouse on the outskirts of Melbourne, near Lilydale, and named it Coombe Cottage. In 1911, Melba returned to Australia for over a year, living at Coombe Cottage when she was not touring with her opera company, and reconnecting with the land of her birth.

On the eve of the First World War, she hurried to Australia to see her ailing father; and once war was declared she threw herself into raising funds for patriotic charities. At town halls around Australia, she held concerts, preceded by auctions of flags, discovering in the process that she was a born auctioneer. In past years, she had been rather aloof with audiences, presenting herself on stage as a remote, fairytale figure, in grand gowns and fabulous jewellery.

At the patriotic auctions and concerts, she was still a grand figure but much less distant. She beguiled and cajoled and cheeked the audience into parting with money, and this led to a long term change in her public style. In future, at all her concerts, she would chat away to the spectators. The audience adored it, and this is one of the ways in which she earned the title of “Our Melba”. Her fundraising was extended to America and Canada, and is said to have raised a £100,000 for war relief. It was for such work that she was created Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

Melba returned to London in 1919 to reopen Covent Garden Opera House. But by now she was almost 60, and the strains of her career were beginning to tell. The rest of her life was a struggle against the inroads of time on a magnificent physique and an even more magnificent voice.

Melba suffered many illnesses in these last years: each winter she battled lung infections. Then she developed collitis and gynecological problems, and finally diabetes. At first she managed to hide her ill health, and kept up a frenetic pace of performances and travel – and people marvelled at her seemingly youthful vitality. But it was a struggle, and her secretaries often found that she was stretching herself – and them – beyond the limits of endurance.

Melba made another opera tour of Australia in 1924, bringing the largest opera cast, personally chosen by herself, so far to visit Australian shores.  It performed in Melbourne and Sydney and caused furore. On the last night Melba stood on stage at His Majesty’s Theatre Melbourne – against a background of electric lights that flashed out the words “Australia’s Greatest Daughter – Our Melba”.

That night began her official farewell to the stage. But it was not really a farewell. She could not live without the excitement of performing. Her farewells to opera – and then to concerts – went on for another four years: her official farewell to Covent Garden taking place in 1926. This sequence of farewells was not so unusual as some maintain, and was certainly not confined to Melba. There was ample historical precedent.  Adelina Patti, the top soprano of the generation previous to Melba’s, was just as farewell-prone as Melba. Audiences more or less expected it.  It was just something that divas did.

Although much of her life was sensationally successful, Melba encountered problems, both professional and personal. She had been taught in Australia to sing by the “bel canto” method, which produced a light, flexible voice, well-suited to florid music and favoured by composers like Rossini and Donizetti, and Verdi in his earlier years. When she reached Europe, she found that this style was going out of fashion; and heavier, more dramatic singing was gaining popularity.

She was safe for the moment, since she sang the old-style repertoire so superbly.  Nevertheless, a soprano could not hope to stay in the front rank unless she sang the heavy and dramatic operas of the rising favourite: Richard Wagner. In 1897 – though it suited neither her voice nor her temperament – she attempted the role of Brunnhilde at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. She sang only one performance. It was close to a disaster.

Such a defeat would have disrupted many careers, but Melba kept her head, and sensibly searched for a solution. She needed a dramatic, modern-style opera that suited a “bel canto” trained voice, and she found it in Puccini’s opera, La Boheme.  She popularised that opera and sang it, with great success, until the end of her career.

Melba was fond of saying that the over-emotional prima donna was dead today, and the best singers exhibited “qualities that would have made them equally successful as managers of big businesses, and generals of great campaigns”. In this she was very much a twenty-first century woman.

What about her private life? Well it was not without sadness. The strains of an exacting public career don’t make for domestic happiness – which was a pity because Melba had a strong sense of family and needed to give and receive love.  She adored her Royal lover, the Duke of Orleans, whom she met in London in 1890. He was a dashing figure, younger than herself, second in line to the French throne if the Orleanist Royals were restored. And there was a fair chance that they might be. He loved his Nellie for her unfettered Australian spirit, which made her so unlike the other women he had known.

The Duke and the diva enjoyed a rather public affair for two years – at the end of which Charlie sued for divorce, naming the Duke as correspondent. As might be imagined, this caused the Orleanists and Melba much embarrassment. It is usually said that diplomatic pressure caused the case to be dropped, but the legal records reveal that it failed because Charlie – who had spent most the last five years in Queensland – was deemed to be an Australian resident, and was therefore not eligible to bring a divorce suit in England. Unfortunately, the dropping of the divorce did not save Melba and the Duke’s relationship. They parted, with grief on both sides.

The marriage to Charlie finished officially in 1900 when, while living in Texas, he sued for divorce on grounds of desertion. Melba did not contest the suit, though she would have liked to contest the court’s ruling that their son, George, must continue to live with his father. Melba had never forgiven Charlie for having summarily taken

the child from his English boarding school, and for having spirited him off to Texas, where Melba was unable to trace him.

In fact, Melba was denied sight of George for eleven years – a source of the greatest pain to her. Mother and son were only reunited when George turned 21 and was legally able to leave his father. George returned to England to live with Melba, and he brought her great happiness, threaded with some sadness. His first marriage to a fashionable English girl failed miserably, but his second, to a warm-hearted Australian singer named Evelyn Doyle, brought both George and Melba great joy. When his daughter, Pamela was born, Melba’s joy knew no limits.

In October 1930, Melba sailed back to Australia, for what was to be the last time. She had not been well when she boarded the ship, and she became increasingly ill as the voyage progressed. When she arrived in Melbourne she was met by an ambulance and taken to Mt St Evins Hospital, where she recovered sufficiently to able to spend Christmas at Coombe Cottage. Nevertheless, her health still caused anxiety. When her daughter-in-law’s brother – who was a doctor in Sydney – came down for Christmas to visit them, Melba asked his advice.  He decided that Melba should go to Sydney to be under his care. In January, she made the journey to Sydney and immediately entered St Vincent’s hospital. And there, for nearly two months, she lay, at first recovering, then dying.

What was the nature of her illness? I don’t know for sure. That she had septicaemia is fairly certain: it was on her death certificate. But how she came by it is open to conjecture. The official version, given out by the family, is that she had typhoid; and that the typhoid produced a rash on her face which turned septic. However, a rumour persists that she suffered from a failed face-lift, performed in Europe prior to

boarding the ship. If this were true, then she must have had an infected face for almost five months – which seems an unlikely length of time.

Melba died on 23 February 1931. Her death caused worldwide sadness. Letters and cables poured into Coombe Cottage from all over the world: Newspapers worldwide carried obituaries and reminiscences. Few crowned heads of Europe could have provoked such public grief. Melba, through a large part of life had come close to being the most famous woman in the western world.

As befitted such fame, the funeral was stupendous. The service was in Scots’ Church, Melbourne, which her father had built back in the 1870s. From Scots’ Church, the funeral procession snaked up Collins Street. First came the hearse, followed by four open vans carrying wreaths, a long queue of mourning cars and a mounted police escort. The cortege stopped outside what is now the Victorian Artist Society in Albert Street. Then it was the Conservatorium where Melba had taught her Australian students the elements of “bel canto” singing. The students came out and placed flowers on the hearse, and many of them were sobbing.

A few yards further down Albert Street, the procession stopped again – this time outside Presbyterian Ladies College. The whole school was lined up on the footpath to show respect for its most celebrated old girl.  Then the long line wound down into Victoria Street – which was crowded with mourners – and paused at the Yarra bridge near the site of her childhood home, and where all Richmond seemed to have turned out to do honour to the woman who was once little Nellie Mitchell.

And so her body processed down what is now the Maroondah Highway toward Lilydale. People sat in their cars, or stood beside the road, and waited for it to pass. There were few stretches of road untenanted. At Lilydale, the coffin was hoisted onto a gun carriage to be pulled the remaining two miles by soldiers and by a pack of Melba’s own boy scouts.

Not long before her death, Melba wrote the following words:

I know that the best of me will live and the worst will die. There may be fires to pass, tempests to face, but there is something that fire cannot burn; and storm cannot quench. Call it soul, ego, astral body – what you will. I call it the true eternal me.