Her pretty appearance, her natural distinction, her grace and elegance won her instant favour. In spite of the fears which at first choked her, the voice, pure and limpid, with an adorable timbre and perfect accuracy, emerges with the greatest ease. The articulation is precise, and there is hardly a moment when an unusual syllable reveals, in an accent which is light but not without grace, her Australian origins. We know that Madame Melba is an Australian and that in Brussels, in recent times, she sang in Italian in the midst of her fellow performers who sang in French.
The whole of the Book Scene was performed not only with the great skill of a singer with rare taste and with great certainty of bearing, but with real dramatic purpose and with highly intelligent stage movement. It continued through to the third act, during the beautiful trio with Hamlet and the Queen, where the replies were given with a rare assurance and in an accent touching and stamped with broken-hearted sadness.
South Melbourne : Macmillan, After studying singing in her home town she travelled to Paris in Her talent was recognised by the influential Mathilde Marchesi who became her teacher and ardent supporter. This marked the beginning of an auspicious international career. Throughout her career, Melba worked with prominent musicians and composers including, Enrico Caruso, Giacomo Puccini and Giuseppe Verdi.
A clever business woman, who always controlled her own interests, Melba only engaged managers for short periods of time in foreign markets. According to one of her biographers, Joseph Wechsberg , Melba had no time for dinner invitations that carried the implication of a little performance. While Melba is known for her astonishing musical talent, she became a Dame in in recognition of this charitable work. Celebrity needs both fame and commodity, and Melba ensured her renown reached far beyond the concert hall.
Even Australians who could have never heard her sing because they lived in regional areas were avid consumers of her as a product. You could buy cartes-de-visite of her in costume, or eagerly read newspaper and magazine gossip about her poorly concealed affair with the Duc d'Orleans. From , recordings of her singing could be purchased; and in she published her own vocal method : a hit with singing students, and still used today.
She returned in to head the celebrated Melba- Williamson Opera Company; Williamson's arranged the venues, Lemmone and she engaged the artists. In England once more, she continued to command an extraordinary following: no fewer than seven kings and queens attended one gala performance at Covent Garden in To go back to Europe was difficult, but she did make three wartime concert tours of North America where she excited pro-allied sentiment, and also applied herself to raising funds for war charities at home, most notably by her spirited auctioneering of flags at the conclusion of her concerts.
When in two Austrian teachers one of them Mme Wiedermann- Pinschof resigned from the Albert Street Conservatorium to follow George Marshall-Hall back to the University of Melbourne, Melba's response to what she saw as enemy action was to offer Fritz Hart her full support. Her connexion with the university, where she had laid the foundation stone of Melba Hall in , was snapped; that with Albert Street thereafter grew to the point where it became known as the Melba Memorial Conservatorium it ceased teaching in and transitioned to the Melbourne Opera Trust.
Her interpretation classes there became famous, and drew students from all over the country; a martinet, she would pace up and down in her high leather boots, ably drawing out general points from students' mistakes as they sang before her. To be taken up by Melba held terrors of its own. Stella Power , winner of a scholarship to Albert Street, was badgered beyond her temperamental capabilities since the diva was intent on establishing her as the 'Little Melba'.
Eager to create a school of bel canto in Australia, Melba provided her services gratis to Albert Street and made the conservatorium responsible for publishing her singing tutor, the Melba Method The war over, Melba went to London to reopen Covent Garden; the city's weariness and shabbiness depressed her deeply.
But the brown tweed coats she noted disapprovingly in the stalls, in place of the formal attire and tiaras of pre-war 'Melba nights', were but an indication of changed social conditions and the declining status of Covent Garden. She did not appear there again until ; in Australia she sang, offering cheap tickets, at the immensely successful Concerts for the People in Melbourne and Sydney in , which drew some 70, people.
A further Melba-Williamson opera tour took place in ; here she did her best to upstage the young Toti dal Monte. Beverley Nichols, who travelled with her while ghost-writing her Melodies and Memories , later writing the novel Evensong about her, observed the 'unutterable weariness of the perpetual struggle to keep her supremacy when her voice and her body were growing old'. Melba returned to England and on 8 June gave her farewell performance at Covent Garden.
Melba now began a series of farewell appearances that, in 'doing a Melba', was to enrich the language as well as bolster her self-esteem. As early as October she had announced her Australian farewell to grand opera, but her last operatic performances, again in a portmanteau programme, occurred at the end of the third Williamson-Melba season as the order had now become in Sydney on 7 August and in Melbourne on 27 September Two months later in Geelong she gave her last Australian concert.
Feeling that she had been away too long, Melba left for Europe for two years, and sang in Brighton before moving on to Paris and Egypt, where she developed a fever. She never quite shook it off; however she managed to sing one last time at a charity entertainment at the Hyde Park Hotel, London. Dreading another northern winter, Melba decided to return to Melbourne, but her health grew worse on board ship.
Partly in the hope of getting better medical care, she later went to Sydney where, in St Vincent's Hospital, Darlinghurst, she died on 23 February of septicaemia, which had developed from facial surgery in Europe some weeks before.
Though tempered with some astonishment that so great a personage should have been a singer, the obituaries read as though for the passing of a monarch. As a visiting English musician had earlier written, it was difficult for anyone outside the country to realize the extraordinarily powerful position Melba occupied in Australia.
She may indeed have told Dame Clara Butt to 'Sing 'em muck! In England she would trade on her Australianness to be brash and forthright, but in Australia, Beverley Nichols recalled, travelling with Melba 'was like travelling through France with Marie-Antoinette'.
She would bestow graded, lavish tiepins as if they were decorations, certificates of approval to shopkeepers, and for her students at Albert Street designed a uniform complete with a blue letter 'M'. There were many acts of public charity and private generosity. Convinced of her own importance, she believed that the accidents which occurred during an American tour during World War I were German-inspired attempts to eliminate her, so effective had she been in the war effort.
Her autobiography shows that Melba's social successes were quite as important to her as her singing ones. Yet, as she once remarked to an inquiring aristocrat, 'there are lots of duchesses but only one Melba'. A splendid constitution and tenacity of purpose, allied with exceptional powers of concentration and attention to detail, were elements of a charismatic personality which enabled Melba to remain for so long in the forefront of the musical world. She had international renown as a soprano, performing in many cities including Milan, Brussels, London, Paris and New York.
Her Scottish father, David Mitchell, was a building contractor and a good bass vocalist, and her mother, Isabella nee Dow , was her first music teacher. A successful audition with the celebrated Mathilde Marchesi in Paris gave her career the boost that it needed.
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