The prima donna in fiction – Part 1 'Tower of Ivory'

Gertrude Atherton, Tower of Ivory, (London: John Murray, 1910)

In her youth the American novelist Gertrude Atherton (1857-1948) faced family opposition in her efforts to be a writer. She and an equally-frustrated young friend ‘used to take long despairing walks over the steep hills of the city, wondering if we should ever get out of it. She wanted to be an opera singer, and her father wouldn’t hear of it... life seemed a dreary waste.’[1] The friend was Sybil Sanderson (1865-1903), who would later conquer the opera stages of Paris and for whom Massenet would write Esclarmonde and Thaïs. When Atherton came to write her novel Tower of Ivory,[2] she thus had first hand experience of the struggles faced by any woman aspiring to be a professional creative artist.

In her study of the prima donna from 1815-1930, Susan Rutherford identifies three main forms that fictional images of the prima donna took: demi-mondaine, professional artist and exalted diva.[3] Margarethe Styr, the heroine of Tower of Ivory, is all three. The ‘greatest hochdramatisch the new music had developed’ (p. 1), Styr is a Royal Bavarian Court Singer at Munich in the mid 1880s. She is regarded as the greatest living exponent of Wagner’s roles, especially Brünnhilde, Isolde and Kundry, having studied them with ‘The Master’ and performed them at Bayreuth until after Wagner’s death.[4] King Ludwig honoured her by making her a countess. Styr is ‘the artist best beloved in Munich’ (p. 78); one character declares, ‘…here in Germany she is a goddess walking on clouds’ (p. 19).

But the road to goddess status was long and hard. Born Margaret Hill, she was the daughter of a Hungarian immigrant woman and an unknown man, and grew up in a coal-mining town in the US. And she has an even more horrifying secret: she survived by tying herself to a series of wealthy men (a time-honoured practice for opera heroines). After being thought lost in a shipwreck off Oregon, she travelled to Europe and reinvented herself as Margarethe Styr.

She lives only to perform (p. 20); in early years she had survived misfortune by remembering her extraordinary talent: ‘It was the knowledge of that golden wonder in my throat and the memory of the ecstacy in pouring it forth that kept the breath in my body.’ (p. 34) That ‘golden wonder’ becomes a means of financial and social independence, and a source of meaning and self-identity beyond the prescribed domesticities. Styr chooses to distance herself from the world, and between performances lives with her books and her music in her villa on the Isar, a gift from Ludwig.

Into this exile comes John Ordham, a young, aristocratic Englishman of indolent disposition, spending a year in Munich to perfect his German before entering the diplomatic service. He is devoted to ‘Die Styr’, and attends her every performance. He makes her acquaintance when he becomes a guest of Ludwig at Neuschwanstein. She warms to his friendship but tries to reject it. ‘Think of me as a stage creature only. And after all, I am nothing else.’ (p. 89)[5] But their friendship becomes more intense, becoming ‘a sort of mental marriage’ (p. 198) and bringing Styr out of her ‘tower of ivory’ existence.

For all her coolness towards the world Styr is passionate in her art. After one Tristan she throws an official out of her dressing room and yells, ‘I hate the whole world when I have finished an opera! They ought to give me somebody to kill!’ (p. 175) One night she astounds her audience (and terrifies the tenor) with an incandescent Isolde, fuelled by fury after she hears that Ordham is to marry Mabel Cutting, an American heiress. The relationship survives the wedding, especially when Ordham arranges a Wagner season at Covent Garden where Styr conquers London.

But she does not conquer Mabel’s family. Styr is unacceptable to the Cuttings for two reasons: her unusually close relationship with Ordham, and her status as a professional artist. In the mid to late 19th century singing had become a means for even middle- and upper-class women to establish their independence,[6] but London and New York society seemed unable to ‘receive’ opera singers, in spite of European practice. When asked to sing at a party in London, Melba insisted on attending as an invited guest, as to appear only as a performer would have lowered her social status.[7] With a higher sensitivity to ‘class’, New York found it even more difficult to accept singers as social equals. Melba later wrote:

In London, if an artist made a great success, he or she was received on a footing of absolute equality with the most “exalted” people in the Capital. Not so in New York. An artist was an artist, and although she might be the subject of amazing hospitality, though innumerable kindnesses might be showered upon her, there was always a subtle difference between her and the rest of society.[8]

After Mabel’s death in childbirth (surely significant), Ordham proposes that Styr become his wife and take her place beside him as he rises in the diplomatic service. But Styr argues that her place is not with Ordham; even if her past did not make her an unacceptable consort for his chosen career, she could never give up the stage. Rutherford comments on real-life divas of the period:

For [Frances] Alda and many other singers, the crucial distinction… seems to have been one between ‘woman’ and ‘artist’… Such women essentially regarded themselves as having two separate identities – and of the two, the ‘artist’ was by far the most important. Like Alda, the singers would protect their ‘artistic’ self with steely determination if inappropriate demands were made on it by notions of womanly behaviour.[9]

Like her non-fiction sisters Styr favours the ‘artist’: ‘I profoundly believe that no born artist could sacrifice her career – which is merely the insatiable activities of the gift resident in the brain – for any man, give him anything more than the temporary effervescence of her woman’s nature.’ (p. 492) But Ordham does not understand, and lest she submit to him she kills herself by riding her horse into the flames at the end of a performance of Götterdämmerung. Brünnhilde’s sacrifice of godhood for womanhood is not one that she can make.

Soap opera? Of course. Atherton is no James or Wharton, and does not have the stylistic grace needed to turn melodrama into epic. But her novel is saved by two elements: her profound understanding of the artist’s struggle to maintain her identity against the demands of prescribed social and gender roles; and the detailed and thorough knowledge she brings to her descriptions of Wagner performance practice, one of the most insightful fictional portrayals of opera ever written.



[1] Gertrude Atherton, Adventures of a Novelist, (London: Cape, 1932), p. 118.
[2] Gertrude Atherton, Tower of Ivory, (London: John Murray, 1910).
[3] Susan Rutherford, The Prima Donna and Opera, 1815-1930, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 31.
[4] A position taken in reality by Amelie Materna.
[5] Contra a more pragmatic diva who commented, ‘Art is not such a stern mistress as to preclude friends.’ Nellie Melba, Melodies and Memories, (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1925), p. 81.
[6] Rutherford, The Prima Donna and Opera, p. 73.
[7] Ann Blainey, I Am Melba, (Melbourne: Black Inc, 2008), p. 171.
[8] Melba, Melodies and Memories, p. 122.
[9] Rutherford, The Prima Donna and Opera, p. 85-6.