The opera audience as an ‘emotional community’

My paper for the USyd History PG Conference. Just an idea which may or may not fit into my thesis. I'm just going to push it out and see if it floats; if it doesn't, we'll sink it.

During Nellie Melba’s Australian tour in 1911 the writer of the women’s page in the Sydney Morning Herald recorded this comment:

Said one girl who was filling her ‘Thermos’ for her fifteenth visit… ‘Every time I see Melba I just feel as if I want to shout out “Thank you, thank you, thank you;” but when she comes on I can’t say a word, for feeling it here,’ with two hands pressed eloquently to her throat. (‘A Page For Women’, Sydney Morning Herald, 25 October 1911, p. 5.)

This girl was not some unusually highly-strung individual amongst an audience of polite and restrained people. Consider this description of a performance of La Boheme a few years later:

Saturday’s audience gave itself up whole-heartedly to the love-making in the first act,… and to the Christmas Eve revelry of the second, became engrossed in the quarrels and reconciliations of the third, and, in the last act, was obviously deeply touched by the sad death of Mimi, which is given such poignant emphasis by the music. There were not many dry eyes at the fall of the curtain. (G. De Cairos-Rego, ‘Grand Opera Season. Impressive Gala Performance. Melba Triumphs In “La Boheme”’, Daily Telegraph (Sydney), 23 June 1924, p. 4.)

In this paper I want to look at the concept of the opera audience as an ‘emotional community’. As a case study I will focus on the audiences of the 1924 Melba-Williamson Grand Opera seasons in Melbourne and Sydney.

(Read the rest here.)

The prima donna in fiction - Part 5 Divas at the movies

Later in the twentieth century the popular imagination was more likely to encounter the diva in movies rather than books. Several opera singers went from the stage to the screen. Grace Moore (1898-1947), a soprano who sang at the Met for sixteen seasons, appeared as Jenny Lind in two films for MGM (A Lady's Morals (1930) and Jenny Lind (1931)), but became an international star as an aspiring opera singer in One Night of Love (MGM, 1934). Lily Pons (1898-1976) capitalised on her position as the Met’s resident coloratura soprano by making three movies for RKO. The first of these, I Dream Too Much (1935) featured Pons as an aspiring opera singer, alongside Henry Fonda and a seal. The Polish soprano Miliza Korjus (1909-1980) (‘gorgeous Korjus’[1]) appeared as an opera singer and love interest of Johann Strauss II in MGM’s The Great Waltz (1938).

Singers from Broadway and operetta also became popular, generally performing the role of ‘the young blond ingénue with the voice of a nightingale and the sweetness of heart to match.’[2] Kitty Carlisle (1910-2007) played Rosa Castaldi in the Marx Brothers movie A Night At The Opera (MGM, 1935), a lyric soprano whose principle role is that of love interest for the tenor Allan Jones. Love and music, or rather aspirations to both, seemed to be the extent of Hollywood’s vision of the opera singer. This was reinforced by the type of music presented: most of the movies involved opera excerpts interspersed with popular songs (written incidentally by giants such as Jerome Kern). This formula allowed singers with operatic potential but not experience to create careers out of the ingénue persona, with Deanna Durbin, Jeannette MacDonald and Kathryn Grayson the most prominent.

Opera, or Hollywood’s version of it, was good box-office – it was instant glamour and prestige. Paramount convinced the distinctly un-Hollywood Kirsten Flagstad (1895-1962) to don the winged helmet and metal breastplate to sing Brünnhilde’s Battle Cry in The Big Broadcast of 1938 (Paramount, 1938), with an introduction from no less than Bob Hope.

After WWII musical tastes had changed, and public affection for the singing ingénue began to decline. The audience was more likely to encounter negative stereotypes of the female opera singer, such as the conniving femme fatale Cecil Carver played by Linda Darnell in Everybody Does It (Twentieth Century-Fox, 1949). Occasionally the genuine article was encountered, but in melodramatic form. The film of Marjorie Lawrence’s memoir Interrupted Melody (MGM, 1954) told the breathtakingly romantic story of how she rose to fame, how she was tragically struck down by polio at the height of her career, and how with the miracles of modern medicine and the devotion of her husband she made a triumphal return to the operatic stage. It was a movie for its time: around the time of its release the world’s attention began to focus on one particular diva – Maria Callas. The public associated the diva with tragedy and temperament, a stereotype that has been as influential as the singing fat lady without whom nothing is over.

[1] Hedda Hopper, ‘Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood’, Los Angeles Times, 2 June 1938, p. 13; Nelson B. Bell, ‘“The Great Waltz” Tops All Film Operettas’, Washington Post, 23 November 1938, p. 10.
[2] Rupert Christiansen, Prima Donna: A History, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p. 206.

The prima donna in fiction - Part 4 'The Phantom of the Opera'

Gaston Leroux probably derived some inspiration from Trilby for The Phantom of the Opera,[1] but created a gothic horror story rather than a melodrama.

The heroine of Phantom is Christine Daaé, a second rank soprano at the Paris Opéra. Like Trilby, her background is tragic and sentimental, and at least has the value of providing an important plot element. She is the talented daughter of a talented Swedish violinist who was ‘discovered’ and taken to France by a music professor. (Her mother is sadly but conveniently deceased.) Before his heart-wrenching early death her father tells her about the Angel of Music, who visits each talented person sometime during their life and brings their talent into fruition (p. 45). He promises on his deathbed that when he is in heaven he will send the Angel to her. But the Angel takes his time; after her father’s death Christine seemed to have lost her talent, but retained enough to get through the Conservatoire without much distinction.

It is from there that she passes into the company at the Paris Opéra, appearing in minor roles without great distinction, until the night her arch-rival Carlotta fails spectacularly on stage. Carlotta is the opposite of Christine. The cliché prima donna, she is temperamental (because of her hot Spanish blood, no doubt) and enjoys the trappings of stardom. The first time we see her she is ringing for her maid to bring her letters in bed (p. 60) – she enjoys luxury and extravagance, unlike the pure Christine, who lives simply and virtuously (and passively).

Christine, we find later, has been given tuition by a mysterious person who she thinks is the Angel of Music. Of course, this person is the Opera Ghost, who is in love with her. The Ghost insists that the managers of the Opéra give Christine the role of Marguerite in Gounod’s Faust (at that time the most popular opera in the world). The managers laughingly ignore the request, because they only know Christine as a second string singer. Carlotta goes on and is afflicted with a frog in the throat in the middle of Act III (when Marguerite has her most gratifying solos – the Roi de Thule aria and the Jewel Song). Carlotta’s humiliation is total; she withdraws from an important gala, Christine goes on instead and wows the audience, who have never heard her sing like this before. Success seems assured…

But – enter Raoul, Vicomte de Chagny. This young nobleman proposes to Christine, but she refuses him. The Angel of Music has told her that if she marries, she will never hear from him again (p. 71). The Ghost hears her declarations of love, and kidnaps her in order to lure Raoul into the depths of the Opéra to kill him… What terrors await Christine and Raoul? Will the Ghost succeed? And who is the mysterious Persian? You’ll have to read the book (and it’s worth reading, if only for the different flavour to the film versions.)

Leroux’s concept of art is more sophisticated than du Maurier’s, and gives Christine more ownership of her talent. She is not a Trilby – her talent was always there, waiting for the Angel of Music to touch her. This owes something to the Greek concept of the muses, who would visit the artist and bestow their genius upon him or her. Trilby is just a blank slate for men to write their dreams on, artistic and erotic.

Leroux’s variation on the ‘married to art’ trope is clever. Christine cannot marry Raoul, because if she does she will lose the Angel. We know that the ‘Angel’ wants to marry her, but this is not a case of Christine being the victim of two men. She doesn’t want to lose the Angel because he is the guarantor of her art. What works out in practice to be submission to another man is, to Christine, a choice in favour of music. An ineffective agency, but one she exercises, unlike the totally passive Trilby. But ultimately Christine will never have the career or the artistic fulfilment she has desired, because is at the mercy of the men who desire her. She may be talented, but she is still an object of the kind that Styr and Kronborg refuse to become.

[1] Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera, (London: Sphere Books, 1975; orig. 1911).

The prima donna in fiction - Part 3 'Trilby'

Perhaps Atherton (1910) and Cather (1915) were writing to counter the image of the prima donna presented in popular literature. There have been no more popular portrayals of opera in fiction than these books by George du Maurier’s Trilby[1] and Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera.[2] Trilby took the world by storm, giving birth to stage plays, toothpaste and a hat (see Frank Sinatra on the cover of Songs for Swingin’ Lovers), and putting the word ‘Svengali’ into common currency. Phantom gave rise to several popular movie versions and that vile Lloyd Webber thing.[3]

Trilby O’Ferrall is not the main character in Trilby. That honour belongs to Little Billee, Taffy and the Laird, three young artists from Britain sharing a studio in Paris. It is fitting that Trilby surrender first place to them, because she exists purely as the object of men’s desires. All three men love Trilby; she is warm and compassionate, with a great capacity for friendship. But she is especially loved by Little Billee, who longs to transform her into a young lady--say the vicar's daughter in a little Devonshire village--his sister's friend and co-teacher at the Sunday school, a simple, pure, and pious maiden of gentle birth.’ (p. 34) He is especially enamoured of her feet, and draws them.

Trilby, when we get to know her, has a moving story. Her father was a gentleman, the son of a Dublin physician. He had been a fellow of his college and entered holy orders, but was devoted to the bottle and eventually left the church. He became a tutor in classics, went to Paris, and married a Scottish barmaid. Trilby was born ten months (sic) after her father’s death, and her mother died in childbirth. She survives by working as a laundress and an as artists’ model, posing ‘for the altogether’ (ie for all parts to be drawn). (Cue salacious wink from du Maurier.)

Trilby has one weakness – she is sexually promiscuous. But she does it for love, not money; du Maurier likens her to ‘a distinguished amateur who is too proud to sell his pictures, but willingly gives one away now and then to some highly-valued and much-admiring friend.’ (pp. 36-7) However she doesn’t come across to any of the three friends, no matter how much they desire her.

Also in love with this bourgeois male fantasy, but despised by her, is Svengali, the German Jew pianist who wished to sing but couldn’t, and ekes out a living by giving singing lessons. One day he amuses himself, and horrifies the others, by inviting Trilby to sing. She is monumentally awful:

From that capacious mouth and through that high-bridged bony nose there rolled a volume of breathy sound, not loud, but so immense that it seemed to come from all round, to be reverberated from every surface in the studio. She followed more or less the shape of the tune, going up when it rose and down when it fell, but with such immense intervals between the notes as were never dreamed of in any mortal melody. It was as though she could never once have deviated into tune, never once have hit upon a true note, even by a fluke--in fact, as though she were absolutely tone-deaf, and without ear, although she stuck to the time correctly enough.

She finished her song amid an embarrassing silence… At length Little Billee said: 'Thank you so much. It's a capital song.' (pp. 18-19)

Svengali is barely tolerated, but he provides a valuable service to Trilby by curing her of a crippling neuralgia (cluster headaches or migraine) through hypnotism. More on this later...

Most of the book is taken up by the love of Little Billee for Trilby, her acceptance of his proposal of marriage, and the dashing of their love against the rocks of his family, respectable English gentlefolk who cannot stand the thought of an Irish slattern entering the family. Tragic stuff that had the readers lapping up each instalment as it was published.

The story resumes several years later, when Little Billee has become a successful artist. London is seized by a mania for ‘La Svengali’, the mysterious singer who has stormed all the capitals of Europe: ‘It’s what she does with it [the voice] – it’s incredible! it gives one cold all down the back! it drives you mad! it makes you weep hot tears by the spoonful!’ (p. 169) Her audiences clap and scream, but La Svengali does not speak or smile. The three friends travel to Paris to see her, and recognise Trilby. Svengali is consumed by hatred for Little Billee, and spits at him when they meet; the Englishmen give Svengali a thorough drubbing, and return to London.

Svengali takes his wife to London for her British debut, but before the concert begins he recognises the Englishmen in the audience. He is gripped by rage, but dies of heart failure. This is fatal for Trilby. Svengali’s influence over her is hypnotic; when he dies the spell is broken. Trilby sings with the hideousness of old, and the audience jeer and reject her. Trilby collapses, and is rescued by her friends. She cannot remember any of her triumphs. She falls ill, and dies, still in love with Little Billee.

I’ll discuss this more in the next part, but I must say this right now: Trilby is a really, really awful book. I read it so you wouldn’t have to. Don’t make my suffering in vain.

[1] George du Maurier, Trilby, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998 [orig. 1894]).
[2] Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera, (London: Sphere Books, 1975; orig. 1911).
[3] If you like the tunes in that show, you’ll love Puccini’s La fanciulla del West – it’s where Lloyd Webber stole them from.

The prima donna in fiction – Part 2 ‘The Song of the Lark’

Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark, (London: Virago, 1982 [orig. 1915])

Of Rutherford’s types of the fictional prima donna,[1] Thea Kronborg is the professional artist and exalted diva. Atherton’s Margarethe Styr is seen at the stage of her career where she is the successful singer; the main part of Cather’s novel is taken up with the growth of the artist: ‘the artists’s awakening and struggle; her floundering escape from a smug, domestic, self-satisfied provincial world of utter ignorance.’ (viii)

Cather’s novel is an entertaining Bildungsroman in itself, but it also presents a picture of the prima donna which readers would have found believable, and would have appropriated to form their own understandings of the prima donnas they encountered in reality.

The prima donna has talent – the innate something special. During a lesson with her piano teacher, the alcoholic Wunsch, Thea’s interest in opera is piqued by an examination of the score of Gluck’s Orpheus. Wunsch sees that she has the special something that will make her great.

That special something is the instinctual connection she has with art. Thea realises her voice connects her with her personality. ‘Her voice, more than any other part of her, had to do with that confidence, that sense of wholeness and inner well-being that she had felt at moments ever since she could remember.’ (p. 272) As she discovers more about her art she realises that this connection is not just emotional but involves her whole body: ‘She had begun to understand that – with her, at least – voice was, first of all, vitality; a lightness in the body and a driving force in the blood. If she had that, she could sing.’ (p. 381)

Thea goes one step further and learns what that connection means. While staying in the cliff-dwellings of ancient native Americans in Arizona, Thea discovers the theoretical context for her art in the work of women in past millennia. The ancient women whose dwelling she lives in made pots to contain precious water, crafted vessels to hold the essence of life:

The stream and the broken pottery: what was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself – life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose?... In singing, one made a vessel of one’s throat and nostrils and held it in one’s breath, caught the stream in a scale of natural intervals. (p. 378)

Thea’s progress also demonstrates the character of the prima donna. Her supporter and patron, Doctor Archie, tells her that if she wants to succeed she has to work hard: ‘… if you want a big thing, you’ve got to have nerve enough to cut out all that’s easy, everything that’s to be had cheap.’ (p. 306) Thea knows that only she can put in the work, that she will stand or fall by her own efforts. ‘Everybody’s up against it for himself, succeeds or fails – himself.’ (p. 155) And when she is on her way to success there will still be sacrifices; her father dies while she is studying in Europe, and when her mother is dying she is unable to visit her because she had been given the role of Elisabeth (Tannhäuser) in Dresden, which she knew was her big break.

But the sacrifice is worth it. Thea knows that it will help her get away from the small-town mediocrity that will be her lot if she doesn’t try: ‘She had better take it into her own hands and lose everything than meekly draw the plough under the rod of parental guidance. She had seen it when she was at home last summer – the hostility of comfortable, self-satisfied people toward any serious effort.’ (p. 382). But the ultimate prize is the pleasure of being yourself. Thea explains to her friend Fred Ottenbury that it is not the horror of married life that makes her want to avoid it: ‘It’s waking up every morning with the feeling that your life is your own, and your strength is your own, and your talent is your own; that you’re all there, and there’s no sag in you.’ (p. 394)

The need to realise her own personality has always been Thea’s motivation, and this is recognised by her piano teacher in Chicago, Andor Harsanyi: ‘I believe that the strongest need of your nature is to find yourself, to emerge as yourself. Until I heard you sing, I wondered how you were to do this, but it has grown clearer to me every day.’ (p. 263)

Thea also demonstrates the prima donna’s temperament. She has difficulty with routine rehearsal schedules. ‘Every single feature of operatic routine is detrimental to me. I usually go on like a horse that’s been fixed to lose a race.’ (p. 544) After Archie sees her sing Elsa (Lohengrin) at the Met, he visits her and is surprised by her exhaustion, ‘rather dazed, and pretty well used up’ (p. 508). She assures him, ‘This is not I.’ (p. 506). Archie is till shocked, but Ottenbury points out that she received him after a performance, ‘When she’d have kicked any other man down the elevator shaft, if I know her.’ (p. 510) The circumstances of her first Sieglinde (Die Walküre) show her as the intense professional. One night she is entertaining Ottenbury and Archie when she is summoned to the Met, to replace the scheduled singer who has fallen ill. After travelling with her to the house, Archie comments, ‘She looked frightened… but I thought she looked – determined.’ (p. 529)

What many readers may have overlooked is a contradiction voiced by Thea towards the end of the novel: ‘“I don’t see why people go to the opera, anyway,” she said suddenly. “I suppose they get something, or think they do.”’ (p. 542) Artist and audience have contrary expectations: ‘… what one strives for in art is not the sort of thing you are likely to find when you drop in for a performance at the opera. What one strives for is so far away, so beautiful—… that there’s nothing one can say about it.’ (p. 551) The artist and the audience have different experiences, and it is a mistake to think that because they happen in the same place, that they are the same thing.

[By the way, it is a beautiful book and a great work of literature– worth reading even if you’re not into opera.]

[1] Susan Rutherford, The Prima Donna and Opera, 1815-1930, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 31.

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.