A 1976 LP release of Melba recordings (EMI COLH 125) contained a critical sketch by Desmond Shawe-Taylor, who quoted a description of Melba’s singing by the great New York critic W.J. Henderson:
“The quality of musical tone cannot be adequately described. No words can convey to a music lover who did not hear Melba any idea of the sounds with which she ravished all ears … It has been called silvery, but what does that signify? There is one quality which it had and which may be comprehended even by those who did not hear her; it had splendour. The tones glowed with a starlike brilliance. They flamed with a white flame. And they possessed a remarkable force which the famous singer always used with continence. She gave the impression of singing well within her limits.”
In the January 1910 issue of the Ladies’ Home Journal Henderson, in more waspish mood, analysed the talents and achievements of Melba, Sembrich, Tetrazzini, Garden, Farrar, Nordica, Gadski, Schumann-Heink, Fremstad and Homer in an article entitled: Where the singers really stand / A frank explanation of the good and bad methods employed by famous women in opera today. In comparison with her sister singers, Melba gets relatively gentle treatment:
“The most beautiful voice heard by the present generation of opera-goers has been that of Madame Melba. Only Patti’s has excelled it, but Patti fairly belongs to the past.
The purity of the natural quality of Madame Melba’s voice is accompanied by an unusual amount of sonority. It is a wonderfully strong voice of its type. Its range is that of the typical coloratura soprano, and the scale is perfectly equalized. As Walter Damrosch pertinently said, on the occasion of Madame Melba’s American debut: ‘There are no registers in that voice; it is all one register.’ That is perfection in the scale. It is this perfection that makes the delivery of a sustained melody so beautiful as mere sound that we are prone to forget that it is deficient in vital warmth. Melba’s singing has always lacked expressiveness, partly by reason of the quality of the tone and partly because of shortcomings in the temperament of the singer.
In the treatment of the musical phrase, one of the most important elements of singing, Melba was formerly careless; but in recent years she has shown herself capable of high artistic achievement in this matter. No singer of our time has excelled her in the delivery of florid passages. Only one can be said to have rivalled her – namely, Sembrich. In the application of the nuances which go toward expression Madame Melba has not risen to the highest level. She has not the sensitive emotional organization which furnishes unerring instincts in this matter, nor has she that cultivated musicianship which goes so far to supplying the deficiency. In short, Madame Melba is a splendid demonstration of how much can be accomplished by a beautiful natural voice coupled with a highly-developed technique and a respectable taste. She is a great singer, but she has her limitations. No one, however, need hesitate to believe her voice the most beautiful of recent years, nor to accept her singing as technically that of a singer of the first rank.”
The very best of Melba’s records, which include all those in this edition, go a long way towards conveying to music lovers “the sounds with which she ravished all ears.” Even the stereophonic sound LP of the nineteen-sixties could only partially suggest the impact in a theatre of Joan Sutherland’s huge and brilliant voice, and the G & T technicians of 1904, working under the added disadvantage of being required to bring their recording machine to Mrs Hwfa Williams’s drawing room at 30 Great Cumberland Place, where Melba was residing at the time, could hardly have been expected to reproduce the “remarkable force” of her voice, though they did capture some suggestion of its “starlike brilliance.” (In a sense it was logical for Melba to “command” G & T to record her in this, no ordinary drawing room. The New York Public Library houses the Robinson-Locke Collection of Dramatic Scrapbooks; books 344-6 are dedicated to press cuttings concerning Melba, and they include a sepia photograph of the drawing room at 30, Great Cumberland Place, set out with rows of gilt chairs for a concert.)
These lovely records offer flashing glimpses of a singer renowned for the beauty of her timbre, the perfection of her technique, and her artistic and musical integrity. Some critics would complain that she was “unmusical” simply because she did not sing Isolde; if they had only listened to her March 1904 recording of Tosti’s “Goodbye” they would have recognized one of the most musical of singers. When the accompanist Ivor Newton ventured to compliment her on the perfection of her phrasing, she just said: “That is why I am Melba.” It is not possible to imagine Ellen Terry, Sarah Bernhardt, Lilli Lehmann or Maria Callas replying in this curt and practical manner, or boasting, as Melba did, “If I had been a housemaid, I should have been the best in Australia!” Ivor Newton describes her as “a woman of precise if somewhat limited tastes whose fastidiousness went hand in hand with strict musical discipline” and declares that she was neither an intellectual nor an emotional singer. Melba was a skilled artisan who could say: “In my own path great obstacles were placed, but I do not think anything in the world could have hindered me from becoming a singer.” Her voice may have been hauntingly pure and ethereal, but she was a tough and practical woman. She was lively, amusing and even lovable in the right company, and was generous to young artists all her life, but when she sent Hammerstein a cable reading “either Alda or myself” she was showing a ruthless side of her personality that sometimes comes across disconcertingly on her recordings. She was a great woman as well as a great singer, and with her very individual voice and style she had found it difficult to fight her way to the top.
Melba’s voice and technique
“It’s discipline she needs, not encores,” said David Mitchell, the father she adored, when, not quite nine years old, Nellie captivated her audience accompanying herself at the piano in some songs at a charity concert. Though a tomboy when a girl, as a music student and then as a prima donna she certainly knew how to discipline herself. She might well have echoed her friend Lillian Nordica’s words: “Many have had my talent, but I have worked.”
While at school she received her first singing lessons from Madame Christian, a pupil of Manuel Garcia. She then studied in Melbourne for seven years, from 1879 to 1886, with the Italian tenor Pietro Cecchi, who had enjoyed a decent career with the Lyster and other opera companies in Australia. The researches of John Hetherington and William Moran lead us to believe that Cecchi had established her voice and technique well, and that Mathilde Marchesi (another, and more famous, pupil of Garcia), in the year that “Mrs. Armstrong” spent studying with her in Paris, had only to give a final polish of sophistication. Madame Marchesi’s daughter, Blanche, says: “Emma Nevada and Nellie Melba were naturally prepared and had only to be taught the right line.”
This is borne out by the memories of Herman Klein and Emma Eames. In Great Women Singers of my Time (London, George Routledge & Sons, 1931) Klein recalls hearing Mrs. Armstrong sing at a London concert in 1886: “Remembering well what an untrained vocalist she was then and the lovely natural quality of her voice, I can give full credit to Mme Mathilde Marchesi for the improvement which was manifest in the singer’s style on her return to London two years later.” According to Klein it was Jean de Reszke who taught her “the old Italian system of breathing, which Mme Marchesi too frequently allowed her pupils to pick up as best they could.”
In her autobiography (Some Memories and Recollections, D. Appleton & Co., New York & London, 1927) Emma Eames dips her pen into vitriol to relate the arrival of Mrs. Armstrong at the ecole Marchesi: “In October of my first year with Madame Marchesi a singer arrived … who … had a naturally placed, liquid, perfect, and divinely beautiful voice. Madame Marchesi immediately began to give her private lessons for a reason that was at once vanity and professional shrewdness. Madame had a wonderful gift for training voices already placed, very real musicianship, an inexhaustible knowledge of Italian opera and inspired invention of cadenza, but she was not so fortunate in her way with the undeveloped voice, although anyone would have incurred her undying enmity by saying so. Therefore her pride made her conceal with private lessons the fact that this brilliant new soprano had little to learn and in truth was well along the road to vocal sophistication before Madame ever saw her, and lacked only taste and imagination and musical intuition.”
Despite the obvious paranoia animating this great soprano’s denunciations of Melba (never named but always referred to as “this singer”), Cosima Wagner, Toscanini and others whom she imagined had slighted her, these details seem to ring true. Mrs Armstrong was musical enough and intelligent enough to realise, after her auditions in London had brought her nothing, that Mme Marchesi might be able to help her. Their meeting was an encounter of Titans, and mutual respect was immediate. Mathilde rushed off to inform her husband, Salvatore: “J’ai encore une étoile!” Blanche Marchesi, who in her various writings can hardly conceal her detestation of Melba as a woman, gives her full credit as a vocalist and as a pupil: “Melba remained a student for many years after her career had started, and she rarely sang anything that she had not first worked at with my mother in Paris … She was an ardent student, and stepped straight from the class-room to the stage of the Brussels Royal Opera, keeping for my mother lifelong feelings of deepest respect and loving gratitude. Melba’s friendship for my mother was one of her great joys; it made up for the forgetful hearts of many others.” (Singer’s Pilgrimage, London, Grant Richards Ltd., 1923.)
When considered ready, the young lady pupils of the Ecole Marchesi were exhibited in private concerts to a specially invited audience; newspaper reviews of these affairs state that all the pupils sang well! Many of them were rich young ladies who had no hope of making a career in opera, but we may well believe that, after a ruthless course of the exercises to be found in Marchesi’s numerous published methods and vocalises, all of them would have been polished into something approaching an elegant sufficiency. In these musical afternoons singers like Melba, Eames, Calvé, Nevada, Parkina, Alda or Scotney would stand out. Melba was the crowning glory of an already famous school, and her supremacy was due not merely to the beautiful quality of her voice but rather to the sound Italian traditions in which she had been grounded by Cecchi, her careful attention to Marchesi’s finishing exercises and the all-important lessons in breathing from de Reszke. Like Caruso, she listened to the great singers who partnered her and learned from them.
Melba outlines the basic principles of her art clearly enough in her treatise Melba Method (Chappell, London & Sydney, 1926). A ruthless common sense prevails:
“Easy singing is good singing, and difficult singing is bad singing.”
“Correct breathing, strange as it may sound, is even more essential than a beautiful voice … Phrasing, tone, resonance, expression, all depend upon respiration.”
“How many people can drop the lower jaw really loosely when they want to sing? Not one in a hundred, I should say. Yet this is necessary if we are to sing easily, and it is one of the first things a student must learn to do.”
In her instructions about registers, Melba follows Marchesi and the Garcia school:
“There are three registers in a woman’s voice. The chest register should, except in exceptional cases, end on the E above middle C. I myself occasionally sing F in chest, but that is not usually right, and for heavy voices it is very dangerous.
The medium (or middle) register consists of the octave from F above middle C.
The head register must begin on F sharp, above C on the third space.”
Records show that, in fact, Melba often – rather than “occasionally” – sang F in chest, frequently F sharp, sometimes G and (for example, in the “Jewel Song” from Faust) even G sharp. She often said that listening to her records had helped her to improve her singing, and in her later recordings she is more careful not to carry the chest register too high. She was sometimes careless about the head register, too: whereas in her 1906 record of Bizet’s “Pastorale”, in the group of three notes – D flat, E natural, F – leading into the long trill at the end, we distinctly hear her pass from medium to head register on the F, in some of the 1907 records she is too heavy on this F and the F sharp. This, too, she corrected in later recordings; after all, she was proud of the “seamless scale” for which she was famous.
Melba gives excellent exercises for breathing, and for agility; her own recordings of agility passages are often thrilling, though highly individual in style. The purity of her timbre, the complete steadiness of her emission and her use of palatal resonance combine with her “grand manner” to make her a vocal phenomenon very unlike anyone we can hear today. In the scales and trills of the Mad Scene from Hamlet her singing is wonderfully affecting as she alternates brilliant, high powered passages of velocity with beautifully drawn lines of piano singing, all sculpted so finely because she has a complete command of the breath. Her bold delivery and radiant tone, with a dazzling burst of staccati and crescendo trill at the end, are very satisfying in Madame Marchesi’s cadenza to the Lucia Mad Scene, and the exhibition of full-voiced Handelian agilità di bravura in “Sweet bird” is something to place beside Joan Sutherland’s “Da tempeste” in Giulio Cesare. (The authorship of the “Sweet bird” cadenza is a mystery: the label of Selma Kurz’s record attributes it to Saint-Saëns, whereas in a letter to the Toledo Blade the flautist Charles K. North, who plays for Melba on her 1907 Victor recording, declared it to be by Paul Taffanel.)
Whilst remaining faithful to Marchesi, in the eighteen-nineties Melba, through Jean de Reszke, got to know Dr. H. Holbrook Curtis, and helped him to write the chapter entitled “Voice building” in his well-known and excellent book Voice Building and Tone Placing (London, J. Curwen & Sons Ltd., and New York, D. Appleton & Company, 1896 and 1909). Dr. Holbrook Curtis had a bee in his bonnet about the coup de glotte, a technical term coined by Garcia to describe just the clean, neat, musical attack of the note for which Melba became so famous. In Hints on Singing by Manuel Garcia (London, E. Ascherberg & Co., 1894) he describes the coup de glotte or “stroke of the glottis” as “The neat articulation of the glottis that gives a precise and clean start to a sound” and declares that “at the start sounds should be free from the defect of slurring up to a note or the noise of breathing.” This is what Melba learned from Madame Marchesi, and the coup de glotte that she denigrates in the Melba Method is quite another thing:
“There must be no jerk or click in the attack. This is known as the ‘Coup de glotte,’ and it has ruined many voices. It is usually caused by allowing too much breath to collect behind the vocal cords, before releasing them to begin to sing.”
So coup de glotte, like some other musical terms, can mean at least two different things; Garcia did not mean an unpleasant noise in the throat. Dr. Curtis says that Melba told him that “Her exercises for warming the voice always commence with Ma, sung dans le masque in the medium register.” These exercises beginning with “Ma” instead of simply “A”, in order to avoid either a breathy attack or a click in the throat, came down to Jean de Reszke, Dr. Curtis and Melba from the Neapolitan school of the eighteenth century. On this subject Henderson says:
“The Melba attack was little short of marvellous. The term attack is not a good one. Melba indeed had no attack; she opened her mouth and a tone was in existence. It began without ictus, when she wished it to, and without betrayal of breathing. It simply was there. When she wished to make a bold attack, as in the Trio of the last scene of Faust, she made it with the clear silvery stroke of a bell.”
Melba’s lilac label G & T records of March, 1904
It is interesting that a writer who heard her often and admired her, the singing teacher J. H. Duval, in his curious book Svengali’s Secrets and Memoirs of the Golden Age (Robert Speller & Sons, New York 1958), confesses himself disappointed in her records: “She did not take the phonograph seriously. One could almost say she tried to do her worst. For her recordings had nothing of the musical grace of her singing on the stage. They are stiff and awkward. There is a semblance of her unmatchable trill – but none of the diva’s quality and beauty in legato phrases.” Such severe words suggest that Duval had not heard Melba’s London recordings of 1904-5-6, which seem to be reasonably faithful echoes of a great artist singing with legato and sensitivity. (Mr Duval makes a point of stressing that acoustic gramophone records should always be listened to on a horn gramophone with steel needles, which is certainly not the best way of reproducing Melba’s records, though of course until the late nineteen-twenties it was the only way available.)
It has always been considered that the March 1904 records present Melba’s voice with more realism than many of the later ones, in which the overtones were not always caught by the recording horn. Certainly we hear her flawless singing without any distortion or mechanical rattle, though some of the records have a slightly fuzzy sound, as though a London fog had got into the room.
“Nymphes et sylvains,” specially written for her by Bemberg, is a successful recording that catches the bloom on the voice. She sails triumphantly up to two high Ds, the first legato, the second staccato, in the cadenza before the reprise of the melody. Melba has her own particular manner of launching the staccato: rather than tiny pinpricks of sound she emits brilliant balls of light that she seems throw up and catch, an effect that later records did not reproduce kindly. The song ends with a chain of rapid trills of the inimitable Melba quality, followed by some beautiful sustained tones.
Arditi wrote “Se saran rose” for Patti, but Melba took it up and from then on it was “The Melba Waltz.” She always thoroughly enjoys a piece that goes with a swing. There is a marvellously sung arpeggio up to high C sharp, each note clearly struck, joined to the next and all perfectly supported in perfect legato, just as Garcia prescribes: “In singing arpeggios the voice must pass with precision and firmness from one sound to another, whatever the distance between, neither aspirating, detaching nor slurring, but executing the sounds as in playing the organ.”
Sir Arthur Sullivan wrote in her album: “So perfect is Melba’s vocal utterance, that by the mere emission of tone, independent of all collateral aid, she can express the whole gamut of human feeling.” Actually, the angelic purity of her own peculiar timbre and the “shortcomings in her temperament” complained of by Henderson rather restricted her range of expression, but in “Goodbye” her command of sustained legato, both loud and soft, enables her to make a hauntingly moving effect with “Good-bye to hope,” contrasting wonderfully with the triumphant, full-voiced conclusion.
“Caro nome,” one of her most famous records, would puzzle opera-lovers who expect Gilda to be a frail ingénue. Melba usually reserved her delicate effects for songs, whereas in operatic arias she seems to want to stun us with powerfully projected, broadly sweeping phrasing. She is carving giants out of marble. Despite some surprising simplifications and a matronly manner, we can marvel at her bold attack and radiant tone, her wonderfully even and long trills and the softness and warmth of her high B, surely one of the most beautiful high notes ever recorded by any soprano. In the coda she commits perhaps the only musical error in which she was ever caught out by the recording machine when she anticipates her entry at the second “Gualtier Malde.” The anonymous author of a delightful little book describing evenings at Covent Garden in 1906, called Memories and Music, Letters to a Fair Unknown, (London, Elkin Mathews, 1908) says: “I should not feel inclined to imitate the rude but enthusiastic Italian who, in my hearing, once greeted a fine rendering of the ‘Caro nome’ in ‘Rigoletto,’ with the cry, ‘Brava, zia Gilda [Brava, Auntie Gilda]. Of course, you can guess the prima donna’s name.” Yes, I think we can.
In “Porgi amor” Melba suffuses her glorious tone with nostalgic longing, to moving effect. There is a typical touch of the Melba grand manner and bold rhythm on the ascending scale to high A flat. She correctly inserts all the appoggiaturas and approaches the high notes in an authentically eighteenth-century manner, with an acciaccatura from below. The record shows her mastery of the grandest portamento. At the end, on the word “morir,” she uses chest tones to great effect.
She is also touching in Mimi’s farewell, “Donde lieta uscì” from La bohème, of which she made several later and successful records. But this and the October 1904 replacement are the most beautifully recorded, showing the ravishing quality of the tone, most particularly on the upper F. Had she, perhaps, promised the engineers to sing her high B flat softly, and is this what causes her to falter a little on the D flat as she goes up the scale? The October performance is more theatrical, this March one rather more refined, with some longer breath-spans.
In the daring attempt to compress onto matrix 6 a fairly comprehensive version of Violetta’s aria, Melba attacks “Ah, fors’è lui” rather heavily, but she soon gets into her stride and the softly sung “misterioso, misterioso altero” is beautiful indeed. The recitative “Follie! Delirio vano è questo” is surprisingly dramatic and on the upper G flat of “Che far degg’io” she produces one of the most extraordinarily lovely notes that even she ever recorded. The “Sempre libera” is brilliant, with a thrilling crescendo high C before the reprise, but they are running out of time and she is forced to hurry; some of the runs lose clarity, a fault which was corrected on the re-take with orchestra on matrix 23. However, on this second take, presumably sung at the speed she normally adopted in the theatre, she is much more careful to avoid “blast” and takes all her high notes softly – or, at any rate, without reinforcing them – and so sacrifices a great deal of impact. Melba’s “Ah, fors’è lui” makes a rewarding study because, like Sembrich and others of her contemporaries, she perpetuates in her interpretation the ornaments and phrasing of Patti (who did not record the aria), which had become “traditional,” and the various changes not to be found in the score may be confidently asserted to have pleased Verdi. Like other sopranos of her day Melba sings through the rests in the opening line, interpreting them as indications to stress the notes dramatically and not use too much legato. (Some treat the rests in the first line of “Caro nome” in the same way.) Verdi’s pupil and toady Emanuele Muzio wrote to the composer in 1886 to complain that Patti, whom he had heard sing Violetta in Nice, had sung a cadenza that was good, but too short, and that: “The sustained trill that she sings on G flat running into the wings was too short, because of her lack of breath, and so did not produce much effect.” Obviously, it did not matter to Muzio that Patti had transposed “Sempre libera” a semitone down, nor that she had interpolated a trill not to be found in the score – only that the trill was too short! Melba’s trill on G is certainly long enough to have “produced much effect.”
Of the remaining songs, Tosti’s “Mattinata,” her first record and one of her “signature tunes,” encapsulates much of what is best and indeed unique in her singing. The attack on the first word, “Mary,” could serve as a perfect example of how to attack a note (but then, how thoughtful of Tosti to choose a poem beginning with “Ma-”!). The voice flashes out, a radiant beam of light. She sings easily and comfortably, with a lovely fresh, open-air quality, breathing when she feels like it. All the upper F sharps and Gs have the kind of freedom and rounded, pearly quality that other singers dream of (Frezzolini struggled all her life to get these notes perfect, but never did). The same cannot be said for the G second line, which she frequently seems to sing in chest register with a rather horny, backward sound, although one G, the last syllable of “celestial” (at the end of the second stanza) she attacks in what sounds like chest but then, in a diminuendo, passes into medium register. She introduces several dotted notes and extra rests that alter the rhythmic effect of the song, but she had studied it with the composer, who said that only she sang it as he intended it to be sung – sad news for Mario Ancona, the dedicatee of the song.
Her performance here is much more beautiful, more interesting and more detailed than in her 1907 Victor recording, in which she seems mainly interested in showing off her keyboard technique. She also frequently sang Tosti’s “La serenata” to the composer’s accompaniment, and the brilliant coda that he wrote for her and that we hear on this record has recently been published in Volume 14 of the Complete Edition of Tosti’s songs edited by the Istituto Nazionale Tostiano, Ortona (Ricordi).
“Si mes vers avaient des ailes” shows how skilfully she had learned to modulate her vowels, for she sings a lovely upper G sharp on the “EE” vowel of the word “rit.” She phrases this song with an apparent simplicity that conceals a great deal of loving care, and she avoids making a “chesty” sound on the F sharp, first space. They probably thought at the time that “Three green bonnets” would turn out to be a bestseller, whereas in fact it is one of the rarest of the set in original form. Although the composer herself giggled at the sobbed ending when P.G. Hurst played the record to her many years later, the performance makes a perfect model for any singer brave enough to attempt the Victorian Ballad repertoire. All you need is a lovely voice, firmly and steadily produced, an artistic legato, a firm knowledge and taste in tempo rubato, and perfect diction.
Conclusion
I should like to quote from Melba’s own favourite criticism of her singing, from the pen of the famous Boston critic Philip Hale in 1907:
“There is still no voice like unto that of Madame Melba, and no one of her sisters on the operatic or concert stage uses voice with the like spontaneity and ease … Those who were so fortunate as to hear her memorable performance of Marguerite’s music in the “Damnation of Faust” at a Cecilia concert a few years ago were struck by the richness of her middle and lower tones which were in themselves expressions of womanly and tender emotions.
“Today this voice is still brilliant in florid passages; it still has the freshness, the ‘girlish quality’ that has always characterized it, and set it apart from those of other singing women; but it now has a fullness, a richness and a sumptuousness that are incomparably beautiful. The voice of Madame Melba would work a wondrous spell even if the artistry of the singer were not uncommon, thrice admirable. And perhaps the most striking characteristic of this voice as it is today is its impersonal nature. It is not so much the voice of a perfect singer as it is the ideal voice of song.”
Michael Aspinall © 2008 | Used with kind permission | Use is governed by copyright laws