Nellie Melba
Dame Nellie Melba GBE (born Helen Porter Mitchell; 19 May 1861 – 23 February 1931) was an Australian operatic lyric coloratura soprano.
She became one of the most famous singers of the late Victorian era and the early twentieth century, and was the first Australian to achieve international recognition as a classical musician.
Failing to find engagements in London, England, in 1886, she studied in Paris, France, and soon made a great success there and in Brussels, Belgium.
Melba was born in Richmond, Victoria, the eldest of seven children of the builder David Mitchell and his wife Isabella Ann née Dow (1833–1881).
[1] She studied singing with Mary Ellen Christian (a former pupil of Manuel García) and Pietro Cecchi, an Italian tenor, who was a respected teacher in Melbourne.
[n 3] Her debut at the Princes' Hall in 1886 made little impression, and she sought work unsuccessfully from Sir Arthur Sullivan, Carl Rosa and Augustus Harris.
[3][11] She then went to Paris to study with the leading teacher Mathilde Marchesi, who instantly recognised the young singer's potential: she exclaimed, "J'ai enfin une étoile!"
Melba made such rapid progress that she was allowed to sing the "Mad Scene" from Ambroise Thomas's Hamlet at a matinée musicale in Marchesi's house in December the same year, in the presence of the composer.
[3] The young singer's talent was so evident that, after less than a year with Marchesi, the impresario Maurice Strakosch gave her a ten-year contract at 1000 francs annually.
After she had signed, she received a far better offer of 3000 francs per month from the Théâtre de la Monnaie, Brussels, but Strakosch would not release her and obtained an injunction preventing her from accepting it.
[3][12] The critic Herman Klein described her Gilda as "an instant triumph of the most emphatic kind ... followed ... a few nights later with an equal success as Violetta in La traviata.
The Musical Times wrote, "Madame Melba is a fluent vocalist, and a quite respectable representative of light soprano parts; but she lacks the personal charm necessary to a great figure on the lyric stage.
"[15] She was offended when Augustus Harris, then in charge at Covent Garden, offered her only the small role of the page Oscar in Un ballo in maschera for the next season.
The following year, she performed at the Opéra in Paris, in the role of Ophélie in Hamlet; The Times described this as "a brilliant success", and said, "Madame Melba has a voice of great flexibility ... her acting is expressive and striking.
[21] Her performance in Roméo et Juliette, later in the season, was a triumph and established her as the leading prima donna of the time in succession to Adelina Patti.
[4] She had at first been nonplussed by the impenetrable snobbery at the Metropolitan; the author Peter Conrad has written, "In London she hobnobbed with royalty; in New York she was a singing menial."
[37] Marguerite de Valois, too, is not the leading female role in Les Huguenots, but Melba was willing to undertake it as seconda donna to Emma Albani.
[39] She received a certain amount of praise in these roles, although Klein found her unsuited to them,[3] and Bernard Shaw thought she sang with great skill but played artificially and without sensibility.
[4] After her initial successes in Brussels and Paris in the 1880s, Melba sang infrequently on the European continent; only the English-speaking countries welcomed her wholeheartedly.
If the Dame can give those hundred girls her own beautiful voice, well and good, but for heaven's sake let a musician be called in to attend to their repertoire.
[4] She is well remembered in Australia for her seemingly endless series of "farewell" appearances, including stage performances in the mid-1920s and concerts in Sydney on 7 August 1928, Melbourne on 27 September 1928 and Geelong in November 1928.
[57] She returned to Australia but died in St Vincent's Hospital, Sydney, in 1931, aged 69, of septicaemia which had developed after facial surgery in Europe some time before.
[1][58] The funeral motorcade was over a kilometre long, and her death made front-page headlines in Australia, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Europe.
In 1924, Melba brought the new star Toti Dal Monte, fresh from triumphs in Milan and Paris but still unheard in England or the United States, to Australia as a principal of the Melba-Williamson Grand Opera Company.
She gave financial assistance to the Australian painter Hugh Ramsay, living in poverty in Paris[63] and also helped him to forge connections in the artistic world.
Melba's acoustical recordings (especially those made after her initial 1904 session) fail to capture vital overtones to the voice, leaving it without the body and warmth it possessed – albeit to a limited degree – in life.
[68] Like Patti, and unlike the more vibrant-voiced Tetrazzini, Melba's exceptional purity of tone was probably one of the principal reasons why British audiences, with their strong choral and sacred music traditions, idolised her.
On 15 June 1920, Melba was heard in a pioneering radio broadcast from Guglielmo Marconi's New Street Works factory in Chelmsford, singing two arias and her famous trill.
[4] The 1934 motion picture adaptation of Evensong, starring Evelyn Laye as the character based on Melba, was for a time banned in Australia.
[94] In 1987 the Australian Broadcasting Corporation produced a mini-series, Melba, starring Linda Cropper miming to the singing voice of Yvonne Kenny.
