Patrick Bade
Opera in the Age of Dame Nellie Melba

Patrick Bade - Opera in the Age of Dame Nellie Melba

- Well, the next time that you go to the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, I would like you to walk up the Grand Staircase towards the Crush Bar, and halfway up on the landing, there is a pedestal with a bust of Dame Nellie Melba I’d like you to look closely at it, and you will see that at some point, somebody broke her neck. Now the question is, who wanted to break Dame Nellie Melba’s neck? And the answer to that could probably be a plot for an Agatha Christie, ‘cause she had an unrivalled talent for making enemies. If you read the memoirs of the great singers of the Belle Epoque, and I think I’ve read them all probably, it’s amazing how many tell nasty stories about her behaviour towards them. Emma Ames, Frances Alda, Mary Garden, Luisa Tetrazzini, Caruso, Titta Ruffo, Rosa Ponselle, they all had some pretty sniffy stories to tell about Dame Nellie. And here is… I just found this photograph today on the internet, I thought that was very funny, here is a restorer actually trying to cover up the evidence of the crime against Dame Nellie. She ruled the Royal Opera House in London with a rod of iron for 25 years, from 1889 up until 1914. These two images, I think, give quite a sense of what a determined and formidable woman she was, especially the one on the right hand side, she’s supposed to be… I don’t think she… she may have been one of the greatest singers who ever lived, but nobody ever claimed that she was a great actress or really tried to get into the character of her roles. I mean, she’s supposed to be Violetta, this frail creature, but she looks like she would use that flower as a weapon.

So this is the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, the building that she sang in, it’s still there today, of course, it dates back to 1857, and it was in a rather, what was then, a very scruffy area of London, Covent Garden, it was surrounded by vegetable markets and flower markets, 'cause the flower market hall is now integrated into the opera house, but it was a kind of standing international joke that the richest, most powerful elite in the world, the English aristocracy and plutocracy, they were the richest, that when they went to show off their diamonds and so on at the Royal Opera House, as they got out of their carriages, they had to pick their way over rotting cabbages in the street, another earlier view of Covent Garden, soon after it opened in the late 1850s. So Nellie Melba, she was born Helen Porter Mitchell in Australia in 1861 into a comfortably off middle-class family, she married a man called Armstrong, it was a very unhappy marriage, he abused her, apparently he even beat her up and she fled from the marriage. She later wrote her autobiography, well, actually she didn’t write it, it was written for her by Beverley Nichols, it’s called “Memories and Melodies,” and as I said, I think I’ve read every autobiography of every singer from this period, and even by the standards of the time, it’s very bland, it’s very anodyne, it doesn’t really give you much sense of her real character. If you want that, then of course, after she died, Beverley Nichols wrote a novel called “Evensong,” where he really dished the dirt on her, and one of his stories, of course, is about that photograph you see on the right hand side where she’s holding up a string of pearls.

Well, the critics who praised her always compared her scale work to a string of pearls because it was so even and so perfect. But by the time this photograph was taken, of course she’d had a certain and she’d put on a lot of weight, and you can see that the photographer has done a bit of work on that photograph and removed part of her bust, leaving the poles hanging at a very unnatural angle. So 1886, she fled from Australia, she came to England, she tried to find work as a singer, nobody was very interested, she had a little bit of Gilbert and Sullivan, but that wasn’t really what she had in mind. She was very, very determined. I mean, I think she’s… Obviously, she had great talent, great musical talent and a phenomenal voice, you need an awful lot more than that for a great career in opera, you need steely ambition and determination. She certainly had plenty of that, and she took herself off to Paris to study with the most famous teacher of the female voice of the 19th century, a woman called Mathilde Marchesi, who was actually German, but she was Paris-based and she trained many of the greatest singers of the period and here you see Melba with Mathilde Marchesi. Mathilde Marchesi, she not only… I’m sure it was a very rigorous, very prescriptive training. All the singers who trained with her have, as we will hear, a certain family likeness because they learned this technique from her, but she’s also somebody with very important connections with the aristocracy and with the musical world, and Melba was her biggest star pupil. And in 1887, she arranged for her to make her debut at the Theatre of the Monnaie in Brussels.

This was always a safe place to try things out, I think I’d mentioned that in connection with Sergeant, that it could be a risk in Paris, critics could be very cruel, the public could be very cruel. You were on safer ground making your debut in Brussels, and if that worked, then move on to Paris and London, that’s what she did. She had a big success in Brussels, they loved her, and the following year, 1888, she came to London and she made her debut as Lucia di Lammermoor, but it wasn’t the great success that she hoped for. The auditorium was half empty, the audience was lacklustre, unenthusiastic. And at the end of the season, the director of the opera house offered her a very disappointing contract for the following year, merely to sing one role, a relatively minor role of Oscar in “Ballo in Maschera” and she flanced out and said she would never come back again, but more of that in a minute. First of all, let’s hear Nellie Melba in the mad scene of “Lucia Lammermoor,” and you’ll hear her very special qualities, incredible purity of tone, so choir boy purity, it’s very unsexy in a way, I always think for me as a singer, she was a kind of curious mixture of Mrs. Thatcher and a choir boy, but there’s a sort of Iron Lady side of her that come through, but she had this instrumental purity of tone, she had this amazingly accurate attack. So when she attacks a note, she starts it in the middle of the note and she comes off it in the middle of the note and her intonation was absolutely impeccable. So here she is in part of the mad scene from Lucia di Lammermoor in this role, in which she initially did not have a huge success. So she flanced out in a terrible huff and swore that she would never come back again, never darken the doors of Covent Garden, but she’d made a very important friend. And this was Lady de Grey, she was one of the most influential members of the English aristocracy, she had the ear of the Prince of Wales and she could pull strings. And she wrote a letter that still exists to Nellie Melba saying, “Don’t worry, come back again, and I will ensure that everything will be different this time.”

You’ve got a photograph of Lady de Grey on the left and it’s rather nice that I can show you this charcoal portrait by Sergeant of her, as I never got round in my last lecture to talking about these wonderful charcoal portraits. So it’s such a difficult medium to control, and of course, this is a drawing of incredible virtuosity. And you can see his technique of drawing in reverse, I mean, if you look at the highlights in her headgear, well, I’m not quite sure what it is she’s wearing, that is drawn with a rubber through the charcoal. So 1889, she then had the sensational success that she wanted, and from that moment, you can say, until 1914, she was Queen of Covent Garden. But rather surprisingly for a woman who’s so hardheaded, early on in this period, she endangered her career by having a love affair with Philippe, Duc d'Orleans, who was one of the pretenders of the French, to the French throne, if it had ever gone up back to being a monarchy, and they were really quite indiscreet. They travelled together to Russia and so on, and it would’ve been fine, of course the royalty and aristocracy, of course, they’re always as thick as thieves, and they were very good at this time in covering up at scandals. It was a rather lush period, of course with the Prince of Wales, Edward VII having hundreds of affairs, and these were all nearly always carefully covered up.

And it would’ve been the same with Nellie Melba, but her husband cut up rough, and he threatened to sue the Duc d'Orleans for the adultery with his wife and that would have ended her career, that would have been a huge scandal. But anyway, everybody stuck together there and the husband was brought off and he was packed off to America with their child and that was the last she saw of either of them and I’m afraid the affair with the Duc d'Orleans, who you see on the right hand side, had to also be packed away. Now, the year 1889 is the year of the Paris World Exhibition, it’s the year of the Eiffel Tower. And it was a very memorable year for Covent Garden, not only because of the debut, well, the successful debut of Nellie Melba, the beginning of her reign, so to speak, it was also the year that Verdi’s penultimate opera, “Otello” was premiered at Covent Garden with the original cast of Francesco Tamagno as Otello and Victor Maurel as Iago, who you see here on the right hand side. And we actually have records of both of them, I won’t play you Maurel 'cause I don’t think those records really do him justice, but the records, the few records that Tamagno made, give a sense of why it was that it was his voice that inspired Verdi to write the role of Otello, he had this tremendous heroic power. He was really an Italian held in tenor, trumpet-like top turns, absolutely thrilling, and of course, at the opening scene Otello’s entrance in act one, the , he has to hurl out his voice, his top notes into the audience, and through this rather dim piano accompanied recording made right at the beginning of the century, I think you can get a sense of the thrill, the visceral thrill of Tamagno’s voice in this role. This was perhaps Nellie Melba’s greatest enemy, a singer called, American Singer called Emma Ames. And in her autobiography, which is, I must say, a lot more colourful than Nellie Melba’s she never names Nellie Melba by name, throughout the book, she only refers to her as my enemy. And she credited Nellie Melba with trying to sabotage and block her career at every turn.

She was also a pupil of Mathilde Marchesi, and it does seem that Melba had a particular thing against any soprano who shared her teacher and her kind of technique. I suspect that Emma Ames may have exaggerated a bit 'cause she says that Melba prevented her having the career she should have had at Covent Garden, in fact, she sang there for the best part of 10 years, she says that Melba prevented her getting the roles that she wanted, but again, in fact, she sang several, she shared several roles with Nellie Melba, they both sang the roles of Marguerite in “Faust” and Juliet in Gounod’s “Romeo and Juliet.” They were sort of particularly show off roles for both of them. When I play you her hit, you’ll hear that there is definitely a family resemblance in the timbre and the technique. But Ames had a bigger voice, the roles in which she was particularly famous, were roles that were really too heavy for Nellie Melba, like Tosca on the left, Aida on the right, she’s a very famous Aida, Emma Ames, and even Ziglinda, a role that Melba would never have been able to sing.

And I took the… although she has that same purity of tone and the same accuracy, a wonderful attack, a wonderful scale work like a row of poles, wonderful trills, all those features that Melba has, but I hear a greater warmth in her singing, oddly enough, I mean, she had the reputation for being a very cold woman and a cold interpreter, she earned one of the most notorious reviews in operatic history, when she sang “Aida” in New York for the first time, and a New York critic wrote, “When Madame Ames took on the role of Aida that was skating on the River Nile.” Interestingly, Puccini didn’t share that view, Puccini who loathed Melba, his letters are full of very rude comments about her, and Puccini in general didn’t like Anglo-Saxon singers, but he did admire Ames despite the fact that… He heard her sing “Tosca” in Paris and he was very impressed by that and said there was something of Greek tragedy about the way she took on the role. But here she is in one of those roles that she shared with Melba, the role of Juliet in Gounod’s opera, and you’ll hear all those qualities that I’ve just mentioned, the purity, the accuracy, the incredible fluidity of the coloratura. So a second possible rival for Melba, was the French soprano, Emma Calve, who was also a pupil of Marchesi. And when you hear her voice in a minute, you’ll hear again, that instrumental purity of tone, but she wasn’t, I think, such a direct threat to Melba because she was a singer of a very, very different character. As I said, nobody ever said that Melba was a singing actress, and that is exactly what Calve was, she was somebody who completely lived her roles on stage. Her voice had a darker quality to it, more of a metso colour to it, and so her really great roles were roles like Santuzza and above all, Carmen, she was probably the most famous Carmen who ever lived. So we’re going to hear her in an excerpt from “Carmen,” and you’ll hear this beautiful, rich quality of the middle of her voice here in this scene, and she’s singing with the French tenor, Charles Dalmores who was also a big star at Covent Garden, but I don’t think they actually ever sang “Carmen” together at Covent Garden, no, they must have sang it together in Paris. Melba’s relations with her male colleagues were generally, but not always, less fraught than with her soprano colleagues.

Her favourite male partner in the early parts of her career, was the great Polish tenor, Jean de Reszke, considered to be the greatest tenor in the world, who was also considered to be the sexiest man in the world. Women went absolutely crazy for him, he was thought to be sex on two legs and Nellie obviously, had quite a crush on him, she really gushes over him in her autobiography. Sadly, I have no records to play you, there is a faint trace of a life recording made in New York, but it’s really unlistenable, and any commercial recordings he made seem to have been destroyed. A singer who sang successfully with her in the 1890s, and we do have plenty of records of him, is the Neapolitan tenor, Fernando Lucia. He is a legendary singer with record collectors because of his phenomenal skill in florid singing. I would have said up till a couple of years ago, I would’ve said there hasn’t been a single tenor since, who could knock off those rapid runs in the way that he does, and he’s a tenor of incredible finesse. I’ve changed my mind because of the American tenor, Michael Spyres, if you get a chance to hear him do, he is phenomenal. I mean, so it’s very fascinating to me how techniques and voice types change, they evolve and skills are gained and skills are lost and skills are regained, and certainly, Michael Spyres has regained a lot of the kind of skill that you’ll hear in the excerpt I’m going to play. Now, another mystery is that Fernando De Lucia was liked by the London critics, but not in the roles for which we admire him today. They didn’t like him in bel canto repertoire, 'cause the English never really liked voices with a malt rapid vibrato.

At least they weren’t prepared to put up with it in Rossini’s bel canto. But he was greatly admired more actually, as an actor than as a singer. And as you can see on the left, he sang with Nellie in Pagliacci, but I’m going to play you a little bit from “The Barber of Seville,” which displays all those extraordinary perfumed exquisite qualities that are admired by record collectors today. The singer, the tenor who’s most associated with her is Enrico Caruso, and that’s because of their partnership really in one opera, “La Boheme.” Between them, they must have made an awful lot of money for Puccini, who was actually remarkably ungrateful, he didn’t really like either singer, as I said, he particularly disliked, he disliked Melba, he always thought she was too old to sing the role, and he used to refer to her unkindly in his letters, not by name, but as the nonagenarian. And he didn’t like Caruso either 'cause he thought he was up to himself and lazy. But they made a very famous record of the end of act one “Boheme,” I should say that Caruso really liked to get into the role, and of course the role is a carefree student, and he loved playing practical jokes on his fellow singers during performances of “Boheme,” which Nellie Melba did not always approve of or appreciate. And he was irritated with her 'cause she insisted on having one pound more per performance at Covent Garden than he got, so that was also a reason to get back at her. And one evening when he was just about to lounge into “Che Gelida Minina, ” he slipped a hot greasy sausage that he had secreted in his sleeve into her tiny frozen hand and she was not best pleased. But so this record, I’m just going to play you the end of it, which is one of those miracles of the gramophone.

Everybody who heard Melba in this role, whether they liked her, her performances as a whole or not, they all said that this moment was unique, that no other singer has ever really managed it as well as she does. As the two lovers walk off stage at the end of act one, he very gentlemanly goes down to a lower note, leave… some tenors insist on going up to the top C themselves, but Caruso allows Melba to display her incredibly perfect and beautiful top C. It’s like a beam of light, she doesn’t lift onto the note, she doesn’t lift off it at the end, it’s just this pure, incredible, amazing sound. Caruso made the first really successful operatic records in Milan in 1902, that’s a story I think I’ve told on other occasions, the huge success of his records, led to other singers like Melba and even Patti, wanting to make records. He made a huge number of records and I think you can say he really, he’s one of those singers like Maria Callas really, who changes everything. The tenor sound, you can always hear on an early historic recording, this is a tenor who was trained before Caruso, or this is a tenor who comes after Caruso and has been influenced by Caruso, huge sound. I mean, none of the sort of exquisite gracefulness, of course, that we heard with De Lucia, it’s a much more direct, much more earthy, much more masculine sound, and here he is in perhaps his most famous role, Pagliacci. A tenor who partnered Melba often in the later part of her career, was the Irish tenor John McCormack. And they were really perfectly matched in a way, I think much better match than Caruso and Melba. He had the same kind of instrumental purity of tone and very, very accurate intonation like Melba’s, but they didn’t make records together. So she liked him sufficiently to hire him to sing with her on a tour of Australia, but they also, there were some pretty fraught moments between them, I don’t think it was a comfortable or easy relationship. We’re going to hear him now in an excerpt from his most famous record, the “Donna Tavia Zaria” from Don Giovanni, which displays his extraordinary breath control.

And notice again the very beautiful, accurate even runs. A male singer that Melba fell out with big time, was the Italian baritone, Titta Ruffo. He had the greatest baritone voice of the period, one of the greatest voices of the Italian baritone that’s ever been recorded, it was enormous. He was really the baritone equivalent of Caruso. So he arrived at Covent Garden in 1903, young man, he was just 26 and he was cast to sing “Rigoletto” with Melba as his daughter, Gilda. Well, they got as far as the dress rehearsal, and apparently during the dress rehearsal, he really let rip with this enormous voice and Melba obviously took fright and at the end of the rehearsal, she insisted on him getting the sack immediately. She said, “I’m not singing with him, he’s too young to be my father.” Of course he was very insulted and disgruntled by this. In his autobiography, he tells this story and he says that later when she went to New York, of course he was a huge star in New York, and she was cast to sing with him in “Rigoletto” that he said, “I’m not singing with her, she’s too old to be my mother.” Well, I’m going to play you an excerpt from “Rigoletto,” and he starts softly, very beautiful, lovely, soft velvet sound, and you’ll see how he builds up the sound and unleashes this enormous, wonderful, voluptuous baritone sound, you can see exactly why it was that Melba with her porcelain, fragile voice took fright at singing with him. This is Pol Plancon, who is actually older than Melba, but she sang with him both in London and in New York. And he was another singer who’s of course an idol of record collectors, he’s a very smooth, deep, wonderful bass voice with fantastic coloratura skills, he could have out sung, apparently, he used to sing the mad scene from Lucia di Lammermoor in falsetto as a warmup exercise before going on stage. So here is the fabulous Pol Plancon in a role at “Mephistopheles,” which he must have sang often with Melba.

After 1900, Melba had to contend with a new generation of younger rivals and one of them, was the Viennese soprano, Selma Kurz, she actually only lasted one season, Melba made sure that she was not invited back again till after Melba’s retirement, after the First World War, but I suppose she was more of a threat, again, because she was once again, a pupil of Mathilde Marchesi and she had great coloratura skills. She was particularly famous for her trill, and of course, it was a joke in German speaking countries, Kurz means short, and a kurz trill would be a short trill, but hers was the longest ever known. And it was this that actually, another reason probably why she wasn’t invited back, was that she really annoyed both the conductor by hanging onto her trills and particularly, Caruso. And so she sang the despised role of Oscar in “Ballo in Maschera” that Melba had refused, and she made it a huge star turn but when she sang her aria she held onto the trill, she walked around the stage holding onto the trill forever and ever and ever, until Caruso became absolutely infuriated, and he started gesturing at her furiously to for God’s sake, stop that bloody trill. The singer who was probably most admired at Covent Garden in the decade before Covent Garden soprano rather, was Emmy Destinn. But again, I don’t think Melba would’ve seen her particularly as a rival, they didn’t have many roles in common, and again, Destinn was a very different kind of singer, more a singer of the Caruso type, a very big, powerful voice. And we’re going to hear her, I’m sure 'cause she would sing roles, again, that Melba could never have sung like Salome, and we’re going to hear her in an excerpt from “The Flying Dutchman.”

There came a moment in 1907, when Melba momentarily wobbled on her throne. She was actually on tour in Australia, so she was absent, when Luisa Tetrazzini made her debut. And another factor that probably had Melba off guard, was that Tetrazzini did not make her debut in the season, the really fashionable season, which is in May and June, she sang in the less fashionable, she first sang in the less fashionable autumn season and she was down to sing “Traviata,” which of course is always a very popular opera. But very few, no nobody had heard of Tetrazzini and very few tickets were sold, of course, everybody really, just wanted to hear Melba in “La Traviata.” And it was a sort of foggy night and the auditorium was half empty, and it’s a kind of historic occasion 'cause it’s the first time that the telephone played a really important part in making somebody’s career and reputation. The audiences were, the audience of Covent Garden, half filled auditorium, were so staggered by Tetrazzini singing at the end of act one of “Triviata.” They couldn’t believe their ears, they’d never heard anything like that, a huge voice, a much bigger voice than Melba. It was amazing coloratura and accuracy. And people in the interval, phoned up everybody they could think of, and so in the second act, there were many, many more people in the auditorium, and by the time it came to the last act, the house was more or less full and it was an extraordinary sensation and extra performances had to be put on, and of course, Melba was really alarmed by this. You can see this is a caricature of the time, of the rivalry of the two singers. And they really didn’t like each other and there were lots of funny stories, if I had time I would tell you, about their rivalry. Here, of course they each have dishes named after them, there’s peche Melba, which was invented by the great French chef, Escoffier, at the Savoy Hotel, in honour of Nellie Melba, Tetrazzini herself, of course, she was an enthusiastic cook, a very, very different personality from Melba.

I mean, all her colleagues absolutely adored Tetrazzini, she was a cuddly, lovable woman and she loved cooking dishes for her colleagues. She liked cooking for them and this is one of the things she did and it’s called pollo Tetrazzini, and somehow these, I think these two dishes, very well encapsulate the character of the two singers. As you can see, Tetrazzini’s cooking skills eventually showed themselves on her figure, here is Tetrazzini at the height of her career, and we’re going to hear her in a excerpt from Mignon, that if Melba ever heard this record, I’m quite sure it scared her and she would have felt very threatened by the incredible bravura of Tetrazzini. Yes, of course I’m afraid that Tetrazzini came to a rather sad end, her great weakness was for Juggalos, she liked young men and fatally, she married one, this is a picture of her marriage ceremony, and he fleeced her of all the incredible earnings that she’d made over her career, and she died sadly and in poverty. In 1914, 1914 of course, it’s the end of the Belle Epoque, and it’s really the end of Melba’s reign, although she did continue to sing, she sang from time to time, after the First World War right up until 1926 but that was another age and another era. And that was foretold by the debut of a young Italian soprano called Claudia Muzio, in 1914 she sang several of Melba’s roles, including Traviata and above all, Mimi, and she’s an entirely different kind of singer, I couldn’t imagine a more different singer from Melba. Warm, passionate, a very smart singer, and I’m going to end with a very, very lovely record made by the young Claudia Muzio in the role of Mimi. And that is a voice made of size and tears and restrained in afar in the memorable words of the tenor Lauri-Volpi. So let’s see some questions.

Q&A and Comments:

Was she, yes, she was very happy to have the dessert named after her, she talks about it in her autobiography, although what she said which made her really angry, was that very often what was served as peach Melba was a very poor imitation of the original dish. She felt it had been commercialised and cheapened. I think the portrait of Emma Ames is by her husband, who was a portrait painter, but I’m not absolutely sure about that.

Margaret likes Victoria de, a wonderful Carmen, I’m not sure I would say she… Well, she’s a very different type of Carmen, Carmen is a role that’s open to very different types of singers and different interpretations.

Herbert, I’m not with you on this one for once, I’m definitely a Victoria de los Angeles fan over Caballe, perhaps you know that story, of course, that when Li Theo burned down in Barcelona, Victoria de los Angeles was photographed by photographers standing among the smoking ruins and somebody said rather tactlessly to her, “Do you know that Madam Caballe has already been here to be photographed?” And uncharacteristically 'cause everybody says Victoria de Sanchez was so sweet, she said, “Yes, when you get corpses, you get vultures,” is what she said about her rival. Bigger, yes, I think it was not, it was about conductors. It’s not my, it’s actually Walter Lekh who said that the bigger the ego, the bigger the talent, but of course, primadonnas are notorious for their ego.

Anna Netrebko as Michel-Ange, I wonder if she… I wonder if Netrebko has ever sang “Carmen.” She could do, she’s got the means for it and the temperament. How would I prefer to compare? That’s a whole talk in itself, I mean, I know Pavarotti has great qualities, the brilliant ringing top notes, wonderful clarity of his annunciation, but in general, I’m not a fan, so I wouldn’t put him on a level with any of the tenors I talked about today.

This is Milena, who was they’re holding Emmy Destinn competition in London, I didn’t know that actually, that’s interesting, she is of course a… she deserves a whole lecture, Emmy Destinn, an absolutely amazing singer and an amazing life, many stories about her. With the lion on the piano, I think it’s a still from a film, I suppose it was a publicity stunt, and I presume the lion was heavily drugged, otherwise it might have tucked into Emmy Destinn.

I think, Jeff, you just need to train yourself to listen to recordings, I mean, I think it’s a matter of really concentrating and listening. My favourite, Violetta and Mimi these days, I dunno, I’d really have to think about that. Well, she didn’t have the… she certainly didn’t have the passion, that’s for sure, I think the voice was…

One thing just to go back to the previous comment, it’s very difficult to tell from acoustic recordings, that’s recordings before the mid-1920s, it’s actually quite difficult to tell the size of a voice. And Melba did make a few recordings by the electrical process right at the end of her career when she was not at her best, but they do give you a sense that the voice was bigger and rounder than it sounds in the earlier acoustic recordings.

Thank you, Susan, and thank you, Ruth.

Q: With Ames being French have helped durability in Emma Calve?

A: No, Ames didn’t sing “Carmen,” Calve, yes, I’m quite sure, that’s something I didn’t talk about was of course Melba’s terrible foreign languages. George Bernard Shaw had a lot of fun commenting on Melba’s French accent, which he said was only slightly better than his own.

Of course, Melba, you can hear her Australian vowel sounds diphthongs through everything she sings in whatever language and when she sings to Tosca’s “Goodbye,” she sings, “Shadows arising on you and me,” something like that, sorry if I’m doing a horrible caricature of Australian accent, but she definitely didn’t have good foreign languages. I love Galli-Curci, just the sound of Galli-Curci, makes me cry, it’s such a beautiful sound, I find her very, very touching. But she incidentally, Melba in a moment of possible graciousness, when Galli-Curci made her debut at the Met in 1921, Melba sent round a big bunch of flowers, but she didn’t like the way Galli-Curci sang, and she sent round the manager of the opera house to remove her card from the flowers that she’d left for Galli-Curci. But give me Galli-Curci any day, but that’s a very personal thing.

Moshaliaping is long, great, he’s the singing actor, what can you say? No rivals there, you’d say.

Thank you all again, and very different, next week is Stanley Spencer, it could hardly be a greater contrast, and I’ll see you then.