Dame Nellie Melba Love, passion & scandal
She was our most famous opera singer and behind the voice was a tempestuous love life involving a disastrous abusive marriage and a scandalous royal lover.
There were two significant concerts early in the life of Helen “Nellie” Mitchell. The first was at age eight when she sang and played the piano at a charity concert organised by her local Methodist Church in Melbourne. It earned her several encores and a review from a newspaper reporter who described her a musical prodigy.
The second was as a young teen when she organised her own charity event to repair a fence at the church. She invited neighbours and friends but her father, angry that she was making an unseemly spectacle of herself, went behind her back and ordered that the guests stay away. Only two people turned up but
Nellie sang anyway, confused but unperturbed by the turn of events.
The first performance told her that she had a golden voice, a God-given talent to be buffed and polished, and the second left no doubt that she would have to rebel against society’s low expectations of women, including her own father, to be heard.
Born in Melbourne in 1861, Nellie’s was a privileged childhood as the eldest child of a self-made businessman, David Mitchell, who built many of the city’s most iconic buildings as the Victorian goldrush turned Melbourne into a city of significance. But her life changed at the age of 20 with the death of her mother, Isabella, followed soon afterwards when her four-year-old sister, Vere, whom she had been charged to protect, fell sick and died.
A month later, David Mitchell took Nellie to Mackay in Queensland with him on a business trip, hoping it would distract her. Instead, she found a thriving musical community that embraced her talent and decided on a whim to marry a man she had only just met. Charlie Armstrong was a handsome and dashing figure, son of an Irish aristocrat who had found his place in life in the Australian outback where he commanded respect as an expert horseman and boxer.
But there was a darkness behind the confidence. Rather than finding a man who would support her desire to sing onstage, Nellie had married a man who wanted a wife to serve his own needs and was prepared to enforce his will with violence. When she was three months pregnant he punched her in the face. It would be the first of many beatings. Her escape would be Europe, courtesy of the appointment of David Mitchell in 1886 as Victoria’s representative to the Indian and Colonial Exhibition in London. He reluctantly agreed to take his
daughter and her husband if she paid her way and promised to return if she couldn’t find a teacher. After a series of disappointments, Nellie found a mentor in Paris who told her she would be a star.
But rather than please the men in her life, Madame Mathilde Marchesi’s declaration of Nellie’s talent only angered them. David Mitchell returned to Australia, refusing to support his daughter in her studies beyond a small stipend, while Charlie stayed in London and made sporadic trips to Paris during which he hit and threatened his wife, who now lived as a single mother with their young son, George.
It was at this moment that Mrs Helen Armstrong would shed her skin and step out onto the stage as Nellie Melba, a name created out of her love of her home city and an insistence to be identified as Australian, but with a new, bold persona.
Her debut, at the Theatre de La Monnaie in Brussels on October 12, 1887, as Gilda in Verdi’s opera Rigoletto, would be a triumph as the Belgian daily La Gazette, among many others, declared: “Her voice, method, temper and beauty are, they say, all intended to form an exceptional nature, destined to shine among all.”
London’s iconic Covent Garden Opera House called but it would take two seasons and the intervention of a rich mentor named Lady Gladys de Grey before she found favour with the colder English audiences. Among her greatest admirers was Edward Prince of Wales, the future King of England, who one night in 1890 hosted in the royal box a young Frenchman named Philippe d’Orléans, son of the wouldbe King of France who had recently
114
arrived in England. Four months before, he had travelled to Paris where he tried to enlist as an infantryman in the French army. It was a brave or foolhardy tactic, aimed at bringing attention to his family’s exile from their homeland. He was not a man to be cowed by social expectations, and particularly aristocratic behaviour.
As he had expected, Philippe was arrested and, as he had prepared to accept, was jailed for two years. The city exploded in protest, even many Republican newspapers declaring the punishment was too severe. The move would backfire as he became a cause celebre, nicknamed Prince Gamelle in reference to the food bowl used by common soldiers. The French Prime Minister had little choice and released him after several months. In exile once more, he headed back to London, where he had been born.
That night in the royal box Philippe fell in love with Nellie Melba at a distance, standing back when she was introduced to the Prince of Wales and his wife, Princess Alexandra. A few days later he introduced himself to the singer and she was immediately smitten.
Despite their age difference – she was 29 and he was 21 – the pair fell in love. Nellie was effectively estranged from Charlie, who had left the year before and was back in Queensland building a ranch, hopeful of saving his marriage but still insisting that she abandon her career and return to resume her duties as a wife.
Nellie and Philippe soon became lovers. They met at the Hotel Metropole, where staff averted their eyes, and were seen in various social events during the London season. Philippe, who was
reluctantly engaged for political convenience to a European princess, would even practise his fencing each morning with Nellie’s male lead, Jean de Reszke. He broke off the engagement, took his own box at the opera and showered his lover with bouquets.
After the season was over they met again, this time in Switzerland away from prying eyes, and when she was invited to sing before the Russian Tsar Alexander III, Philippe followed her to St Petersburg, where he ill-advisedly began cheering Nellie out aloud, breaching protocol that it was the
Tsar who should lead the applause.
Philippe was asked to leave the capital but soon caught up with Nellie in Vienna, where they booked into adjoining rooms of the famous Hotel Sacher, he under an assumed name, and spent a fortnight together. But it was here they would be outed, attending the opera, where Nellie was recognised by the performers with the prince, who was already wellknown by the Prince Gamelle stories.
Charlie had returned and was waiting back in Paris, where he confronted his wife, not about the affair but whether she would return to him and live in Australia. He hated her “bohemian” way of life in Paris and did not want George exposed to Europe’s liberal ways. They fought as he demanded that his son be sent to an English school, otherwise he would take him back to Australia, as was his right as the father: “I’d kill you except I would hang if I did,” he yelled, thrusting his fist in her face.
Charlie left the next day, taking
£800 of her earnings, his departure from Gare du Nord station causing excitement as police mistook him for Philippe d’Orléans, who was rumoured to have snuck into the city dressed as a servant. The affair was now common knowledge, the newspapers filled with various versions. But how might it affect her career, carefully nurtured and established in France and England where she was regarded as the best soprano of her day? Would the well-heeled and titled turn their backs on the singer or would they flock to the theatre to see and hear the woman at the centre of the scandal?
The answer was the latter. French audiences wanted to see the scarlet woman and gave her 11 encores at her next performance at the Palais Garnier, while Covent Garden experienced record ticket sales for the 1891 season.
Charlie Armstrong learned of his wife’s infidelity on his way back to Australia, telegrammed by one of his brothers who had heard the stories in his London club. Outraged, he wrote to Nellie demanding answers and threatening violence but it would be five months before he could return to London. By the time he arrived, Nellie had moved legally to ensure that her husband could not go ahead with his threats and take George away from her. Infuriated, Charlie launched divorce proceedings and gave media interviews in which he challenged Philippe to a duel: “I want to duel him. I’ll whip him and see what he’s worth,” he told one reporter.
Philippe’s father refused to accept the challenge on the basis that it would be unseemly for his son to fight a commoner. Instead, he sent Philippe to stay with his cousin, the King of Portugal, and told him to stay away from Nellie.
But the lovers would not be denied. Nellie accepted a booking to perform in the southern French city of Nice. Philippe, once again showing his audacity, anchored a yacht in the bay of the city so he could see Nellie without having to step ashore in France and breach his exile. The pair would also meet across the border in Italy, playing a cat and mouse game with detectives hired by Charlie, whose lawyers were busy interviewing waiters and cleaners at the Swiss and Austrian hotels where Nellie and Philippe had stayed.
The newspapers devoured the story, providing almost daily updates on their latest dalliance and gasped when Nellie, in her affidavit in answer to Charlie’s divorce application, gave graphic details of the repeated stormy confrontations between her and Charlie over the past eight years. Individually the incidents looked bad enough but collectively, it was shocking and left no doubt that the marriage had been a mistake long
115