The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Mess with Melba? You’re toast
Meet the scary, sweary soprano who claimed she ‘put Australia on the map’
NELLIE by Robert Wainwright 336pp, Allen and Unwin, T £15 (0844 871 1514), RRP £17.99, ebook £8.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ
Disdaining mealymouthed modesty, Nellie Melba liked to claim she had “put Australia on the map”. Such bravado wasn’t baseless: this opera soprano, born Helen Mitchell in Melbourne in 1861, was certainly the frontier continent’s first global celebrity, her fame spread by her recordings as much as her live performances and still enshrined 90 years after her death (from septicaemia contracted after cosmetic surgery) in the names of a peach dessert and oven-cooked toast.
She was not a particularly attractive person. Venal and mercenary, as well as foul-mouthed and brutally competitive on occasion, she was mistress of all the games of the prima donna. You did not mess with Melba; nobody’s fool, she expected and received regal deference wherever she went. Implausibly impersonated by Kiri Te Kanawa, she features as a guest of Lord and Lady Grantham in an episode of Downton Abbey – an appearance that reflects her actual success in being received in several aristocratic households as a social equal. “I’m a damned snob,” she admitted, and she played the game of arriviste very cleverly, too.
Yet, as someone who fought her way out of a cultural backwater without significant help or advantages and made her own high place in a man’s world, she commands a certain respect. Her patina of toughness was a necessary defence against exploitation, and like the heroines dreamt up by Ibsen and Shaw, she embodies something of the phenomenon of what was known in the late 19th century as “the new woman” – a type determined to pursue an independent professional career and insisting on the freedom to speak out candidly and even dictate the terms.
Talent, nurtured by hard work, was her passport: through the hiss and crackle of the surviving evidence, her singing voice may sound alien and squawky now – fragments of it can be found on You Tube – but in her prime it was considered a thing of astonishing purity and clarity, built on impeccable technique. Hatchet-faced, she couldn’t act for toffee and was never imaginative or spontaneous on stage, but the sound she produced was disarmingly sublime – “a ball of light”, wrote her awestruck rival Mary Garden after hearing her pianissimo top C. “It left everything and came over like a star and went out into the infinite. I have never heard anything like it in my life.”
Melba’s latest biographer, Robert Wainwright, is uninterested in the question of anyone’s artistry; although he gets the basic facts right enough, his is not a study of any subtlety, let alone one to be recommended to an opera lover. His focus is more on Melba’s marriage to Charlie Armstrong, the runt of an Irish baronetcy, and her affair with Philippe, duc d’Orléans.
Armstrong was an aimless chancer with nothing much to offer who ended up trying his luck in
Australia; what he saw in Melba, or vice versa, is not easy to understand, and he both envied and resented her success. Worse, he hit her, and it took all the resilience and initiative she could muster to keep him at bay. Eventually, he decamped to Texas, taking the couple’s son, George, with him.
Born in Twickenham and a graduate of Sandhurst, Philippe Orléans was altogether more agreeable. Eight years Melba’s junior, he was a swashbuckling, hunting and shooting fellow, as well as Bourbon pretender to the throne of France. He and Armstrong almost came to blows, but neither wanted the humiliation of a divorce case – instead, Melba appears to have paid Armstrong off and Orléans drifted away to pair up with an Austrian archduchess. Several other gentlemen of lesser note took their place in Melba’s affections, making her erotic proclivities the subject of much unedifying speculation.
Wainwright’s account of this aspect of Melba’s life makes for jolly gossipy reading, easily digested, but he does his subject matter no favours by resorting to a breathless, slapdash style, marred by clichés redolent of Barbara Cartland (“their love was more than just lust”). Sloppy editing has allowed references to “vocal chords” and disregarded diacritical marks. The result is bland, adding nothing to more rigorously researched accounts of Melba’s life by John Hetherington, among others, and doing little to honour her considerable achievement.