Music: Vale

It was a gala night at Covent Garden, London. The King was there, so were the Queen with the old Dowager Countess of Minto, the Duke and the Duchess of Beaufort, he who was King Manuel and she who was Queen Augusta of Portugal, Prince Chichibu of Japan and a hundred other folk whom people jostle through crowds to glimpse. But it was not for the King or for the Queen that common folk had stood, many of them, some 20 hours in line, not for them especially that Covent Garden had preened itself to a pre-War splendor. It was for Nellie Melba,* prima donna, Dame of the British Empire, who had set that night for her farewell appearance in opera.

What would the opera be? Dame Nellie held long council with her memories. La Bohème was good. It stood for a hundred triumphs, for gay, gay Monte Carlo and her début there a quarter of a century ago, for Russian Grand Dukes and Princesses, the warm scent of orange blossoms, tiny balls spinning in a great casino, the great Caruso who was her Rodolfo, Tosti making great goggle eyes from the front row. It, too, had been the first Covent Garden performance after the War, when a shabby tweed audience replaced the pompous black. Yes, La Bohème was good. But so was Romeo et Juliette, which she had studied with Gounod himself—Gounod with his velvet skullcap and his velvet smoking jacket—Romeo et Juliette in which she had made her first successful London appearance with Jean de Reszke her Romeo, his brother Edouard the Friar. And there was Otello, fruit of Verdi’s Indian-summer genius. She had sung Otello for the Master himself, an old man then like a gnarled tree, kindly, restrained, with bright, bright eyes and restless hands. Yes, it was a finicky business, that of choosing the opera. Perhaps a bit from all three. . . .

And so it was. She sang arias from the third and fourth acts of La Bohème, the balcony scene from Romeo et Juliette to the Romeo of Charles Hackett, U. S. tenor, the final scene from Otello. She died once as Mimi, again as Desdemona. Her Britannic Majesty, high in her royal box, wiped away a tear.

The commoners shouted and so did even the Duke of this and the Duchess of that. They called her back again and again after each curtain; gave her a riotous ovation when Lord Stanley of Alderly, chairman of the Royal Colonial Institute, presented her with a gigantic floral display that filled the entire stage, a floral kangaroo, emblem of her native Australia in the centre, flanked by British and Australian flags. She tried to thank them: “Covent Garden . . . the dearest place I know . . . my public . . . dear old Austin, who for 36 years has been at the stage door and helped me to my carriage . . . good-bye . . . good-bye . . . .”

Some 10,000,000 Britishers heard her sing over the radio, heard the little speech. Some 3,000 paid trebled prices to get into the theatre. Important correspondents, critics, wrote columns on her “brilliant farewell”on the same stage where she had made “triumphant début” 38 years before.Melba, happy, read their stories, sniffed a little at the “triumphant début,” recalled her own version*:

“I do not believe that the greatest critics had even bothered to look in at all.

“The House was half full. There was a general air of apathy over the stalls and boxes. Even the orchestra, with which I had had one hasty and slovenly rehearsal, seemed half asleep and it was thus that I sang my first role in Covent Garden. . . .

“I woke up in the morning feeling that I had passed through a nightmare, and as soon as I had remembered the events of the night before I sat up in bed and reached with trembling hands for the newspapers which were beside me. As I read them one by one, I was filled with a feeling, first of indignation, then of astonishment, and then of amusement. Of my voice they said practically nothing. They seemed to be concerned solely with my powers as an actress. . . . And I know that in those days I could not act!

“My second night was equally depressing and so was the third. . . . Again the house was only half full, the critics were apathetic, and the performance of a standard very much lower than that to which I had been accustomed in Brussels. Two days later I was again in Mr. Harris’ office. He offered me the role of the page in the Ballo in Maschera—and my reply was to pack my trunks and to go straight back to Brussels.

“So ended my first experience of opera in London.”

She reminisced further . . . Paris, Milan, Berlin, Vienna, New York, Chicago, Boston, her own Melbourne, from which she borrowed her name. . . . Success after success, approbation, adulation. . . . She wiped away a tear bigger than the Queen’s, decided it was sad, if fitting, to have to be just a grandmother.

Convention

To Manhattan last week from all over the U. S. flocked manufacturers and dealers in musical instruments and materials—more than 1,000 of them—for an annual convention. For five days they sat in sessions—little sessions, big sessions—talked music, not in a hushed, long-haired way, but loudly, statistically. “More than a billion dollars,” they were told, “is spent each year by the people of the U. S. on music in all its phases. . . . Ten million pianos in use today in the U. S. alone. . . .”

“Get pianos into the public schools,” urged Dr. Sigmund Spaeth of the Advisory Committee of the National Bureau for the Advancement of Music. “Get pianos. . .” echoed makers.

Most important to culture was the expressed opinion that pianos are no longer bought as a vulgar mark of distinction, but simply for the love of music.

While a ten-year-old boy played on a cornet, they elected a patron saint—Benjamin Franklin—even though the printers and the Saturday Evening Post already have his memory enshrined. Franklin played on the violin and guitar, composed a few conventional songs, and invented a long-obsolete musical instrument,the “armonica.”* The musical chambermen found these facts decisive.

*The American Who’s Who gives Dame Melba’s age as 60; the New Encyclopedia of Music and Musicians, 65; while many press despatches insisted she “is said to be 76.” Her own estimate is 67.

*MELODIES AND MEMORIES—Doran ($5)

*Not a mouth organ but an obsolete instrument consisting of hemispherical glasses, somewhat like champagne or sherbet glasses, mounted on an axis. He played the machine by dampening his fingers and touching the edges of the glasses.