Music: False Notes

The man on the phone said it was a bit of an emergency. Could Mrs. Dorothy Dobson sing top D flat? “Just a minute,” said Dorothy. She had just had a baby and felt a little out of practice. She went to her piano, tried the note, and then reported back: yes, she could sing top D flat.

A few days later, plump, curly-haired Dorothy, 26—a soprano hardly anyone in London had ever heard of—found herself in the studio of His Majesty’s Voice recording company. The famed star of the Milan Opera, Madame Margherita Grandi, was making a recording of the sleepwalking scene from Verdi’s Macbeth. Suddenly, right at the end, Madame Grandi shut her mouth, and Dorothy took over. She sang three notes—F, A flat, and top D flat. For her pains, she got a slight bow from Madame Grandi and 5 guineas ($21.15). Then she went home. She was to keep her three notes and 5 guineas a secret.

But last week, eight months later, all London seemed to know about it. One of the recording musicians had whispered to a friend, and the friend had told the Daily Express.

From Milan, Madame Grandi assured her British public that she really could sing top D flat herself. “But sometimes,” she confided, “I am under such emotion, that it is a help … if someone can sing it for me.” London music lovers did not much like this explanation. It soon developed that Madame Grandi had been under similar emotion at last year’s Edinburgh Festival, and had used another ghost, standing in the wings, for the same three notes. How much of this kind of thing went on? Apparently Sir Thomas Beecham, who conducted the orchestra for the recording, had approved the whole affair. Wrote a reviewer in Gramaphone: “From now on, I shall have the gravest suspicions when I hear sopranos singing their top notes.”

The only one who wasn’t fretting last week was modest Dorothy Dobson. She had always dreamed of being a famous singer—and this was fame of a sort. She only wished her three notes had been better. “They were,” said she, “the tiniest bit sharp.”