Читать книгу Canadian Performing Arts Bundle - Michelle Labrèche-Larouche - Страница 12

“Roberto, blacken the sides of my gown, please,” Albani told the costume assistant at Covent Garden. It was the dress rehearsal of Gounod's Roméo et Juliette, in which Emma was singing the role of the tragic heroine.

“But, Madame, it has already been done.”

“Do it again, then. And don't roll your eyes at me! I'm not the only one making demands here. You've already heightened the tenor's heels so that his voice will project more; You've loosened his shirt so he can breathe better, and You've changed his velvet jacket for a brocade one that won't absorb the sound as much!”

“She's only taking her stage jitters out on me,” said the costume assistant to himself. “I should be used to it by now!”

Albani was thirty-six years old that season, while Juliette, the heroine of the play and the opera, is supposed to be fifteen. The great cantatrice was still able to create the necessary illusion on stage to fit her roles – resorting to the occasional artifice, such as darkening the sides of her costumes to appear slimmer. In any case, opera-lovers are notably blind to physical short-comings as long as the singer's voice is worth listening to, and Albani's voice was still in full flower.

In spite of her continuing worldwide success, it seemed that people were beginning to lack the appropriate reverence towards the diva – perhaps because Ernest Gye was no longer in charge of Covent Garden. The theatre had declined under his directorship, and he had resigned as its manager. The official reason given out was that Ernest had decided to dedicate all his energies to managing his wife's career.

This did not prevent Albani from triumphing in Lohengrin – sung in German – at the same Covent Garden Theatre. Emma was able to savour her victory more sweetly after the opera and the festival season ended, ensconced in a country residence that one of her admirers, Lord Fife, had offered for her use the previous year.

Old Mar Lodge was a large hunting pavilion in the valley of the River Dee in the Scottish Highlands, in a landscape of lakes, islands, forests, and hills that reminded Emma of Canada. However, the mysterious countryside, along with its relics of battles among the clans and the piercing notes of the bagpipes, was pure Scottish. Albani and her family would sojourn for vacations in the land of Donizetti's Lucia and Verdi's Lady Macbeth for five years.¹

The estate was only a few miles away from Balmoral, the castle belonging to the Queen. Victoria was the first neighbour to extend a friendly invitation to the Gyes.

As time went on, it became customary for Emma to sing, accompanying herself on the piano, at intimate receptions at Balmoral. Victoria, lulled by the music and the warmth from the open hearth, would often drift into slumber. Once, she was rudely awakened when Emma fell onto the carpet at her feet; a leg of the piano bench had suddenly given way. The Queen, still half asleep, unthinkingly uttered her famous stock phrase, the severe “We are not amused,” and the guests burst into laughter at the incongruity of the situation.

Emma returned Victoria's invitation, and the Queen came to the Lodge for tea on several occasions. The young Ernest Frederick was impressed: “Oh, Mummy, what a little woman for such a big queen!” he said one day.

These holidays in Scotland were the only times that the boy could see both his parents as much as he liked. What joy! His father took him on expeditions into the hills, and his mother read him Peter Rabbit and other Beatrix Potter stories before he went to bed. Knowing that she would go off on a singing engagement all too soon, he would hug her tightly.

When the holidays ended, Emma would return to London, and the season of opera performances and festival recitals would start up again. In 1885, she sang again in the Handel Festival at the Crystal Palace,² and at the Birmingham Festival, where she created a new oratorio, Mors et Vita, composed for her by Charles Gounod.³ The composer and the soprano collaborated together in preparing the concert; he addressed her as “my dear great interpreter,” and rewrote certain sections of the score that Emma found difficult.

Queen Victoria attended the first performance of the oratorio and invited Albani back to Balmoral; Emma had become a regular member of the royal entourage in Scotland. Victoria took out a page of her diary and gave it to Emma, after writing on it: “To Madame Albani-Gye, with my warmest thanks for the great pleasure I had upon hearing her sing. – Victoria Regina, Balmoral Castle, September 24, 1885.” Emma kept it carefully among her most valued souvenirs, among tributes from Gounod, Brahms, and Franz Liszt.

Liszt came to London in April 1886 for the premiere performance of his oratorio, The Legend of St. Elizabeth, created by Albani. Emma was in awe of the illustrious black-caped composer with the face of an ascetic – by this time, he had been ordained a Franciscan and styled himself the Abbé Liszt. After the performance, he wrote to thank Emma and expressed his admiration for her art. She never saw Liszt again: he died later that year.

Albani had a gift for inspiring composers. A few years later, during a tour of Austria, Hungary, and Bohemia, she met Johannes Brahms in Vienna. He reportedly wept when he heard her sing his Requiem.

At the beginning of the 1887 Berlin opera season, Albani sang Lohengrin and Die fliegande Holländer in German, and La traviata, Rigoletto, and Faust in Italian.

Her valise bulging with musical scores, Emma crisscrossed Europe, returning to Covent Garden to sing Antonida in A Life for the Tsar by Mikhail Glinka – the story of a peasant hero who died saving the first Romanoff tsar in 1613. The work brought back poignant memories of St. Petersburg, where Albani's fresh beauty and innocence had captured Russian hearts. Now, she was almost forty and would soon begin an inevitable decline as far as her singing voice was concerned.

But Albani hadn't yet reached that precarious stage, and Ernest arranged her third North American tour. In January 1889, they set sail for Canada on the Etruria, accompanied by a convivial party of other talented singers and musicians. Rehearsals were held every day of the voyage; on rough days, the piano had to be bolted to the floor.

The steamer made its entry into the scenic Gulf of St. Lawrence. When Albani and her troupe disem-barked at Quebec City, they lodged at the Château Frontenac Hotel, with its sweeping view of the river. Emma was invited to the Quebec provincial parliament and was the guest of honour at the luncheon given by Premier Honoré Mercier after the morning's session.

“The weather here is pleasant; I hope it will still be so at the time of your visit,” wrote Sir John A. Macdonald, enjoining Emma and her husband to stay at Earnscliffe, the prime minister's official residence perched on a cliff overlooking the Ottawa River. The couple travelled to the national capital in a private railway car provided by William Van Horne, the president of the Canadian Pacific Railway; it was lavishly fitted with beds, a parlour, and a kitchen.

They enjoyed their time in the nation's raw new capital; Ernest even went tobogganing with Sir John!

After a zigzag into the United States, their itinerary took them to Montreal, where Albani gave the farewell concert of her tour. This city also had its château: a huge castle built entirely of ice! A masterpiece of the imagination, with towers and turrets hacked from the frozen St. Lawrence River, and illuminated by electric lights, it gleamed and sparkled in the night.

In the sleigh that carried her to the performance hall, the diva hummed some of the arias and songs she would perform that evening. She glanced fondly at the familiar passing scene: the show-filled streets, passers-by hailing horse-drawn taxis, and children hurling snowballs that burst against greystone buildings that reminded her of parts of The City, London's business district.

Emma arrived back in London for the start of the opera season. She sang for the Shah of Persia during his official visit to England in July 1889. The potentate was resplendent in his uniform, glittering with diamonds and other precious stones – he shone more brilliantly than a jewellery shop window. The Shah, amused by the sight of the musicians tuning their instruments, applauded; for etiquette's sake, the rest of the audience imitated him. He slept through most of the performance, rousing himself every once in a while to admire the ballerinas. When he wondered aloud if he might obtain some of them for his harem, he was told that in England, these arrangements were made more discreetly.

It was during that season that Nelly Melba made her Covent Garden debut in Rigoletto. The wide range and beautiful timbre of her voice, the quality of her phrasing, and her exceptional lung capacity immediately made her the house darling.

Emma realized that Albani's star was fading at last. In the newspapers she read that “the Covent Garden management has decided to stop basing its opera programme on the cult of a single star performer. Now, secondary roles as well will be sung by great artists. Nonetheless, we deplore the loss of Madame Albani, who has enchanted audiences of the Royal Italian Opera in her grand roles for many a year. In future, she will no longer have the exclusivity of these roles.”

George Bernard Shaw, the sharp-tongued Irish playwright, essayist, and man-about-town, was a relentless critic of Albani and other opera divas. He wrote of Emma: “her acting is calculated, with an obvious lack of spontaneity.” He admitted, however, that she was unsurpassed as an interpreter of Wagner's music.

Emma was still in demand for touring contracts, and her busy schedule did not allow her to ruminate on comments such as Shaw's. In autumn 1889, she left for a tour of the United States and Mexico as part of a troupe that included the legendary Adelina Patti and Francesco Tamagno. On its way to Mexico City, the large convoy of opera stars, musicians, and choral singers, with their mountains of baggage containing costumes, instruments, and stage sets, were obliged to delay for a day until a stretch of the railway track could be repaired, completely throwing them off their tour schedule.

Mexico City is situated at an altitude of over two thousand metres; the nights are chilly, and most of the houses and hotels are unheated. Emma warmed herself by drinking the fortifying cordial that she had used for years, a concoction called Mariani wine. Charles Gounod had introduced her to the benefits of this elixir based on pulverized coca leaves. Newspaper advertisements of the period proclaimed that “Mariani wine stimulates and clears the throat and strengthens the chest. Approved by the Medical Academy of Paris, this drink has gone around the world. It is known as ‘the wine of athletes.’”

From Mexico, the troupe returned to the United States, then to Canada, where Emma sang La traviata and Lucia di Lammermoor. It was the first time in Canada that two full-length operas were presented by a troupe mounted for the occasion. Albani's visit ended in Montreal with a benefit concert in aid of the Notre-Dame Hospital. Held at the Victoria skating rink, this event brought in twenty-five hundred dollars.

The following year, at Covent Garden, she sang Desdemona in Verdi's Otello, opposite Jean de Reszke, who sang the role of the jealous Moor. In Albani's dressing room hung a photograph of the celebrated tenor, inscribed: “With the very affectionate homage of her devoted partner.”

True to himself, George Bernard Shaw wrote of the performance that Desdemona was “pleasantly plump – rather too plump for the role.” This barb finally succeeded in annoying Emma. “Him again! Won't he ever leave me in peace?”

To the devil with Shaw! It was no pasty, evanescent Desdemona who gave throat to her first aria, Mio superbo guerrier, addressed to Otello, but a passionate and loving wife who poignantly begged for mercy, crying “Non uccidermi!”⁴ And afterwards, brokenhearted and without hope, intoning “Emilia, distendi sul mio letto la mia candida veste nuziale se morir dovessi”⁵ before uttering the desperate plea, “É perchè t'amo che m'uccidi?”⁶ as Otello glares at her with maddened eyes before strangling her.

“De Reszke has the habit of changing the stage directions to maximize the effect, without telling his partners in advance,” mused Emma. “I hardly know what to expect: tonight, he's so convincing that I don't know if I'll come out of it alive!” However, after grasping Desdemona's corpse in his arms for the finale, Otello raised her up and led her forward to bow to the wildly applauding crowd.

Glowing with success, she returned to the United States for a three-month contract at the Metropolitan Opera of New York City. Her Met debut was as Gilda in Rigoletto on December 23, 1891.

While Emma and Ernest took the train to Montreal to spend Christmas at the Villa Albani with Papa Lajeunesse, their son Ernest Frederick spent his holidays in England with Aunt Nelly and his paternal relatives. In Chambly, on the Rue Bourgogne, a typically English Christmas dinner was served: turkey, mince pie, and plum pudding. Real candles on the Christmas tree had been replaced by little electric lights. Emma reminded the assembled family members that the tradition of the Christmas tree had been introduced to England by Victoria's beloved Prince Albert, who had brought it from his native Germany.

In Montreal that winter, Albani sang in two operas, with singers from New York. Returning to the Metropolitan, she was acclaimed until the end of March, 1892, in Faust, Otello, Don Giovanni (as Elvira), Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots (in the role of Valentine), and Wagner's Lohengrin, Die fliegende Holländer, and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (as Eva).

In New York, Albani's name not only appeared in print for her performances, but also her wardrobe: the Redfern shirtwaist dresses that she wore were considered daring. She was also known for wearing hats with fine veils of different hues. “They give rainbow nuances to the face,” gushed a feature writer in an American fashion magazine.

In 1893, her career was still in full swing with a demanding agenda of opera tours in Austria, Hungary, and Bohemia, as well as a full slate of English festival performances. A whirlwind schedule, as usual.

In 1894, Ernest organized for Emma a German tour, which ended in Switzerland where their son was at boarding school. He was fifteen years old and hoped to make a career for himself in the British foreign service. “You'll have to study very hard, Freddy,” his father advised him. “You know how difficult the civil service entrance exams are.”

In the train on their way back to England, Emma said to her husband: “How Freddy has grown! I hardly know him, really, being so busy with my singing and all the travelling. When he was little, we used to take him with us, but those days ended so soon. Do you remember how he used to hang on to us, begging us not to go? And when he was ten, how he learned my part in Mors et Vita by heart so we would return more quickly to hear him sing it? And the drawings of us he used to do when we were away? I don't believe he has ever really understood how much I love him, in spite of everything.”

Two years later, Albani was booked for a new North American concert tour at the beginning of 1896. New York City seemed more electrifying than ever; the first public cinema screenings had just been inaugurated and were attracting eager crowds.

On this trip, Ernest Frederick accompanied his parents. He was now a handsome youth of seventeen, but very reserved, having been brought up under the Victorian edict that children were to be seen and not heard. He was all eyes and ears on the tour, as he took in new impressions. When they reached Quebec City, it was Carnival time, with its opening ceremonies of military parades. His mother sang, accompanied by two hundred choristers, a violinist, and the combined bands of the Royal Canadian Artillery, the Quebec Rifles, and the Canadian Hussars. Before sailing for England, the Gyes visited Chambly, where Ernest Frederick saw his maternal grandfather for the first time in many years. “It's a beautiful country,” he told the aging Joseph Lajeunesse. “I'll come back for a holiday as soon as I can.”

The return to London was tinged with sorrow, as it was to be Albani's last season at Covent Garden. Her final repertoire there was a celebration of the three great opera composers, Mozart, Meyerbeer, and Wagner. The critics all agreed that Albani's rendering of the Liebestod, Isolde's great love song to the dead Tristan, was the apogee of her art. Over the years, Emma's voice had gained in substance and had deepened from the lighter coloratura soprano to the dramatic soprano style suitable for the role of Isolde.

Thus, Albani left the stage where she had shone so brightly for twenty-four years of her career and gracefully made way for the younger soprano stars. Nonetheless, it was painful for her to strip her dressing room of all the lovingly placed evidence of her long reign at Covent Garden: the silver candlesticks, her red brocade divan, her Venetian mirror. This had been her second home.

To raise her spirits, Emma went to take a thermal cure in Auvergne in south-central France. “The waters here are a sovereign elixir for the throat and bronchial tubes,” she wrote to her devoted friend, the poet Louis Fréchette. She was to see him soon, for a cross-Canada Albani tour was scheduled for November 1896.

Touring a country of such vast dimensions was not without problems. In Calgary, for example, the lighting was inadequate; for the garden scene in Faust, a locomotive headlamp was brought in! Some of the newspaper critics along the way were lukewarm towards Emma's performances. From the Hamilton Spectator: “Her voice no longer has the freshness and purity that it once had. There are signs of exhaustion in the high register. The quality is slightly laborious and the intonation hesitant. However, the voice remains full and ample, and is carried with the art and subtlety that have made Miss Albani one of the great artists of our time.”

Emma felt a sense of panic when she read these comments. Was the end of her career at hand? One thing she knew for certain: she was getting old.

In 1925, King George V conferred on Albani the title Dame Commander of the British Empire.

1. In her autobiography, Emma recalled these stays at Old Mar Lodge with fondness.

2. Albani stared in the Handel Festival at the Crystal Palace every year for two decades.

3. Other composers who wrote music for Albani included Antonín Dvorák and Arthur Sullivan, who became one of her greatest friends.

4. “Don't kill me!”

5. “Emilia, lay my white wedding dress out on my bed, if I must die.”

6. “Is it because I love you that you will kill me?”