Jean de Reszke

‘Over the Moon’ by H.M. Brock, designed for the front cover of the programs for the D’Oyly Carte Opera Co.’s 1919–1920 season at the Princes Theatre, London. Courtesy of David Lovell.

James Hay, dated 1923. Photographer unknown. British Library, London.

On 1 july 1958, in Brighton, England, a 73-year-old single gentleman passed away in the town’s General Hospital. The death certificate records that he died of cerebral arteriosclerosis, a thickening of the arteries that supply the brain which would have undoubtedly caused a degree of dementia. The fact that the ‘occupier’, a member of the hospital administration, registered the death suggests that no family or friends were there, or even knew of his passing. Furthermore, that the certificate states Occupation Unknown confirms that very little was known about him. No grant of probate was ever recorded, so either his estate was not large enough to need one, or possibly he died intestate.

He was Peter James Hay; an Australian classical singer who had once lived at the swankiest of addresses—a bachelor pad on London’s Pall Mall, had studied with the great Polish tenor Jean de Reszke, had sung with Tetrazzini, and had for a number of years been a principal tenor of the celebrated D’Oyly Carte Opera Company.

There is much we don’t know about his later life or how he came to die in such lonely circumstances in Brighton, but his early life is better documented.

His father, Peter Hay, was a Scottish sheep farmer who had arrived in South Australia in the early 1880s. With his wife Sarah Ann (née Hair) he bought a small farm in Luton near the town of Clare, SA. In that remote rural setting Peter James was born on 21 August 1885. When appearing in The Gentle Shepherdin Scotland many years later, he would recall his early life: ‘My grandfather was a Presbyterian Minister in Edinburgh, but he emigrated to Australia, and there my father took up sheep farming. I remember as a wee laddie minding the sheep, and another recollection which remains with me very clearly is that of my grandfather rocking me on his foot as a tiny child, and singing many of the old airs and melodies reminiscent of the tunes which run through The Gentle Shepherd. I never saw a train until I was fourteen years of age, so you may imagine how remote we were from the busy highways of life.’¹ His father too would sing his young son to sleep with songs of Scotland, something Hay would later acknowledge as the root of his musical ability. ‘I owe all my success to my father, who gave me an appreciation of the best in music, and taught me the right idea of singing.’²  He recalled that his father had a fine tenor voice, and trained his son in the old Scottish folk songs. His guiding principle was expressed in these words: ‘The author of the song is the man who wrote the words.’ Even when Hay was at the height of his career, after years of training, it was noted that he sang with a noticeable Scots burr. It can be heard on the only recording that survives of him singing, a recording of D’Oyly Carte’s HMS Pinafore in which he sings the role of Ralph Rackstraw.

When Hay was 14 years old the family moved to Western Australia, where amongst other musical pursuits, he became a choirboy at Perth Cathedral. ‘On leaving school I went into business, but I used to devote all my spare time, and some of my time that was not spare, to music, the only thing in which I was interested. As a result, I occupied many different positions for only brief spaces of time—much to the annoyance of my father. He died when I had been at work for a year or so, and I found myself obliged to think seriously of my future.’³

His first singing teacher in Perth was a man called Lardeth, thereafter he studied with Mr. J.B. Huntingdon of whom he spoke glowingly in later years, declaring that throughout his subsequent studies in London and Paris and with the great Jean de Reske, ‘no alteration was ever considered necessary in the foundations of the art imparted at this Perth master’s hands.’⁴

Soon after his father’s death, Hay left Perth for Melbourne, but before he went, he gave a final recital at the Boulder Mechanic’s Institute. There was a good ‘front’ house for the concert, but, as the Kalgoorlie Miner reported, ‘the program did not contain the lighter items that appeal to a goldfield’s populace, and consequently there was poor attendance in the back of the hall’⁵ Those that attended certainly couldn’t complain of being short-changed, since the program was astonishingly long, concluding with ‘Take a Pair of Sparkling Eyes’ from The Gondoliers.

Amy Sherwin, dated 1898. Photo by London Stereoscopic and Photographic Company.

State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

Jean de Reszke, photographed by Benque & Co., Paris in 1892

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

Hay arrived in Melbourne with nothing but a letter of introduction and a reputation for being hopeless at business and for wasting his time on music. ‘Then we’ll try you at music,’ said a benevolent Scotsman to whom he was introduced and who soon took him under his wing. ‘I dinna think ye’ll ever dae ower much at business,’ said the old man, ‘but ye micht dae weel at the music.’ ‘I’ll take you to Marshall Hall, and if he says you have a chance of a musical career, I’ll back you for a couple of years till you can make your own living.’ Though Hay acknowledged the help of the generous man numerous times when recounting his career, he never divulged the Scotsman’s name. Marshall Hall’s advice was that he should take up singing professionally and go to Paris to study. Hay replied that he had no money, but the generous Scot provided the necessary financial backing for the crossing.

On the way over to Europe, Hay met the Tasmanian-born operatic soprano Amy Sherwin, with whom he subsequently studied in London for six months. Madame Sherwin had studied with Stockhausen, and Hay later acknowledged her to be a great practical teacher. Moving to Paris he commenced studies with a celebrated French baritone by the name of Monsieur Brouhy, before being taken on as a pupil with Jean de Reszke under whose guidance he remained for eighteen months. Hay recalled the experience: ‘His system, if such it can be called, consisted chiefly in singing a phrase more like an angel, than a human being. “Do it like that” added the great one in French, and of course you did—not! However we used to do operas in his little theatre in the Rue de la Faisanderie, and learned interpretation according to our brain –power. He always threw out the stupid pupils, no matter how fine their voices were.’⁶

Luisa Tetrazzini, 1908. Photo by E.F. Foley, New York.

Boston Public Library, Boston.

Ada Crossley, 1905. Photo by H. Walter Barnett, London.

National Portrait Gallery, London

Returning to England in 1909 he gave a recital at London’s Aeolian Hall which de Reszke had arranged for him. The Daily Telegraph reviewing the concert on 1 December found his performance of an aria from Gluck’s Iphigenia en Tauride ‘rather lacking in dramatic spirit’, but found good taste and delightful charm in his rendering of chansons by Fauré and Debussy. Overall, the recital was deemed to be a success, resulting in numerous subsequent engagements. The first was with the Chappell Ballad Singers, followed by six promenade concerts for Sir Henry Wood at the Queen’s Hall including singing with the Royal Choral Society in Missa Solemnis. On one occasion he was called on to deputise for the indisposed Gerard Elwes in Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius. ‘Next I had the invaluable experience of singing Berlioz’s Faust with Richter and studying oratorio under Rendegger. I then toured with Tetrazzini and Madame Ada Crossley for a couple of years.’⁷

Perhaps it is testament to either his quixotic nature, or to his passion for singing that only a week after his London debut recital at the Aeolian Hall, he travelled all the way to Coleraine, Northern Ireland, to sing in a concert in aid of a local rowing club. Or maybe the fee made the journey worthwhile. He was billed as ‘The New English Tenor’.

Ivor Novello with his mother, Madame Novello-Davies, 1916. Photo by Lallie Charles.

National Portrait Gallery, London

Opera singer Ruby Heyl, 1913. Photo by Matzene, Chicago.

J. Willis Sayre Collection of THeatrical Photographs, University of Washington Libraries

In 1913 we find him taking part in a concert organised by Madame Clara Novello-Davies, to promote the compositions of her son Ivor Novello. Although the newspapers claimed that all the artists taking part in the concert had  been trained by Madame Davies, Hay never acknowledged that he received any tuition from the Welsh Impresaria. Other singers taking part were Ruby Heyl who later had a career in the Chicago Opera Company; Charles Mott, a young English baritone of much promise, and much admired by Elgar, who was tragically killed in action in 1918; and Sara Melita (née Davies) who had sung at the Queen’s Hall Proms with Hay. The Referee found Hay’s rendering of Novello’s song “The Valley” particularly pleasing.⁸ Ivor himself was not at the concert, as he was in America “for the production of his new opera”,⁹ so we cannot be certain whether he and Hay ever met.

Immediately afterwards Hay embarked on his afore-mentioned tour with Madame Tetrazzini. It appears that most of her concerts were in Wales, where she was feted and most rapturously received. When in North Wales, the party stayed at the Pwll-y-crochan Hotel, the finest that Colwyn Bay could offer. The list of guests published by the North Wales Weekly News on August 1 tells us that not only did the great soprano travel with her own maid, Monsieur Tetrazzini was there with his valet, as was James Hay, Esq. of Walton-on-Thames.

‘All this time I had been anxious to go on the stage. So I applied to Mr D’Oyly Carte, of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas. He engaged me, but when I asked him what parts I would play he dashed my hopes. “Parts!” he exclaimed. “When you have never been on the stage before! You start in the chorus.”

‘It was rather a drop for me, but my determination to go on the stage conquered my pride, and I accepted his offer.

‘After a few months I was given a trial as Col. Fairfax in The Yeomen of the Guard, and after that I played parts until March 1915.’

In his later interviews with the press, Hay always said his debut as Fairfax took place in Glasgow in 1912, but as we have seen, unless the company gave him time off to sing for Clara Novello-Davies and Mme Tetrazzini, which is most unlikely, he cannot have joined till the summer of 1913.

We first see him being billed as a company principal in October when he is announced as one of two new tenors expected in Cambridge. The other was Dewey Gibson. Two months later, The Era, in possibly his first review as a principal, as Nanki-Poo in The Mikado at the Borough Theatre, Stratford, East London, reported that ‘Mr James Hay was heard to distinct advantage in the rôle of Nanki-Poo, and he played the persistent lover very successfully.’¹⁰

Between 1913 and 1915, Hay played the roles of Ralph Rackstraw in HMS Pinafore, Earl Tolloller in Iolanthe, Frederic in The Pirates of Penzance, Prince Hilarion in Princess Ida, Nanki-Poo in The Mikado, and Colonel Fairfax in The Yeomen of the Guard.

He left the company in March 1915, but we do not know where he spent the rest of the war years. It seems unlikely that he saw active service. By this time, he had begun a relationship with a wealthy London widow, a multi-millionairess, Stella Ettlinger, many years his senior. It may be that he and Stella fled to safer territories, though their names do not appear on known passenger lists.

Elsie Griffin as Mabel and James Hay as Frederic in Act I of The Pirates of Penzance

Courtesy of David Lovell

Griffin and Hay in Act II of Pirates

Courtesy of David Lovell

The war safely over, Hay returned to D’Oyly Carte in 1919. Richard D’Oyly Carte’s son Rupert had now taken over the running of the company and was firmly wielding a new broom. Rupert began re-costuming and re-designing the operas, launched a West End London repertory season, not at the Savoy but at the larger Princes Theatre (now the Shaftesbury), and created a second company which would tour smaller towns and cities. Hay returned to the principal company, then known as the Repertory Company, and adding Duke of Dunstable in Patience to his roles, he continued to play Ralph, Frederic, Hilarion, Nanki-Poo, and Fairfax. It was a short-lived spell however as in June 1920, he left and returned to Australia to join a new J.C. Williamson company which was being put together to tour Australia with seven of the operas.

Leo Sheffield as Captain Corcoran, Elsie Griffin as Josephine, Frederick Hobbs as Dick Deadeye, James Hay as Ralph Rackstraw and Sydney Granville as Bill Bobstay in HMS Pinafore. Courtesy of David Lovell.

Before he went, he managed to fit in an appearance at the Kings Theatre, Hammersmith, in a production of Audran’s comic opera La Cigalegiven by the Selfridge Operatic and Dramatic Society. The Stage found that ‘as Chevalier Franz de Bornheim, Mr. James Hay showed a tenor of unusual sweetness; his work is accompanied by a good deal of finely-felt singing, and his rendition of “Trifle Not With Love” is extremely fine.’¹¹

Meanwhile in Australia, the Melbourne journal Table Talk reported that ‘Rehearsals for the Gilbert and Sullivan opera season under the J.C. Williamson Ltd. management have already commenced at Her Majesty’s. On the way out from England are Charles R. Walenn, who was such a favourite when he last appeared in the Gilbert and Sullivan opera under the J.C. Williamson management; Gayford Hobbs [i.e. Frederick Hobbs] (baritone), James Hay (tenor). Both of the last-mentioned artists have been figuring with great success in the Gilbert and Sullivan revival in London. Also coming to Australia is Albert Kavanagh, already popular here by his appearance in the role of Popoff in the Clarke and Meynell production of “The Chocolate Soldier.” Others to be included amongst the principals will be Eileen Castles, who achieved great success in Gilbert and Sullivan opera in America; Ethel Morrison, Strella Wilson, and others. The operas will be produced by Minnie Everett, and the conductor will be Gustave Slapoffski.’¹²

Program for HMS Pinfore, Melbourne, 16 October 1920. From JCW Prompt Scrapbook 8, Vol. 4, National Library of Australia, Canberra.

The opening season consisted of productions of The Gondoliers, in which Hay played Marco for the first time, The Mikado, The Yeomen of the Guard, Iolanthe, Patience, HMS Pinafore and The Pirates of Penzance. The tour opened at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Melbourne on Saturday, 7 August 1920, with a performance of The Mikado, before visiting Sydney, Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane, and Toowomba in October 1921. The company then returned to Melbourne by which time Princess Ida and Trial by Jury had been added to the repertory.

The Bulletin, 19 August 1920, p.34

The Bulletin, 10 February 1921, p.34

In most announcements of the tour, Hay was referred to as ‘the new tenor’. It is surprising that more wasn’t made of his Australian roots, although the Sydney Morning Herald reviewing The Mikado, and wrongly calling him a Victorian, at least gave him a glowing notice: ‘To James Hay, a Victorian, came most of the applause. As Nanki Poo his make-up was excellent, and the trueness and sweetness of his voice quickly won favor, which was added to as the entertainment proceeded. His rendering of “A Wandering Minstrel” was delightful.’¹³

James Hay as Hilarion and Sylvia Cecil in the title role of Princess Ida, London

Wilson & Lloyd

James Hay as Frederic and Elsie Griffin as Mabel in The Pirates of Penzance, London

Wilson & Lloyd

At the end of his engagement, Hay returned to London. He frequently recounted the story of an occurrence when he happened to call into Rupert D’Oyly Carte’s office one morning in January 1922 ‘with nothing particular in view, and Pinafore hopelessly in full swing at the Prince’s Theatre. While chatting, a message of despair came through that Derek Oldham had fallen ill, inquiries on all sides had failed, and the day’s matinee would have to be postponed.’ To the amazement of his old friends in the company, Hay was on stage ready in his old costume before the curtain rose. He continued to play Ralph Rackstraw until the end of the season, and soon took over for some performances as Hilarion (in Princess Ida) too. In July he was re-engaged fully as a company principal sharing the tenor roles with Dewey Gibson and Leo Darnton.

The Sphere, 25 November 1922, p.x

In November of that year, in a much reported celebrity Mayfair wedding, he finally married Stella Ettlinger, a wealthy widow fifteen years his senior, following what the papers declared was a 14-year romance. If true, they must have met immediately on his first arrival in London in 1908. On the marriage certificate Hay gave his address as 14 Pall Mall, an address that even on the highest salary that D’Oyly Carte could pay, he could not have possibly afforded. Clearly Stella was supporting him there. She herself lived in nearby fashionable Hertford Street. The marriage took place at Christ Church, Down Street, Mayfair and Lady Dorothy D’Oyly Carte, titled wife of Rupert, and society doyenne attended the wedding.

James Hay, with his bride Mrs Stella Ettlinger, 14 November 1922

From Daily Mirror,15 November 1922, p.11

14 Pall Mall, London

www.rightmove.co.uk

The wedding was widely reported in the national press, with photographs of the happy couple. Their portraits appeared in the society magazine The Sphere,flanking a photo of the Wimbledon Centre Court, currently under construction. The British press were duly congratulatory and respectful. Some of the Australian reports of the wedding were less complimentary: ‘News that James Hay, the Gilbert and Sullivan opera tenor, has married a diamond merchant’s widow worth £40,000 a year, will satisfy Australian friends who found money for sending young Hay to England some years ago. He did very well when at last he got going, and some of his G. and S. performances in his native country were most artistic in all respects. But Nature had given the gentle tenor no physique to speak of. He was on the small side as a stage hero, and, before he left Australia, his sweet tenor had become as hard as a brick, whilst his throat was said to hold out no hope of the voice standing any more hard work. A wife with £40,000 a year should be an easier profession for him than the stage.’¹⁴

Album cover featuring drawing of Bill Bobstay, the Bo’sun’s Mate

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His Master’s Voice factories at Hayes, from an aeroplane

From Opera at Home, The Gramophone Co. Ltd., London, 3rd ed., 1925

During the tour of 1922, and despite having a voice ‘as hard as a brick’, or maybe because of it, Hay returned to London numerous times to record the role of Ralph Rackstraw for HMV. The recording studios were out in Hayes Middlesex and it must have made for long tiring days to get back to wherever the company were playing in time to perform that night. Correspondence has survived between Leyden Colledge, the producer of the recordings for The Gramophone Company and Rupert D’Oyly Carte showing that the two did not always see eye to eye.¹⁵ Rupert was very keen that the singers should all be current members of his company, but Colledge had already rejected Derek Oldham and Dewey Gibson, saying they did not have the right sort of voices for recording. Of Gibson, he claimed ‘the recorders tell me his voice is quite hopeless for our purposes.’ Hay recorded most of the show, however some of the numbers are sung by the tenor Walter Glynne, who was Colledge’s preferred choice for the role. Glynne had replaced Hay in the D’Oyly Carte company back in 1915 when Hay left at the start of the war. Glynne as a singer was clearly happier on the concert platform and did not return to the stage after the war. This recording of Hay as Ralph is the only known one we have of his voice.

For this, his third stint with D’Oyly Carte, Hay remained with the company until June 1923. It is not clear why he left at that point, but possibly Stella had grown unhappy with him being constantly on the road, and demanded more time at the marital home. He was soon signed up however to take part in a new production in Scotland, which alternatively may have been the reason he left.

The Scots poet Allan Ramsay’s pastoral The Gentle Shepherd was an early 18th century ballad opera and often cited as the first Scottish Opera. In London an actor-manager, Nigel Playfair, had revived the fortunes of the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, and in 1920 had produced a much celebrated and admired production of Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera. It was no doubt on the wave of interest caused by this revival that plans were announced to produce Ramsay’s Scottish equivalent, written in 1725, two years before The Beggar’s Opera. The show was staged in Glasgow and Edinburgh in September 1923. The Stagereported that ‘Mr James Hay acts and sings capitally in the title role.’¹⁶ A much-promised West End transfer however never happened, despite favourable notices for the production in Scotland.

The Stage (London), 5 June 1924, p.17

The following year an offer to sing the role of Camille de Rosillon in The Merry Widowenticed him back to the stage, with the added advantage that he could remain at home in London. At that time, most of the roles in Basil Hood and Adrian Ross’s 1907 English version of the show had different names, and the character was then called Camille de Jolidon. The merry widow herself was called Sonia, not Hanna her original name. Such changes might appear unnecessary and bizarre to us today. The show opened at the Lyceum Theatre on 28 May 1924 and ran until the end of November when it closed to allow the Christmas pantomime Ali Baba to take the stage. It starred matinee idol Carl Brisson as Danilo, George Graves as Baron Popoff (Baron Zeta) and Nancie Lovat in the title role. Following the Christmas season the show went out on the road in 1925, but Hay did not go with it.

By 1925 he was back with D’Oyly Carte, but this time as principal tenor with the smaller New Company. This company only toured four operas each year, and stayed only a week in each town, playing smaller towns, and often smaller theatres. It was consequently a more gruelling schedule, and Hay was engaged as the sole principal tenor which meant that he was ‘on’ every night. In 1925 the New Company were performing Patience, Iolanthe, The Mikado and Ruddigore, and Hay accordingly played The Duke of Dunstable, Earl Tolloler, Nanki-Poo and Dick Dauntless. It is probably true to say that the tenor roles in the first two of those operas are not as demanding as those of the latter two; nevertheless it was a punishing tour with more travelling than he had experienced hitherto.

Cast list for the Sydney season of Ruddigore, August 1927. National Library of Australia, Canberra.

Plans were afoot in Australia to mount another J.C. Williamson G&S tour, and in January 1926, Hay left the D’Oyly Carte Company for the last time. Also leaving the New Company to go to Australia with him were contralto Winifred Williamson, soprano Kathleen Anderson, and leading baritones Bernard Manning and Sydney Granville with his wife Anna Bethel.

The tour was to include the first Australian production of Ruddigore, and Hay who had given many performances as Dick Dauntless was given the responsibility of staging it. Ruddigore received its Australian premiere on Thursday, 23 June 1927 at Adelaide’s Theatre Royal.

The Australian premiere of a Gilbert and Sullivan opera was an event of some significance to the nation’s theatregoers, and the production received considerable coverage in the press. Hay gave many interviews prior to the opening, and introduced the country to the opera in a special radio broadcast, which was followed the next night by a transmission of the first act.

The Colemans’ Act 1 set for Ruddigore. Book 07-0028, JCW Scene Books, Theatre Heritage Australia.

The Triad wrote that the production ‘reflects considerable credit upon the efforts of James Hay as producer; because, through his observance of traditional accuracy, we have been able to witness a performance which should pass muster even in the very stronghold of Gilbert and Sullivan—The Savoy itself … James Hay, invoking the shade of Captain Marryat, tripped a most wonderful hornpipe to the noise of a kettle drum heard above a nest of shrilling fifes; the same player’s song about a “Bold Mounseer” was one of the features of the first act.’¹⁷

Of course, no-one who saw the show in Australia had anything to compare it to, so how close it was to the London production we cannot know. Presumably Hay had largely re-created the show he knew from the D’Oyly Carte production, and we assume that the same changes were introduced, principally the new overture by Geoffrey Toye, and the replacement of the Act Two finale with a short reprise of the end of Act One. Robin’s Act Two number ‘Away, Remorse’ remained cut, however we must give Hay credit for re-instating the lovely duet for Rose and Richard—‘The Battle’s Roar is Over’. It’s perhaps not surprising that he restored it, since it’s the tenor’s only romantic music in the piece, and Hay was after all playing the tenor role. He also moved the number from Act One to Act Two. The duet had been cut in the D’Oyly Carte revival, much to the disappointment of G&S lovers all over Britain who wrote in numbers to the press to complain (although it is on the first recording of the show made in 1924).

Sadly few photographs of the production have survived. Probably the costumes were sent over from London, as they were for the other shows. New scenery was designed and painted by W.R. Coleman & W. Coleman Jr. who provided the scenery for many of J.C. Williamson’s productions. As these sets were still in use in the 1940s, we have access to pictures of them. Act One shows a rather strange lighthouse that certainly doesn’t look like anything you would find in Cornwall, and, as others have observed, the cottages look more like the chocolate box Cotswold variety than anything Cornish. Act Two is more traditionally baronial, though the curtained entrance at the back is a peculiarly un-architectural feature.

The Colemans’ Act 2 set for Ruddigore. Book 01-0104, JCW Scene Books, Theatre Heritage Australia.

The complete tour lasted from 3 April 1926 when it opened in Adelaide with The Gondoliers, to the summer of 1928 and included many towns and cities in Australia and New Zealand. By the time the company reached Tasmania in February 1928, it claimed to have travelled over 26,000 miles, ‘a record in the history of theatrical touring’. As well as the usual major Australian cities, and New Zealand, the company also performed in Toowoomba, Armidale, Hobart, Launceston, Geelong, Broken Hill, and Newcastle. Singing every night, plus extensive travelling is a recipe for wrecking voices, and in May 1928 when the G&S company added Lilac Time, the musical comedy about the life of Schubert, to its repertory, the Adelaide Advertiser wrote: ‘Mr James Hay would be the first to grant that the pristine freshness of his tenor voice that has charmed so many thousands in the Gilbert and Sullivan operas has gone, but he still has a serviceable voice, and he has the artistry that enables him to “lift” a scene the moment he appears on the stage. It is a rare gift and its charm is its lack of self-consciousness. From the moment Mr. Hay appeared as Franz von Schober the piece began to sparkle, and if it were more the sparkle and effervescence of sherbet and champagne, there were few to quarrel with it on that score.’¹⁸

Sydney Mail, 7 September 1927, p.10

Clearly Hay’s voice was showing signs of wear and tear from so many years on the road, although it sounded, according to the Perth Sunday Times, that there was life in it yet: ‘The recent operation in Melbourne on the throat of tenor James Hay, of the Gilbert and Sullivan Co., has worked wonders for the singer of “Sparkling Eyes” and other delightful ditties. It was an ex-West Australian medico who suggested to Jimmy that his huskiness could be cured. This was effected in less than 24 hours, J.H. not losing a night’s work.’¹⁹

Hay left the J.C. Williamson company after the performances of Lilac Time in May 1928. By the time the company appeared in Armidale in July Leo Darnton was billed as the leading tenor. Many of the company stayed on for a new contract that would take them on even more punishing one, two and three night visits to such places as Wagga Wagga, Cootamundra, Maitland, Warwick, Maryborough, Rockhampton, as well as return visits to Armidale, Toowoomba, and Geelong.

The Bulletin, 6 May 1926, p.34

Strella Wilson, 1928. Photo by Ruskin, Melbourne.

Flickr

It is to be noted that when Hay left London for Australia in 1926, Stella did not travel with him. Was their marriage already over? Whatever the state of things then, Hay did not appear in any rush to return to the UK, so one can only conclude that to all intents and purposes, it was.

In the second half of 1928 and the early months of 1929 he made numerous radio broadcasts, many with G&S soprano Strella Wilson, returning to a more classical repertoire, and helping to inaugurate a Schubert Festival in Melbourne. He and Wilson also sang together in cinemas before showings of films, a popular practice at that time.

In an interview in April 1929 Hay told his Australian readers that he was preparing to go abroad again, and the Adelaide News reported that he would be passing through Adelaide on the SS Comorin on his way back to England.

We then lose track of him until the following year when he was to be heard in concerts on the radio for the BBC.

In 1932, Hay returned to the stage briefly, when he stepped into the breach to help out an amateur company in Burton-on Trent, Staffordshire, whose Frederic in Pirates had gone down sick. It was a generous gesture, but perhaps a sad last performance for one who had played the role so many times in London’s Princes Theatre, and all over Australia.

Thereafter Hay disappeared from the public’s gaze, as did so many singers in their later years. A surprising number turned to the hospitality profession and took on the management of public houses, but Hay followed a rather different course. It is not till 1946 that we find him in a very different occupation, teaching singing to wayward young boys in what were then called ‘approved’ schools.

And what of Stella? In the late 1920s Stella had left London and bought a large and comfortable mansion called Lindal Mount, on the banks of the Thames at Bray, near Maidenhead, a fashionable market town west of London. 

In 1936 we find Hay living close by at 1 Laburnham Road in Maidenhead. It appears that they could not live together but were never far apart. She continued to call herself Mrs. Ettlinger-Hay until 1938 when she changed her name by deed-poll to Ettlinger-Stewart (Stewart was her maiden name).

During the 1940s, Stella took an apartment in Viceroy Lodge, a fashionable sea-front block in Brighton. Electoral roles show that James Hay lived there with her during 1945.

Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove

Stella’s final Brighton home was at Embassy Court. Many celebrities had apartments in this luxurious Art Deco block  including Terence Rattigan, Rex Harrison and Max Miller.

RIBA, London

The 1939 Register (undertaken at the start of World War II) shows Stella still at Lindal Mount, and Hay now lodging with Albert and Susannah Baker at 187 Hersham Road, in nearby Walton-on-Thames. He is divorced, and describes himself as a musician. It appears that the two continued to live separate lives, though not far away from each other, until astonishingly they appear on a 1945 electoral roll in Brighton living together again at Viceroy Lodge, a fashionable apartment block on the sea-front. Was this an attempt to re-kindle old affections, or a temporary war-time measure of expedience? Whatever, it appears not to have been long-lasting, as the following year Hay took up residence at his final place of employment: Mile Oak Approved School for young offenders where he taught music and singing. Approved schools had been established in 1933 for the residential education and reforming of wayward children, usually boys. Mile Oak took boys of 12–15 years old and was a large forbidding place. Though situated just outside Brighton, on the downs, it was run by the London County Council for the edification of young offenders from the whole of the capital. The teaching staff were resident too and James Hay was provided with his own bungalow in the extensive grounds of the institution.

Early postcard view of Portslade Industrial School, which in 1933 became the Mile Oak Approved School

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The bungalows at Portslade/Mile Oak School, where Hay resided

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A newspaper report in the Norwood News in October 1946 records a rather bizarre and extraordinary event as our last glimpse of Hay in the public eye. ‘On Saturday at the Croydon Youth championship swimming gala held at Central Baths, the voice of Mr. James Hay, formerly principal tenor of the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, interrupted a swimming lesson. The lesson was being given by the boys of the Shiverers Swimming Club, Hove, under the direction of their president, Mr. Carl Wootton, who proved how simple swimming can be once the beginner has the confidence to float. Mr. Hay, mistaking “swimming” for “singing”, launched forth into opera and afterwards introduced his choir of lads, who sang in perfect harmony whilst the Shiverers swam in time. The effect was beautiful, and there was tremendous applause, not only for its perfection but for its originality.’²⁰

The description of this most unusual and original performance gives us a unique last image of Hay.

By the time of his death in 1958, seemingly alone and unknown in Brighton General Hospital, his career appears to have been forgotten. But not in Clare, South Australia. Only a few years earlier an article in the Northern Argus of South Australia had reminded its readers of Clare’s notable past talent as it prepared the program for the South Australia Eisteddfod. Hay was high on the list: ‘Then we remember James Hay of Mintaro, famous operatic singing personality in the great auditoriums of the world with his rich tenor voice.’²¹

The town of Clare was justly proud of its illustrious son.

Endnotes

1. Sunday Post, 26 August 1923, p.16

2. The West Australian, 5 April 1921, p.6

3. The West Australian, 5 April 1921, p.6

4. The West Australian, 5 April 1921, p.6

5. Kalgoorlie Miner, 15 June 1907, p.10

6. Adelaide News, 14 April 1926, p.7

7. Adelaide News, 14 April 1926, p.7

8. The Referee, 15 June 1913, p.5

9. London Evening Standard, 14 June 1913, p.12. According to Sandy Wilson in his book Ivor, the opera referred to was, in fact, an operetta, The Fickle Jade, which he had written for a competition organised by Chappell & Co., the music publishers, who would eventually publish his most famous compositions. He won second prize, but The Fickle Jade was never performed, although some of its melodies appeared in later shows.

10. The Era (London), 3 December 1913, p.15

11. The Stage (London), 3 June 1920, p.16

12. The Referee, 1 December 1920, p.11

13. Sydney Morning Herald, 20 November 1920, p.14

14. The Bulletin, 30 November 1922, p.36

15. Letters between Rupert D'Oyly Carte and Leyden College, 1922, in the collection of Chris Webster

16. The Stage (London), 6 September 1923, p.18

17. The New Triad, Vol. 1, No. 3, 1 October 1927, p.60

18. The Advertiser (Adelaide) 28 May 1928, p.13

19. Sunday Times (Perth) 6 May 1928, p.2

20. Norwood News, 11 October 1946, p.2

21. Northern Argus (Clare), 17 February 1954, p.5

Bibliography

Tony Joseph, The D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, 1875–1982: An unofficial history, Bunthorne Books, Bristol, 1994

Cyril Rollins & R. John Witts, The D’Oyly Carte Opera Company in Gilbert and Sullivan Operas, Michael Joseph Ltd, London, 1961

Raymond Walker, Backdrop to a Legend: The scenic design of the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, Raymond J. Walker, 2018

Robin Wilson & Frederic Lloyd, Gilbert & Sullivan—The D’Oyly Carte Years—The Official Picture History, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1984

Sandy Wilson, Ivor, Michael Joseph, London, 1975

Acknowledgements

David Lovell

George Low

Raymond Walker

Further sources

‘Refrain, audacious tar’from HMS Pinafore—Violet Essex and James Hay (recorded 27 July 1922—conducted by Harry Norris).
Courtesy of Chris Webster.

Asked by leo schofield the direct question, which was the greatest voice he had ever heard in an opera house, the distinguished music critic Desmond Shawe-Taylor (1907–1995) responded, unhesitatingly, ‘Margherita Grandi... the Glyndebourne performances before the war. She was sublime.’¹

Shawe-Taylor was not alone in this judgement. Grove’s Dictionary commented: ‘She was incomparable.’ Harold Rosenthal, in his Concise Oxford Dictionary of Opera, summarises her as ‘One of the few modern singers of the “grand style”, whose Tosca and Lady Macbeth were sung and acted with a sweep and conviction rare today.’ And John Steane in The Grand Traditionsaid:

It was to the ears of this post-war generation, longing to hear again singing that could sweep regally and soar with international authority, that the few records of Margherita Grandi were so welcome. The arias from Macbeth were directly in the grand tradition, noble and commanding, rich-voiced and dramatic.

A great difficulty in outlining her life and work is the lack of reliable sources. So, the pioneering work of Barbara and Findlay MacKenzie, Michael Bott and Douglas Hassall must be acknowledged and welcomed by all subsequent writers, and I have been fortunate to be helped by Grandi’s relatives in Milan, Hobart, Sydney and Harwood Island.

Margherita Grandi

Desmond Shawe-Taylor

The Early Years: Miss Maggie Gard

Even the most basic facts of the life of Margherita Grandi have for many years been comprehensively incorrect. The Oxford Dictionary of Australian Music of 1998 opens with: ‘b Hobart, 4 October 1894’.² And the Grove Book of Opera Singers of 2008 repeats these untruths. Both seem to have been based on Michael F Bott’s biographical essay in The Record Collectorof twenty years earlier. Mr Bott, a fine researcher, admitted that he had found that ‘much of her early life unfortunately remains a mystery’. So much so that he has nothing on her early years until she arrived to study at the Royal College of Music in London in September 1912 at the age of seventeen (when in reality she was shortly to be twenty years old).

In fact, as her birth certificate reveals, she was born Margaret Gard, not in Tasmania, but in the northerly part of New South Wales, at Harwood Island in the Clarence River district, on 10 October 1892.³ Her father, Bernard ‘Barney’ Gard was an engine driver, according to Margaret’s memoir of her early years on the river boat Woolwich, carrying sugar cane to the mills.⁴ His parents were Edward and Ann Gard (née Dougherty). Both had come to Sydney in 1841—he sailed from Cork, she from Greenock—‘with the large wave of Irish who had come to Australia to escape famine in their homeland’.

Born in the Hunter River area, he sang and played the concertina. And her mother, Catherine ‘Kate’ Ryan was said by Grandi to have ‘crooned me to sleep in her lilting voice with an Irish lullaby’, whereas her father would ‘sing arias from Puccini and Verdi to me and my sister in his strong and clear voice’. There she had three sisters: Molly (b 1890), Teresa (b 1895 d same year) and Katie (later Kathleen, b 1896). She was to be her father’s favourite, according to Grandi, always supporting her ambition to become an opera singer.

Royal College of Music entry card

So where did all the misinformation as to her origins come from? It occurred to me that she herself was most likely the author—and having now seen the entry card for the Royal College of Music from 26 September 1912, written in her own hand, one can see immediately that she deliberately shaved two years off her real age and that future researchers would assume that she had been born in Hobart. Also, in her entry card she writes that her name is Marguerite Filo (presumably Filomena) Gard. Aside from the gentrification of Margaret, this is the first we hear of Filo, which is not in her birth certificate. 

I was joyfully able to connect with Margherita Grandi’s daughter Patricia in Milan in 2005 and shared with her a draft of the piece I was developing for the Testament CD of her mother’s Lady Macbeth at Edinburgh. She took me to task … ‘born at Hobart Tasmania’. Perhaps the diva maintained that fiction throughout her life, leading to constant speculation regarding her date and place of birth. And after a talk I did in Sydney in 2008, other Grandi relations told me that her father, when she was born, had been an engineer, not an engine driver. Not so! Not yet.

Initially Margaret went to school at Harwood but then, aged eight, she seems to have first performed in public on 27 September 1901 at a concert given by the pupils of Yamba Convent School. Yamba sits at the mouth of the Clarence River, some kilometres from Harwood Island and was reached by boat. There …

The principal item of the second part was the drama ‘Reverse of the Medal, or Contentment is the Secret of Happiness’. The leading parts were taken by Misses Eileen Holt and Maggie Garde, who displayed a dramatic ability that was really surprising in such small children.⁵

The following year, now ten, Maggie (established already as her given performing name) again performed for the school in a drama on 2 December 1902, ‘Mrs Willis’ Will’, together with ‘Polly Garde’, who was presumably her older sister Molly.⁶

In 1903, around her eleventh birthday, Maggie and her family did sail to live at Hobart in Tasmania. Quite why they relocated is not clear but father Barney may well have felt that there were better career opportunities in the city, together with the possibility of gaining ‘certification’ as a professional engineer. And in due course he was able to establish himself as such, based in the burgeoning motorised marine sector on the harbour, working on the City of Grafton, carrying fruit rather than sugar cane.  

Initially in Hobart, Maggie was sent to St Mary’s Primary School, where, on 13 July 1905, she was to perform with the other pupils in a Benefit Entertainment in aid of school funds. In it, she and her sister Katie sang a duet, ‘What are the wild waves saying?’, and Maggie was complimented on having ‘a nice, clear soprano marked by good enunciation. This was most probably her vocal debut! And later in the same event, Maggie was Little Bo-Peep to Katie’s Little Boy Blue, where they ‘sang, danced and lived out their little lives before an audience which evidently appreciated the fun.’⁷

The following year Maggie moved on to a secondary school, St Columba’s, where, taught by the nuns, she participated aged thirteen in an invitation concert given by the pupils, Katie dancing and Maggie playing the piano ‘very creditably’.⁸ In June 1906 Maggie and Katie were maids of honour in a school production of The Persian Princess, and in the following concert she sang ’The Swiss Toy Girl’ in costume.⁹ At St Columba’s, she was to recall she had her first singing teacher, Sister Mary of the Assumption, and drama classes with Sister Mary Rose. However, she did not like her ruler-wielding piano teacher, Sister Brigid.

On 26 August 1907, the fourteen years-old Maggie gave her first (and last?) full scale straight dramatic performance, as Annie White (daughter of the lead role) in the Hobart Catholic Young Men’s Dramatic Society’s production of H.T. Craven’s Milky White at St Peter’s Hall. Perhaps rather miserly, the Mercury reported that the acting was ‘adequate’.¹⁰

It seems that Maggie’s final performance for her school, at sixteen, on 10 December 1908, was in the operetta Wanted, A Parlourmaid by H. Ffrench in which Maggie ‘sustained her character well’.¹¹ What had become clear was that Maggie Gard was totally at home on a stage – and this boded well for the future. And it was at St Columba’s that …

The nuns taught us the virtues of chastity, humility and obedience, feeling it their foremost duty to fight a rearguard action against Satan … During our daily Catechism lessons we learned that any sexual pleasure is concupiscence and any sexual pleasure outside marriage is fornication. Both concupiscence and fornication were sinful.¹²

Alongside her performances as Maggie Gard in Hobart, between 1905 and 1910 under her fuller name, Margaret, she was to take and pass, sometimes with honours, the theory exams of both the Royal Academy of Music and Trinity College in London, her teacher being Miss I.B. Carmichael.

Having left school at sixteen, Maggie Gard sang at the Christmas Day morning service of 1908 at St Mary’s Cathedral in Hobart, where she gave the soprano solo in ‘Adeste Fideles’. Her family by no means wealthy, Maggie will have taken a job—of which I have found no trace—but she also continued to perform in Hobart, with her outside-of-school singing teachers beginning to come to the fore.

The first of these was Percy Marchant, at the time probably the leading voice teacher in the city. She sang at the concert given by his pupils on 14 July 1909 at the Town Hall. By this stage, Maggie, still sixteen, was described as a contralto, presumably a shift engineered by her teacher, singing the recently published ‘Sympathy’ (by Charles Marshall and May Hay) with ‘taste and maturity’.¹³

Within a few months, she was being described either as a contralto or as a mezzo-soprano. ‘Sympathy’ was to become a regular for her, along with Stowell’s ‘Flowers of Paradise’, the Mercury reporting on the latter that ‘this young lady has a contralto voice of great volume, and her intonation, expression and articulation are exceptional.’¹⁴

Lucie Atkins

Percy Marchant left Tasmania in February 1910, moving on to teach in Perth WA. At his Farewell Concert, seventeen years-old Maggie sang Luigi Luzzi’s ‘Ave Maria’ and ‘The Reaper’. Also performing in that concert was another Marchant pupil, Lucie Atkins, who, along with Vera Hempseed and Maggie Gard, was to form a triumvirate of talented young female singers from Hobart, all anxious to emigrate to London and/or Paris for further training and career opportunities. However, each of them needed to be funded.

Contralto Lucie Atkins was lucky enough to have been heard by Nellie Melba, who gave two concerts at the Town Hall in April 1909. Melba attended Lucie’s concert on Tuesday 6 April). She was ‘very pleased with her voice’ and asked her to come to Melbourne in September so that she could hear her again and give her some initial coaching.¹⁵

This was accomplished and her mother reported that Lucie had been invited by Melba to come to London. Melba wrote to Lucie’s supporter, Captain Evans, that ‘if the Tasmanian people can raise £200 for her, I will do this rest. She will have to study for two years and will require £600.’ On receipt of Melba’s note, Evans convened a public meeting in the Town Hall aimed at raising the funds.¹⁶

In parallel with Lucie, soprano Vera Hempseed, having been heard by Mr F. Moore, examiner for the Royal Academy of Music, was also recommended to Melba, but in her case, her wealthy parents decided to provide for her expenses in London.¹⁷

Both Lucie and Vera left for Europe in December 1909. In the event, Lucie went as planned to study with Melba in London, whereas Vera went to Paris to audition for Mathilde Marchesi. She was to write to her parents the following year:

Madame says I sing my exercises perfectly as regards tone and adds, ‘You may write to Miss Levy, your teacher in Hobart, and tell her, with my sincere compliments, that she has taught you to sing correctly … [your voice] is entirely without faults and well placed.¹⁸

Grace Levy had become singing teacher to both Vera Hempseed and Maggie Gard after the departure of Percy Marchant. Before the end of 1910, Marchesi had decided that Vera should have a new performing name—and so she became Vera Tasma.¹⁹ It was a regular part of Marchesi’s approach to give her preferred students names that were often reflective of their origins—and to give them identity in a crowded marketplace—earlier Australian pupils being Nellie Melba and Frances Alda.

While Lucie Atkins and Vera Hempseed were now settled in Europe, it became Maggie Gard’s turn to find a way of getting there. And she had none of the financial wherewithal that had enabled the other ladies to go. So, in January 1911 a meeting was convened by the same Captain Evans who had helped Atkins at the Town Hall in order to solicit support for her. And in January a second meeting announced that Mrs Hempseed, Vera’s mother, was going to live in Paris to be with her daughter and had offered to give board and lodging for Maggie.

However, there were further costs still to be met, not least fees for her teacher(s) there.²⁰ Maggie and Mrs Hempseed left Hobart for Melbourne and Paris on 11 February 1911—Regatta Day.

Marchesi and Nellie Melba, 1894

Maggie Gard, 23 September 1910

In my biography of Mathilde Marchesi and her pupils (2016) I came to the conclusion that Vera Hempseed was the last of Marchesi’s pupils and that the pedagogue had finally shut up shop after a lifetime of teaching around August 1910 aged 89. Over the years she had taught a multitude of young women from around the world, including some fifty Australians.

If that was the case, how could it be correct that a report had come to Hobart from Mrs Hempseed in Paris that Maggie had auditioned for Marchesi in March 1911, and that Marchesi had declared that the ‘voice very beautiful, decidedly worth training.’²¹ This report certainly encouraged the worthy citizens to support their promising songbird.

Did she really become a Marchesi pupil? It seems so. For a report was received in September from Senator J.J. Long, who had visited Maggie at Marchesi’s:

‘By the courtesy of the madame,’ said the senator, ‘we were permitted to hear Miss Gard sing. Although she has only been under the care of Madame Marchesi for four or five months, we were able to notice a very marked improvement in her voice … I asked Madame Marchesi if she was pleased with Miss Gard’s voice, and the reply came, “You can tell the people of Tasmania that I think she has a wonderful voice”.’²²

It appears that I shall need a new edition of my book. Marchesi’s last pupil: not Vera Hempseed in 1910 but Maggie Gard in 1911.²³

However, around October-November 1911, Maggie was stricken with typhoid.²⁴ In danger for a while, she started to recover and the illness provided further encouragement for fundraising in Hobart.²⁵

Jean de Reszke as Siegfried

It was clear that Madame Marchesi was fast approaching the end of her working life and by February 1912 she had relocated to London to live with her daughter Blanche. So, Maggie was in need of a new teacher in Paris, but who should it be?

She was quite swiftly under the tutelage of the great Polish tenor, Jean de Reszke. He had had a long and glittering career, starting out as a baritone and moving up to tenor in 1883. Before the advent of Caruso, he was Nellie Melba’s favourite on-stage partner and a close personal friend. It could well have been Melba who facilitated the introduction to de Reszke. As a result of a respiratory illness in 1902, he had turned to teaching in Paris and among his pupils were the soprano Maggie Teyte and the tenor Leo Slezak.

Maggie studied with de Reszke for several months before taking a break to go to London in June 1912. And by September she was signed up with the Royal College of Music there, winning an exhibition.

Sir John McCall, London, 1917

National Portrait Gallery, London

Lempriere Pringle

Through that London summer of 1912 she had been taken up by the agent-general for Tasmania in London, Sir John McCall, who was to be a constant supporter over the coming years. A first fruit of this new relationship was a recital at the Bechstein Hall (now the Wigmore) on 25 July, where she sang Beethoven’s ‘In questa tomba’, Amy Finden’s ‘Allah be with us’, ‘Sympathy’ and ‘Lullaby’ (in which she accompanied herself). Among the audience was the well-established Australian contralto, Ada Crossley, who ‘spoke warmly of Miss Gard’s promise’.²⁶

Maggie (or perhaps more properly now Margaret) was to sing in December at a Complimentary Dinner given at the Trocadero in London for Sir John McCall, where the former Australian prime minister Sir George Reid was the principal speaker. Also singing there was the Tasmanian-born bass, Lempriere Pringle.²⁷

Marguerite Gard, London, 1916

Harry Plunket Greene

At the Royal College of Music, Margaret’s main teacher was the celebrated Irish baritone Harry Plunket Greene, author of the influential Interpretation in Song (1912) who was greatly enthused by her singing but ‘has not allowed me to accept any engagements so far,’ she reported.²⁸ And early in 1914 she won a second scholarship at the College said to be worth £100 and sang the wattle song at the Australia Day celebrations in London.

It is unclear how long she was to stay with the Royal College. Her entry form indicates that she left after five terms in April 1914, but it may be that she left and rejoined during the duration of the First World War. Whatever she did in those years, there are very few reports until she made her ‘debut’ at a Halloween concert at the Queen’s Hall (London’s premier concert venue) on 3 November 1918—eight days before the cessation of hostilities.²⁹

Between the Wars: Starting at the top and moving up

Maggie’s first booking after the war seems to have been on Australia Day, 26 January 1920, when, among the many functions In London, she was to sing at a ‘corroboree’ where the principal guest was the High Commissioner (and former prime minister) Andrew Fisher. Sharing the programme with her were two other Australian performers—the vaudevillian Albert Whelan and the concert pianist William Murdoch.

Perhaps it would be good at this point to assess the trajectory of her career. Of course, the disruption of a World War with its severe reduction in both operatic and concert activity for the duration had a major negative impact. And this was to happen to her again (for different reasons) through the next major conflict (1939–45).

But on top of those enforced career breaks, from a public and professional point of view, who was she? Through her early years, she had been Maggie/Margaret Gard/Garde but later she was to experiment with the supposedly more sophisticated Marguerite. What a pity it was that her first teacher in Paris, Madame Marchesi had just given away the origin-based Tasma name to Vera Hempseed. And, going by the example of Marchesi’s most successful pupil, Helen Mitchell, whom she had dubbed Nellie Melba, she might have advised Miss Gard to stick with Maggie, like Nellie a combination of familiarity and distinctiveness, along with a suggestion of ‘of the people’. Then in the early 1920s, she was to meet in Milan the man she was to marry, Giovanni Grandi, taking his surname, with its implications of splendour and magnificence, and becoming Margherita Grandi.

How perfect might have been ‘Maggie Grandi’. One wonders if they considered it?

Emma Calve as Carmen

Signed photo of Djemma Vécla

However, shortly after the war, Maggie returned to Paris, studying with the fabled mezzo-soprano Emma Calvé, a woman most celebrated for her embodiment of Carmen. And Calvé was able to organise for Maggie a two-year contract with the Opéra-Comique in the city, with the prospect of a raft of new roles. Auditioning, she sang arias from Carmen and Massenet’s Wertherfor director Albert Carré. At some point in the early days of this relationship, she was heard by the legendary director of the Monte Carlo Opera, Raoul Gunsbourg, who signed her up as Carmen, also taking the title role in Massenet’s new (and final) opera, Amadis.³⁰ But who should she be?

Somehow, Calvé and Gard between them decided on an impossible to commit to memory name, Djemma Vécla, the first word a complication of Emma and the second an anagram of Calvé. Given that, at thirty years old, Maggie was just starting out on her operatic career at the top, it was a disastrous choice of monicker, one that was soon to be abandoned.

Monte Carlo Opera

Gard/Vécla was not the first Australian to sing at Monte Carlo. Indeed, 1 February 1902 had seen the first of the legendary Melba-Caruso nights, when Melba was Mimì and Caruso Rodolfo in Puccini’s La bohème with an elegant, sellout audience.

Vécla opened as Carmen at Monte Carlo twenty years later, on 31 January 1922, with the local favourite tenor Fernand Ansseau as Don José and Gaston Barreau as Escamillo with the Belgian long-term musical director at Monte Carlo Léon Jehin conducting. The Bystander in London reported: ‘Mlle Vecla in Carmen has a beautiful contralto voice but is a very young debutante.’ In reality she was twenty-nine.³¹

Mlle Vécla was to return at Monte Carlo as Charlotte in Massenet’s Werther on 11 and 14 February and running that same week (12 and 16 February) was Gounod’s Faustwith (according to T.J. Walsh’s history of the Monte Carlo Opera) Fanny Heldy as Marguérite. In fact Mlle Vécla was Marguérite in one of those performances, probably the latter, and The Graphic in London reported that she ‘succeeded’, although Ansseau as Faust was ‘too awful for words’.³²

On 1 April she took the title role in a previously unperformed opera by Massenet, Amadis. Massenet had first composed the work in 1889–90, some twenty-one years earlier, but had shelved it and it was not resurrected until nearly ten years after the composer’s death in 1912. Other leading roles were taken by members of the Monte Carlo company and the premiere was conducted (again) by Léon Jehin. Massenet’s star in the descendant, it ran only for only three performances.³³

Nevertheless, there were fine reports of her Amadis: ‘She acted the part as a great artist, with a perfect simplicity and a power that won her repeated applause,’ (J. Mery) and ‘A beautiful voice, wonderful shades of tone, coupled with a most intelligent comprehension of the role.’ (M. July)³⁴

Jules Massenet

Giovanni Grandi self-portrait, 1921

It seems that Amadis was the last of her performances at Monte Carlo that season. Following it, she reported that she was to return to her contract at the Opéra-Comique in Paris, but if she did so, no performances there have been identified. And what name would she have sung under? Not Djemma Vécla it seems.

So who was she? She will have  had to earn a living in some way—and it seems most likely that she did go back to serve out her contract as a mezzo-soprano with the Opéra-Comique, but the only name suggested that she might have used, proposed by Michael Bott, is Madeleine Caron, who sang both Carmen and Charlotte there in the relevant years.³⁵

In late 1924 or early in 1925 in Milan she married the Italian stage designer Giovanni Grandi. Where and when they had first met is not known to me—probably in Paris or Milan. Initially a portrait and landscape artist, Giovanni had become a leading international opera designer and scenery painter, first in St Petersburg from 1912 through the revolutionary period to 1920, then from 1922 at La Scala, Milan, his debut there fittingly being Boris Godunov. Giovanni went from 1925 to 1927, accompanied by his new wife, to become Technical Director of the San Francisco Opera.³⁶

Design by Giovanni Grandi for Iphigenia in Tunis, La Scala, 1945

Together they made their home in Milan, and thus ‘Margherita Grandi’ was born. They had a daughter, Patricia, who was born in 1928 and with whom I was able to correspond and talk on the telephone around 2004–05. Maggie Gard is first apparent (for me) as ‘Grandi’ in a return to Monte Carlo in a smaller role in Massenet’s Manon in February 1925.

However, as Margherita Grandi, she seems to have abandoned the need to publicise her triumphs, not only in Australia, but also in Britain. So, her name was to become principally known well only to opera-lovers in her new home country, Italy. And given that few Italian newspapers are today available archivally online, and given my own lack of functional Italian, she becomes somewhat invisible.

However, we can be altogether grateful to Michael Bott for his 1979 essay in The Record Collector. He managed to fill in her (principally) Italian years so fully—a major part of her performing life. Of course, some of his correspondents had heard her singing live there between the wars.

Gianinna Russ as Aida

Margherita Grandi, 1932, by E.S. Mariva, Milan

National Library of Australia, Canberra

Margherita Grandi did not sing professionally in San Francisco while her husband was creating much-admired stage designs there. And she only returned to the stage, following the birth and young childhood of Patricia, in October 1932, when she was already forty years old. Ahead of that re-emergence, she had taken lessons with a new teacher, the Italian dramatic soprano, Gianinna Russ (1873–1951). Herself a pupil of Eva Leoni, Russ had made her debut as Mimì in La bohème at Bologna in 1903, going on to become a star at La Scala, Covent Garden and elsewhere—as Aida, Norma, Gilda, Violetta, Elizabeth in Don Carlos, Abigaille in Nabucco and Margherita in Boito’s Mefistofele.

Starting out as a contralto in childhood, Gard/Grandi had moved up to mezzo-soprano, but now, perhaps no longer happy with her voice or her roles, she took the final step, becoming, under Russ’s guidance, a dramatic soprano. She had always had the power and the tone for those new roles—and now she added the extra notes at the top of her range.

Verdi, 1860, by Nadar

John Brownlee

Grandi made her debut as a dramatic soprano as Aida at the Teatro Carcano in Milan (not Rome as Bott has it) on 14 October 1932,³⁷ following that two months later with Margherita in Mefistofele³⁸ and Aida at Bari, then both of those roles in Turin. It was her first Verdi. Did she realise at this stage how his operas were going to dominate her future career? Of her Aida, an Italian critic wrote:

Margherita Grandi was much applauded in the part of the protagonist. She interpreted the Verdian personage with a secure art and showed herself in possession of superb vocal and scenic qualities.³⁹

La Scala, Milan

Late in 1933 and through the early months of 1934 she toured in the Netherlands as soloist with the La Scala chorus conducted by Vittorio Veneziana. She went on from there to sing Aida at Cairo and Alexandria in March 1934 (with fellow-Australian John Brownlee her Amonasro in both cities), before returning to Italy to make her debut at La Scala in Milan in May as Elena in Mefistofele. And in Bergamo she added Leonora in Il trovatore, receiving an ovation for her performance of the aria ‘D’amor sull’alli rosee’.⁴⁰

She continued as Aida in Italy—at Novara, at the Teatro Adriano in Rome, at the Roman amphitheatre in Pola, and at the Teatro Verdi in Florence, before returning to Mefistofele at the Teatro Reale in Rome under Tullio Serafin, then at Ravenna. She added Amelia in Simon Boccanegra on radio (EIAR) in May 1936 before performing it for a live audience at the Teatro Regio in Parma.⁴¹

Tullio Serafin

Margherita Grandi on her way to Rio, 1937

There was a change in gear in February 1937, when Grandi sang in Verdi’s Requiem at Trieste, followed by her first Tosca in July at Genoa.⁴² And in August she sailed to Brazil, singing two of her staples at the Teatro Municipal in Rio de Janeiro—Aida and Leonora—plus two new roles—Yara in the Brazilian composer Antonio Carlos Gomes’s Lo Schiavo and Frine in the Italian Lodovico Rocca’s Morte de Frine. Moving on from Rio, she gave a single performance of her Tosca at the Teatro Municipal in Sao Paolo.

Returned to Europe, Grandi sang her first Desdemona on 2 October at the Teatro Carlo Felice in Genoa with a leading tenor as Otello, Francesco Merli (who was a star with Melba’s company in Australia in 1928) and, as Iago, Mariano Stabile (Lord Harewood’s favourite baritone).⁴³ Stabile was to return as a colleague in Grandi’s highly-regarded seasons after the Second World War at the Cambridge Theatre in London.

She then took her Desdemona to Trieste, Brescia and Parma, before giving two performances of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis under Felix Weingartner at Trieste in March 1938.

Teatro La Fenice, Venice

The following month she appeared at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice as Elizabeth in Verdi’s Don Carlos—a role and venue debut—before giving another first (for her) in the title role of Ponchielli’s La Gioconda at Palermo.⁴⁴

In November-December of 1938, for a second time, Grandi toured in the Netherlands (Amsterdam, The Hague, Rotterdam) with Opera Italiana as Tosca before returning to sing Elizabeth at Genoa with Ebe Stignani and Francesco Merli (broadcast by Italian Radio), and Desdemona and Tosca at the San Carlo in Naples in January 1939—her debut at that great theatre in operatic history.

It is perhaps surprising that, as one of the (by this stage) leading and best-known dramatic sopranos in Italy, she should be hired as an unknown in Britain to sing at the small but already revered opera house at Glyndebourne.

Glyndebourne, Edinburgh, the Cambridge Theatre and Covent Garden

John Christie, owner of the country house at Glyndebourne in Sussex, had built the opera house in his grounds in 1934—partly as an opera-lover himself, but principally in order to feature his soprano wife, Audrey Mildmay, in productions of the great operas of Mozart. Initially with an auditorium that sat just 300, it was intended to become a sort of Mozartian mini-Bayreuth.

The Christie family—John Christie and Audrey Mildmay with their children

National Portrait Gallery, London

Glyndebourne today

Grandi with Signor Cattaneo, the prompter, and Francesco Valentino

And the first seasons were entirely devoted to Mozart—The Marriage of Figaro, Cosi fan tutte, The Magic Flute, The Flight from the Seraglioand Don Giovanni. Christie had brought in an outstanding production team from Germany—all of them dismayed by the political developments back home—musical director Fritz Busch, producer Carl Ebert and general manager Rudolf Bing. Their early productions in Sussex drew admiring notice—but would they be able to carry on with Mozart for ever, or should the repertoire be expanded?

Although Verdi had been having something of a revival in early-1930s Germany, it was not to be expected that their first venture beyond Mozart at Glyndebourne should be one of Verdi’s lesser known early operas, Macbeth.⁴⁵ It was premiered (to good reviews) on 1 May 1938—its first professional production in Britain—with the Croatian-born Vera Schwarz as Lady Macbeth and New York-born Francesco Valentino in the title role.

Glyndebourne persisted with Macbethin the following season, this time hiring the ‘Tasmanian’ Margherita Grandi as Lady Macbeth. It must have been something of a risk. She was quite unknown in Britain, and she was given very little pre-publicity. Was Vera Schwarz unavailable?

It opened on 2 June 1939 to ecstatic reviews—in particular for Grandi. Later, Desmond Shawe-Taylor was to write:

In Macbeth everything came together: the bracing shock of the unknown masterpiece, the unifying force of conducting, production and stage picture, and superb portrayals of the leading roles. This last element was still more marked in the 1939 revival, when Vera Schwarz … was replaced in the role of Lady Macbeth by the unknown, but vocally and dramatically magnificent, Margherita Grandi.⁴⁶

And Lanfranco Rasponi in his The Last Prima Donnas wrote: ‘In the 1930s the Tasmanian soprano Margherita Grandi was considered the greatest Lady.’⁴⁷

Rudolf Bing

Grandi with Francesco Valentino in Macbeth at Glyndebourne

With a great success on his hands, general manager Rudolf Bing made every effort to have the production recorded, writing to HMV enthusiastically about the proposed project.⁴⁸ However, the recording company were not convinced, and in the event a set of recordings of live performance(s) was made privately, now remaining in the Glyndebourne archives, still unpublished. They will include Grandi’s first recordings, made in her forty-six years old prime.⁴⁹

She gave ten performances as Lady Macbeth that season at Glyndebourne, but with the outbreak of war with Germany looming, Margherita, perhaps rashly, returned to her family in Milan. Perhaps she thought that Mussolini’s Italy would not join any war between Germany and France/UK, but that war started just two weeks after the summer season at Glyndebourne closed, and Italy joined in the invasion of France in support of Germany in June 1940.

Nevertheless, return to Italy she did, and with it she returned to the stage there: first as Aida at the Arenaccia (Arena) in Naples on 8 August 1939, followed by Il trovatore in Genoa on 28 August and a return to that city as Tosca in January.

On 30 January she was to appear for the first (and only) time in an opera by Richard Strauss, the one-act Friedenstag. It was the Italian premiere of the piece at the Teatro La Fenice and Margherita sang the role of the Commandant’s wife Maria—but it was dropped after only two performances. Significantly, she sang no more in public after May 1940, with Mussolini about to join the war, only returning briefly in November 1942 to sing in two concert performances of Rossini’s Stabat Mater—first at the Teatro Adriano in Rome, then at the San Carlo in Naples. 

And after a five-month break, Margherita sang for the first time in a Monteverdi opera, L’incoronazione di Poppea, at the Teatro Reale in Rome, two performances conducted by Tullio Serafin. She was Ottavia, a mezzo-soprano role, and the musical and dramatic language from the early seventeenth century would have been a radical departure for her.⁵⁰

Those performances in Rome in April 1943 were to be her last until the Allies took over control, and Margherita only returned to the stage after a two-year gap in June 1945.

What happened to her in those lost years? Family sources have told me that she was interned as an alien at a camp at Avellino, near Naples, but Giovanni retrieved her and she later retreated to the foothills of the Italian Alps near Bergamo, where she is said to have supported the partisans, helping to smuggle escaped Allied  prisoners of war to safety in Switzerland.

After the war, most of what remained of Margherita’s professional career was to be back in Britain, but first she had around a few engagements to fulfil in Italy. The first of these was to sing the role of Marta in Lorenzo Perosi’s oratorio, La resurrezione di Lazzaro. This took place with the La Scala company in Milan, but, because that theatre had been bombed, it took place at the Teatro Lirico on 1 June 1945. And she was to return to the same theatre with the same company eighteen days later in Verdi’s Requiem, this time with Ebe Stignani, conducted by Tullio Serafin.

Beniamino Gigli

Elena Nicolai as Amneris

There were to be two further Verdi Requiems—first in Trieste in April 1946, then in Rome in June under Serafin again. Aside from religious oratorios following the carnage of war, Grandi also returned, briefly. to the Italian stage, with Aida at the Castello Sforzeco in Milan in July 1945 (with Beniamino Gigli), then in August with La Gioconda (with Stignani and Gigli) at the Terme di Caracalla in Rome (repeated in July 1946 in Trieste), and finally four performances of Aida at the postwar revival of the Verona Festival in August 1946.  

The Amneris in these Aidas at Verona was Elena Nicolai, who was later to sum up the confusion surrounding Grandi’s life and work:

I suppose that Margherita Grandi has returned to Australia with her family [she never did], but I can’t help you about her address. I only remember that she was a wonderful, true soprano drammatico; she sang like an angel, and her husband, Giovanni Grandi, was an outstanding designer.⁵¹

Nearly all of the last part of Margherita’s singing career was to be in Britain—in London and Edinburgh—and the most substantial part of it was being hired by the New London Opera Company to sing Tosca and (later) Donna Anna in Don Giovanni (her only Mozart role) at the Cambridge Theatre. The Russian-born Jay Pomeroy had leased the theatre and his new company gave some 609 performances there between 1946 and 1948. 

Pomeroy recruited a first-rate company of singers, including the sopranos Alda Noni and Margherita Grandi, tenors Antonio Salvarezza and Murray Dickie, baritones Mariano Stabile and Giuseppe Taddei, and basses Italo Tajo and Ian Wallace. And the director and designer for the productions was Margherita’s husband, Giovanni Grandi.

Cambridge Theatre

Tosca at the Cambridge Theatre

Grandi opened as Tosca at the Cambridge Theatre on 17 December 1946 and went on to sing the role there fourteen times (all conducted by Alberto Erede), the last of these (at the Stoll Theatre) on 23 January 1949, when she was fifty-six years old. Of her debut, FB in the Daily Telegraphwrote under the headline, ‘Consummate actor’:

A capital performance of Puccini’s Tosca was given at the Cambridge Theatre last night. Mme Margherita Grandi, who took the title role, will be remembered for her excellent performance of Lady Macbeth in the Glyndebourne production. Her voice and style are equally suited to the intensely passionate music of Puccini and the familiar aria of the second act was very finely sung and acted.⁵²

Why did she not sing other Puccini roles? The review also celebrated the Scarpia of Mariano Stabile: ‘… by far the best Scarpia we have heard here since the days of Scotti’. And this performance was gratefully-remembered fifty-four years later by Lord Harewood when I had lunch with him at York in 2010.

More intimate aspects of Margherita are not so easy to come by at this distance but her colleague, the Scottish bass Ian Wallace, remembered her as:

… a dignified, statuesque woman he liked immensely. She was … a sincere artist who went out of her way to help the young British artists in the company.⁵³

Excerpts from the performance of Toscaon 4 May 1947 were broadcast by the BBC and on 8 and 11 October that year, Grandi sang Senta in a BBC broadcast of Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman (her only Wagner) with Paul Schoeffler and Howell Glynne, conducted by Stanford Robinson.⁵⁴

Margherita’s Donna Anna at the Cambridge Theatre in February 1948 was much less successful, the Daily Herald reporting: ‘She has neither the finished style nor the absolute control of tone necessary for Mozart.’⁵⁵

Mid-way through her years at the Cambridge, the call came again from Glyndebourne to repeat her Lady Macbeth, this time at the inaugural Edinburgh Festival of 1947, which was directed by the Glyndebourne general manager, Rudolf Bing. Would she be able to repeat her triumph of eight years ago? She was by now fifty-four.

Macbeth, Edinburgh, 1947

Berthold Goldschmidt

There were nine performances of Macbeth, opening on 25 August 1947 at the King’s Theatre in Edinburgh with three important singers who had been in the Glyndebourne performances in 1939—Francesco Valentino as Macbeth, Italo Tajo as Banco and Grandi as Lady Macbeth. This time the intended conductor was to be the highly regarded, fifty-years-old Hungarian, George Szell, but in the event Szell pulled out, to be replaced by Serafin, who did likewise, and all nine shows were conducted by the Hamburg-born composer-conductor, Berthold Goldschmidt.

Although later writers were to recall a decline in Grandi’s vocal abilities, the critics at the time were warm in their appreciation. The Scotsman noted:

Margherita Grandi’s Lady Macbeth was nothing short of a triumph. The sleepwalking scene was magnificently done—with such artistry that one might have been tricked into giving Verdi sole credit for the whole idea.⁵⁶

My dear late mother-in-law, Jill Wilson was there as a fifteen-year-old (with her mother) and talked with me many years later with great enthusiasm of the experience. She went on an evening (8 September) when the performance was attended by the Queen (Queen Elizabeth, wife of George VI).

Two of the Macbeth performances of 1947 were broadcast on radio by the BBC—27 August and 9 September—and the former was recorded off-air on acetate discs by Lord Harewood. It was from that recording that extended excerpts (transferred by the late Roger Beardsley) were issued on CD by Testament in 2006.⁵⁷

And in January/February 1948, Margherita made three of her much-admired (but sadly few) commercial recordings: two comprised the sleepwalking scene from act 4 of Macbeth, ‘Eccola!...’ and ‘Una macchia è qui tuttora’, with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under Sir Thomas Beecham; and she went on to record Elisabeth’s act 4 aria, ‘Tu que le vanità’, from Don Carlos, again with the RPO, this time under Alberto Erede. Issued on 78rpm records, they were greatly admired. In Opera on Record, Lord Harewood wrote of her Don Carlorecording: ‘Margherita Grandi, with big-scale phrasing and pulsating tone, sings the music thrillingly.’

And in the Gramophone magazine in 1949, Trevor Harvey welcomed the Don Carlos recording, ‘Here is some really thrilling Italian singing’, and of the Macbeth scene he wrote that Grandi, ‘… possesses the dark tones, especially in the lower part of the voice, that really do convey a sense of evil and tragedy.’

However, he goes on to point out that in the recording of the high D flat at Lady Macbeth’s exit was taken by Dorothy Bond. Wits have observed over the years that some sopranos have been known to ‘take a note above A with her eyebrows’. This is perhaps not so surprising for singers like Grandi, who had moved up over the years from contralto. Did it ever happen to Dame Janet Baker? Perhaps not.⁵⁸

Margherita Grandi Sings Verdi

Grandi, 1947, by Angus McBean

Grandi as Lady Macbeth, 1947, by Angus McBean

Commissioned by HMV to coincide with their recordings of Grandi as Lady Macbeth, the great theatre, opera and dance photographer, Angus McBean, took a magical set of portraits of Margherita in role. But, aside from the printing of two of them in the booklet for the Testament CD of 2006, they never seem to have been seen in public … until now.

Grandi returned briefly to Italy in December 1947, singing in the Verdi Requiem at the Palazzo Ducale in Genoa, and on her return to London in January she sang in a BBC concert at the Royal Albert Hall under Sir Adrian Boult. And there was a further broadcast concert at the Royal Albert Hall in August 1948—this time with the London Symphony Orchestra under Sir Malcolm Sargent.

She completed her long association with the New London Opera Company as Tosca in June 1949, not at the Cambridge Theatre, but moved on to the larger Stoll Theatre in Kingsway.

Un Ballo in maschera, Edinburgh, 1949

Scene from The Olympians

At some point that year she went to sing Aida at the Royal Opera House in Antwerp, and in August she returned to the Edinburgh Festival with the Glyndebourne Company, this time as Amelia in Un ballo in maschera conducted by Vittorio Gui.⁵⁹ It was Grandi’s sixth opera by Verdi. The role she shared with Ljuba Welitsch.

Now she was available … and, finally, at the end of her long performing career, she was hired by Covent Garden to create the role of Diana in Sir Arthur Bliss’s new opera, The Olympians. Directed by Peter Brook, it opened on 29 September 1949 and included in the cast were Shirley Russell, Edith Coates, James Johnston, Murray Dickie, Howell Glynne, Robert Helpmann and David Franklin, conducted by Karl Rankl. It ran for ten performances and was the first world premiere at Covent Garden since the war. It had excellent press, as did Margherita Grandi, of whom: ‘… excellent singing,’ said the Daily Telegraph; ‘… magnificently dramatic,’ wrote the Daily Herald.⁶⁰

She was to return to Covent Garden for her last performances—as Leonora in Il trovatore in October 1949, and then for a single performance as Tosca two years later (on 27 November 1951). By this date, she was fifty-nine and retirement beckoned.

Sir Thomas-Beecham, 1946, by Karsh

The Music of ‘The Red Shoes’, from The Story of the Red Shoes souvenir

However, during that year, the great film production duo of Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell made a film of Offenbach’s last operetta, The Tales of Hoffmann, and while the actors acted (and danced) on screen (including Moira Shearer and Robert Helpmann), the sound was produced by a series of opera singers with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under Sir Thomas Beecham. The singers included Dorothy Bond (Olympia), Margherita Grandi (Giulietta), Monica Sinclair (Nicklaus) and Robert Rounseville (who also acted as Hoffmann).⁶¹

It is generally not recognised that this was the second time that Margherita had sung in a Powell and Pressburger film, as, usually uncredited, in 1948 she had sung the aria ‘The Struggle for Vicky’ by Brian Easdale in their legendary The Red Shoes (also with Shearer and Helpmann).

Two years after Margherita retired, Giovanni Grandi was also to retire as director of scenic design at La Scala and Margherita and Giovanni lived from that time in Milan. She died there on 29 January 1972.  

It is perhaps appropriate to reflect on why Margherita Grandi’s life and work is so little known, even among opera-lovers. There seems to be a multiplicity of reasons: so little has been written about and what has been written has been filled with gaps and inaccuracies; her career was interrupted not only by two world wars but also by a long break when she became a wife and mother; she had multiple name identities, only settling on Margherita Grandi after marriage, when she was already thirty-two; she shifted her singing range twice—from contralto to mezzo-soprano to soprano; she seems to have felt little need to publicise herself and her work; she settled and had the longest part of her career at the top in Italy; she was shockingly neglected by the recording companies; did she ever have an agent?

And she never returned to her birth country, Australia, where she might have been embraced alongside other great Australian singers who did return—among them Nellie Melba, Peter Dawson, Joan Hammond, John Brownlee, Joan Sutherland, and her dramatic soprano contemporary, Florence Austral.

Known Opera Repertoire

Bizet: Carmen, title role, Monte Carlo, first performed 31 January 1922

Massenet: Werther, Charlotte, Monte Carlo, 11 February 1922

Gounod, Faust, Marguérite, Monte Carlo,12 February 1922

Massenet, Amadis, title role (creator), Monte Carlo, 1 April 1922

Massenet, Manon, Poussette, Monte Carlo, February 1925 (possible)

Verdi: Aida, title role, Milan, 14 October 1932

Boito, Mefistofele, Elena, Bari, 25 December 1932

Verdi: Il trovatore, Leonora, Bergamo, 6 December 1934

Verdi, Simon Boccanegra, Amelia, Parma, 5 December 1936

Puccini, Tosca, title role, Genoa, 11 July 1937

Gomez, Lo Schiavo, Yara, Rio de Janeiro, 20 August 1937

Rocca, Morte de Frine, title role, Rio de Janeiro, 21 September 1937

Verdi, Otello, Desdemona, Genoa, 20 December 1937

Verdi, Don Carlos, Elizabeth, Venice, 21 April 1938

Ponchielli, La Gioconda, title role, Palermo, July 1938

Verdi, Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, Glyndebourne, 2 June 1939

R. Strauss, Friedenstag, Commandant’s Wife, Venice, 30 January 1940

Monteverdi, L’incoronazione di Poppea, Ottavia, Rome, 13 April 1943

Wagner, The Flying Dutchman, Senta, London (radio only), 8/11 October 1947

Mozart, Don Giovanni, Donna Anna, London, 9 February 1948

Verdi, Un ballo in maschera, Amelia, Edinburgh, 24 August 1949

Bliss, The Olympians, Diana (creator), London, 29 September 1949

Offenbach, The Tales of Hoffmann, Giulietta, London (film soundtrack), 1951

Grandi has been criticised for having too short a repertoire, but her twenty-three known roles are little short of Melba’s twenty-five. And there may be several other roles, as yet unknown to us, which she sang at the Opéra-Comique.

Endnotes

1. Schofield had dinner with Shawe-Taylor and later drove him to his hotel in Sydney, the Menzies; email to the writer, 23 January 2006

2. Indeed, Kutsch and Riemens in their Concise Biographical Dictionary of Singers (1962) have Margherita Grandi born in 1899

3. It was Douglas Hassall who first discovered this, revealing it in Australasian Sound Archive in 1989

4. This memoir of Grandi’s early years was sent to me from family sources

5. Clarence River Advocate, 1 October 1901, p.3  

6. Clarence River Advocate, 23 December 1902, p.3

7. Mercury(Hobart), 14 July 1905, p.3

8. Tasmanian News (Hobart), 15 December 1905, p.5

9. Mercury (Hobart), 14 June 1906, p.7

10. Mercury (Hobart), 27 August 1907, p.3

11. Tasmanian News, 11 December 1908, p.3

12. Grandi, p.17

13. Mercury(Hobart), 15 July 1909, p.3

14. Mercury(Hobart), 28 January 1910, p.3; Percy Marchant was to teach in Perth from 1910 until his death by drowning in the Swan River in 1929

15. Mercury(Hobart), 8 April 1909, p.5

16. Daily Post (Hobart), 20 October 1909, p.7

17. Argus (Melbourne), 8 December 1909, p.13

18. Mercury(Hobart), 12 November 1910, p.5

19. Mercury(Hobart), 17 November 1910, p.5

20. Mercury(Hobart), 19 January 1911, p.6

21. Mercury(Hobart), 30 March 1911, p.6

22. Daily Post, 15 September 1911, p.4

23. Hempseed and Gard were not the first Tasmanian singers to go for teaching to Marchesi in Paris—Amy Sherwin had gone to Marchesi for coaching in 1892 and Marchesi became godmother to Amy’s second child, Jeanette

24. Tasmanian News, 16 November 1911, p.2

25. Mercury(Hobart), 22 January 1912, p.6

26. Mercury(Hobart), 31 July 1912, p.3

27. Examiner (Launceston), 18 December 1912, p.8

28. Mercury(Hobart), 18 December 1913, p.2

29. Mercury, 4 November 1918, p.2

30. Daily Examiner (Grafton NSW), 5 July 1921, p.4

31. Bystander(London), 15 February 1922, p.16

32. The Graphic (London), 25 March 1922, p.14

33. T.J. Walsh, Monte Carlo Opera 1910-1951, p.301

34. Mercury(Hobart), 9 June 1922, p.6

35. There was indeed a Madeleine Caron, contralto, who sang in Paris in the relevant years, but she was usually entitled ‘Mme’

36. San Francisco Examiner, 27 September 1925, 37; San Francisco Chronicle, 1 October 1925, p.14

37. Verdi’s twenty-sixth opera, Aida was first performed at the Cairo Opera House on 24 December 1871

38. Boito’s Mefistofele was first performed at La Scala Milan on on 5 March 1868

39. Bott, ‘Margherita Grandi’, p.55

40. Verdi’s Il Trovatore was first performed at the Teatro Apollo in Rome, 19 January 1853

41. Simon Boccanegra was Verdi’s twenty-second opera, first performed at the Teatro Fenice in Venice, 12 March 1857

42. Puccini’s Tosca was first performed at the Teatro Constazi Rome on 14 January 1900

43. Otello was first performed at La Scala Milan, 5 February 1887

44. Verdi’s Don Carlos was first performed (in French) at the Opéra in Paris, 11 March 1867; Ponchielli’s La Giocondaat La Scala Milan, 8 April 1876

45. Macbeth was Verdi’a eleventh opera, first performed at the Teatro della Pergola Florence, 14 March 1847; Verdi produced a revised version in 1867 and it was this one that was produced at Glyndebourne

46. Shawe-Taylor, p.64

47. Rasponi, p.19

48. HMV had previously recorded Mozart operas at Glyndebourne with great success 

49. Campion and Runciman, pp.25–27

50. L’incoronazione di Poppea was Monteverdi’s last opera, first performed at the Teatro Santi Giovanni e Paolo in Venice in 1643

51. Letter to Michael Bott, nd

52. Daily Telegraph (London), 18 December 1946, p.5

53. Bott, p.61

54. Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman was first performed at the Hofoper Dresden on 2 January 1843

55. Daily Herald (London), 10 February 1948, 3; Mozart’s Don Giovanni was first performed at the National Theatre Prague on 29 October 1797

56. Scotsman (Edinburgh), 26 August 1947, p.4

57. The writer gave a talk at Glyndebourne with musical director Vladimir Jurowski featuring these off-air recordings of Grandi on 6 May 2007

58. Gramophone, May 1948 and October 1948

59. Un ballo in maschera was first performed at the Teatro Apollo Rome, 17 February 1859

60. Britten’s Peter Grimes preceded The Olympians at Covent Garden in 1947 but had been first produced at Sadler’s Wells two years earlier

61. Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann was first performed at the Opéra-Comique Paris on 10 February 1881

Bibliography

Warren Bebbington (ed), Oxford Dictionary of Australian Music, Melbourne, 1998

Michael F. Bott, ‘Margherita Grandi’, The Record Collector, Ipswich, 1978

――, ‘Margherita Grandi: The Final Chapter’, The Record Collector, 1998

Judith A. Bowler, Amy Sherwin: The Tasmanian Nightingale, self-published limited edition, Melbourne, 1982

Emma Calvé (translated by Rosamond Gilder), My Life, Appleton, New York, 1922

Paul Campion & Rosy Runciman, Glyndebourne Recorded: Sixty Years of Recordings 1934-1994, Julia MacRae, London, 1994

René Dumesnil, L’Opéra et L’Opéra-Comique, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1971

Simon Fenwick, The Crichel Boys: Scenes from England’s Last Literary Salon, Constable, London, 2021

Margherita Grandi, ‘My Early Years’, unpublished memoir, nd

Lord Harewood, The Tongs and the Bones: The Memoirs of Lord Harewood, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1981

Douglas Hassall, ‘Margherita Grandi’, Australasian Sound Archive, issue 8, September 1989

Spike Hughes, Glyndebourne: A History of the Festival Opera, Methuen, London, 1965/1981

P.G. Hurst, The Age of Jean de Reszke: 40 Years of Opera 1874–1914, Johnson, London, 1958

K.J. Kutsch & Leo Riemens, A Concise Dictionary of Singers: From the Beginning of Recorded Sound to the Present, Chilton Book Company, Philadelphia, 1962/1969

Barbara & Findlay Mackenzie, Singers of Australia: From Melba to Sutherland, Lansdowne, Melbourne, 1967

Laua Macy (ed), The Grove Book of Opera Singers, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008

Roger Neill, ‘Margherita Grandi Sings Verdi’, Testament CD, London, 2006

――, DIVAS: Mathilde Marchesi and her Pupils, NewSouth (University of New South Wales Press), Sydney, 2016

Charles Osborne, The Complete Operas of Verdi: A Critical Guide, Victor Gollancz, London, 1969

Harry Plunket Greene, Interpretation in Song, Macmillan, London, 1912

Lanfranco Rasponi, The Last Prima Donnas, Gollancz, London, 1984

David Rosen, & Andrew Porter (eds), Verdi’s Macbeth: A Sourcebook, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1984

Harold Rosenthal, Two Centuries of Opera at Covent Garden, Putnam, London, 1958

Desmond Shawe-Taylor, Covent Garden, Max Parrish, London, 1948

――, ‘Other Operas’, in Glyndebourne: A Celebration (ed John Higgins), Jonathan Cape, London, 1984

J.B. Steane, The Grand Tradition: Seventy Years of Singing on Record 1900–1970, Scribner’s, New York, 1974

Malcolm Tudor, British Prisoners of War in Italy: Paths to Freedom,Emilia Publishing, Newtown Powys, 2012

T.J. Walsh, Opera in Monte Carlo 1879–1909, Gill and Macmillan, Dublin, 1975

――, Opera in Monte Carlo 1910–1951,Boethius Press, Kilkenny, 1986

Fredric Woodbridge Wilson, The Photographs of Angus McBean: From the Stage to the Surreal: Photographs from the Harvard Theatre Collection, Thames and Hudson, London, 2009

Acknowledgements

Grateful thanks are due to Sarah Batchelor (Royal College of Music), Joanna Hughes (EMI Archive Trust), Tony Locantro, Sophie Wilson, Karen Anderson and Phil Boot (Glyndebourne), and of course to Elisabeth Kumm at Theatre Heritage Australia.

Back in 2004-06, when I first worked on Margherita Grandi, I was lucky enough to have help from several Gard/Ryan family members, including daughter Patricia Caramella in Milan, grandson Alex Caramella in London, Maureen Tulk in Hobart, Hilda Hardy in Sydney and Pearl and Michelle Ryan in Harwood Island. Also from Lord Harewood, Leo Schofield, Jill Wilson and Roger Beardsley.