Divas: Mathilde Marchesi and Her Pupils

By Roger Neill

The incredible story of singing teacher extraordinaire Mathilde Marchesi who trained more international opera stars than anyone before or since.Who was Mathilde Marchesi? How did she become a byword internationally for vocal excellence and operatic success? What was her formula? And how did she produce prima donnas on such a consistent basis?From nineteenth-century Vienna to Paris high society, Roger Neill traces Marchesi's extraordinary five-decade career and introduces a remarkable cast of characters Felix Mendelssohn, Franz Liszt and the pupils who crossed the globe to study with her, including Dame Nellie Melba. He reveals the phenomenally successful singing method that is her legacy, with Joan Sutherland, Kiri Te Kanawa and Meryl Streep all taught by pupils of Marchesi.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth
• Release date: Feb 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781742242576

Book preview

FOR TONY LOCANTRO

Loud cries of ‘Hush’ came from the upper circle and the gallery … A shiver of expectation went round the house.

ÉMILE ZOLA, Nana, 1880

All the characters now formed a single line across the stage. All were gesticulating at once, and rage, vengeance, jealousy, terror, pity and amazement poured simultaneously from their open mouths.

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, Madame Bovary, 1857

‘What are we to do with our daughters?’ is a vital question. The young ladies cry in chorus, ‘Put us on the stage mama’; but mama still hesitates …

GEORGE MOORE, Mummer-Worship, 1891

Singing is being.

RAINER MARIA RILKE, The Sonnets to Orpheus, 1923

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© Roger Neill 2016

First published 2016

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This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Title: Divas: Mathilde Marchesi and her pupils / Roger Neill

Subjects: Marchesi, Mathilde, 1821–1913.

Singers – Biography.

Voice teachers – Biography.

Dewey Number: 782.67092

ISBN: 9781742235240 (hardback)

9781742242576 (ebook)

9781742248028 (epdf)

Design Avril Makula

Cover design Sandy Cull/gogoGingko

Cover image Signed photograph of Nellie Melba (right) with her teacher Madame

Mathilde Marchesi, c.1897. Photograph by Reutlinger, Paris. Image courtesy Arts Centre

Melbourne, Performing Arts collection.

Printer Everbest

All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The author welcomes information in this regard.

UNSW Press Literary Fund wishes to acknowledge the book’s generous supporters.

This book is printed on paper using fibre supplied from plantation or sustainably managed forests.

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

1  To be a professional 1821–54

2  Teaching in Vienna, first star pupils 1854–61

3  Paris and Cologne 1861–68

4  Back to the Conservatoire in Vienna 1868–78

5  Moving to Paris 1881

6  Melba, Eames and the class of ’86

7  Shoals of Americans 1887–99

8  Boatloads of Australians and New Zealanders 1887–99

9  The last lap 1899–1913

10  Marchesi’s magical method

Notes

Appendices

1 Chronology of Mathilde Marchesi’s pupils

2 Marchesi’s lineage and legacy

Bibliography

Index

Preface

When Mrs Helen Armstrong auditioned for Mathilde Marchesi in Paris in 1886, Marchesi immediately called out to her husband Salvatore, ‘J’ai trouvé une étoile’ – ‘I’ve found a star’. Mrs Armstrong was to become the world’s most celebrated diva, Dame Nellie Melba.

In fact Marchesi had already been turning out leading prima donnas from around the world for three decades at that point and she was to continue to do so for a further twenty years – so many of them from North America and Australasia. Her fifty-year-plus career was altogether an astonishing achievement, one completely unmatched by any other singing teacher before or since.

Although her own early teachers included composers Felix Mendelssohn and Otto Nicolai, the turning point in German-born Marchesi’s life came when in 1845 she became a pupil of the younger Manuel Garcia in Paris. The consequence of her years with him was that she was to devote her life to coaching singers – women only – who would become leading performers in the ‘Golden Age’ that ran between around 1870 and the First World War.

The hallmark of her greatest pupils was complete mastery of the bel canto style, which, ironically, went into decline over that very period, the musical reins being taken up by the emergence of verismo in Italy – led by Mascagni, Leoncavallo and Puccini – and of Wagner and his followers in Germany. Nevertheless, many of her best pupils became divas, not only in the bel canto repertoire, but also in verismo and Wagner.

The Golden Age that coincided with the late nineteenth century was not the first such, but the third. Her teacher Manuel Garcia II provided for Marchesi a bridge to the previous one, whose leading lights included Garcia’s father (the tenor Manuel Garcia I), and Manuel II’s two legendary prima donna sisters, Maria Malibran and Pauline Viardot, plus a host of other great names – Giuditta Pasta, Giulia Grisi and Jenny Lind among them. And before that Golden Age of the early and mid-nineteenth century was an even earlier one in the eighteenth century, featuring singers such as the castrati Farinelli and Caffarelli, and the founding fathers of the teaching of bel canto – Nicola Porpora, who taught Giovanni Ansani, who taught Manuel Garcia I, who taught his son Manuel II, who taught Mathilde Marchesi.

In Marchesi’s earliest years as a Conservatoire professor in Vienna and Cologne, her pupils came overwhelmingly from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, among them several who went on to become famous divas of the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s – including Gabrielle Krauss, Ilma di Murska, Etelka Gerster (who for a while became a serious rival to Patti) and the great Wagnerian Katharina Klafsky. One of Marchesi’s Austrian pupils from this period was the soprano Elise Wiedermann, who, following a brief career in Europe performing mostly Wagnerian roles, emigrated with her husband to Australia, where she taught a generation of young singers in Melbourne and proselytised there for Marchesi.

One of Marchesi’s greatest pupils, Ilma di Murska, had already toured Australasia accompanied by massive media coverage. And she was followed there by a steady stream of other Marchesi pupils, both foreign and Australian, most prominently Nellie Melba herself. From Marchesi’s first years as a teacher, young women were also coming to her from America, the earliest of these including the contralto Antoinette Sterling and sopranos Emma Abbott and Emma Nevada.

When she left her role at the Conservatoire in Vienna in 1878 to set up a private studio in the city, pupils started to arrive from many other parts of Europe, notably the Russian Nina de Friede and the Swede Sigrid Arnoldson. Both of them were to benefit in due course from the new-fangled technology of sound recording. They are the earliest Marchesi pupils that we can still hear today, each of them demonstrating clearly the characteristic markers of the Marchesi method.

Marchesi moved her school to Paris in 1881 and twenty-eight of her pupils from Vienna went with her. While many of her early pupils in Paris fell by the wayside, several others succeeded, either as performers or as teachers, the most significant of them including the definitive Carmen of her generation, French soprano Emma Calvé, the Belgian Blanche Arral and the leading Brünnhilde at Bayreuth, Swedish dramatic soprano Ellen Gulbranson.

Then, following the arrival of two of her greatest students in 1886 – the American Emma Eames and the Australian Nellie Melba – young women came in droves, including many more from America, Australia and New Zealand, in search of the magic formula which might lift them to prominence, among them Americans Suzanne Adams, Sibyl Sanderson, Yvonne de Treville, Estelle Liebling, Elizabeth Parkina and Felice Lyne, and Australians Frances Saville, Amy Sherwin, Ada Crossley, Amy Castles, Frances Alda and Evelyn Scotney.

The only British-born singers to achieve prominence from Marchesi’s Paris years were the Scottish Mary Garden (briefly) and the English Miriam Licette. And, having started her teaching practice five decades previously with a class filled with singers from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, among Marchesi’s last crop was the great coloratura soprano from the Court Opera in Vienna, Selma Kurz.

How many pupils in all did Marchesi have over the five decades that she taught? When I first started thinking about this some twenty years ago, the Australian musicologist Professor Jeff Brownrigg gave me a list that he had of those then known to him. There were thirty-nine women on that list and my immediate response was that this number seemed too high and that several young ladies may have wishfully embellished the truth about their musical education. Intrigued, I started the process of verifying the names – were they really all pupils of Marchesi? Then I went on to see if there were others who might have been pupils too.

It seems that indeed nearly all those named singers had been Marchesi students. What is more, new names kept turning up and, to date, I have a list in excess of 500 pupils of Mathilde Marchesi, some 140 of them coming from North America and a further sixty from Australia and New Zealand. More undoubtedly will emerge from the shadows in coming years. So many of these young women in turn started to teach others that Marchesi’s legacy runs into thousands, all over the world. Among her pedagogical grandchildren and great-grandchildren are Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Gladys Moncrieff, Sylvia Fisher, Maria Jeritza, Gertrude Lawrence, Beverly Sills, Kiri Te Kanawa, Danielle de Niese and Meryl Streep.

The last-named of these, Meryl Streep, was taught by one of Marchesi’s later pupils in Paris, Estelle Liebling, so her lineage goes straight back to Porpora in the early eighteenth century. Known primarily as a great actress, Streep has recently sung extensively in three musical movies – Mama Mia, Into the Woods and Florence Foster Jenkins. The young Australian-born bel canto specialist, Danielle de Niese, has a longer line connecting her to Marchesi (and Porpora). She is a pupil of Kiri Te Kanawa, who in turn was taught in New Zealand by Sister Mary Leo, a pupil of Irene Ainsley, who was taught by both Marchesi and Melba.

So what happened to make this particular woman such a magnet for talented young singers from around the world? Who was Mathilde Marchesi? How had she managed to become such a byword for vocal excellence? What was her winning formula? And why was it that she seemed to polarise response from her students – some idolising her unreservedly, while others rejected her?

Although Marchesi wrote some fascinating memoirs (which came out in three successive versions between 1877 and 1897) and, although since that date there have been biographies of several of her most prominent pupils, including six on Melba alone, until now there has been no published exploration of the life and work of Mathilde Marchesi and the resulting careers of her finest pupils. This book is a first attempt to fill that gap.

Roger Neill

King’s Sutton

Acknowledgments

When I first started researching and writing about singers and other musicians, writers, artists and innovators – some twenty-five years ago – one had to make lengthy journeys just to look up a reference in an old newspaper or magazine. How the situation has changed. Now one can search millions of pages online for specific items in seconds. So the most grateful thanks go to all those nameless people who brought this about – especially at Gallica in Paris, at the British Newspaper Archive in London, at Newspapers.com in the USA, at Trove at the National Library of Australia in Canberra and at PapersPast in Wellington.

Thanks for facts, opinions, suggestions and insights are due to Sir Thomas Allen, the late Roger Beardsley, Linda Blondin (Twillingate Museum), Professor Jeff Brownrigg, Stephen R Clarke, Brenda Dehn (Henry County Museum), Thomas Dorneich, Eckart Fest, Professor Stanley Henig, Lawrence F Holdridge, Emma Jolley (National Library of Australia), Yvonne Kenny, Michael Letchford, Larry Lustig, Ward Marston, Bonny Miller, Professor Kerry Murphy, John Pugsley, Peter Quantrill, Eva Rieger, Amy C Schindler (University of Nebraska, Omaha), Leo Schofield, Michael Simonson (Leo Baeck Institute, New York), Jonathan Summers (British Library), Richard Sykes, Professor Peter Tregear, Carlos Ernesto Ure, Peter van der Waal, Alastair Wilson, Jill Wilson and Vivienne Winther.

At NewSouth Publishing, Kathy Bail, Elspeth Menzies and Emily Stewart have been constant in their support. Thanks also to the meticulous and wise Fiona Sim, congenial editor. At King’s Sutton, Jackie Bradley has helped me with a long list of IT puzzles. In London, Tony Locantro has read and commented on every chapter, sentence and word, giving me the benefit of his knowledge, wisdom and judgment every step of the way.

Grateful thanks to the National Gallery of Victoria, the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Arts Centre Melbourne for permission to reproduce portraits of Nellie Melba, Elise Wiedermann and Frances Saville respectively, and to many collectors of ancient photographs of singers. And to Stephen R Clarke and the Estate of John Stratton, the Historic Singers Charitable Trust and the Wagner Society of New South Wales for providing necessary financial support.

Members of my family – Sophie Wilson, Dora Neill, Kate Neill and Isobel Slattery – have cheerfully put up with Mathilde Marchesi and her talented pupils for far too long.

1

To be a professional

1821–54

Mathilde Marchesi was born Lisette Sophie Jeannette Mathilde Graumann in Frankfurt am Main on 24 March 1821, the youngest of three sisters. Her father, Johann Friedrich Graumann, was a merchant in the city, ‘wealthy and highly respected’ according to Mathilde. ¹ Her mother was Catherine Elizabeth Graumann (née Engelhard).

Her father had numerous relations in France, particularly in Alsace, where her grandfather lived; and cousins in Paris including the Haussmanns. Baron Haussmann was to be responsible for the re-creation of the city in the 1850s and 60s, comprising the major boulevards, four new parks and the new opera house, the Palais Garnier. Mathilde’s father was the brother of Baroness Dorothea von Ertmann,² who lived in Vienna and had been a favourite pupil of Beethoven, his ‘dear and beloved Dorothea Caecilia’, his late piano sonata in A major, Opus 101 dedicated to her. Mathilde had two older sisters, Marie and Charlotte.

Now the most important financial centre in continental Europe, Frankfurt am Main in the early nineteenth century, although not the great metropolis it is now, was already a major location for both the banking and stock markets, as well as the Bethmann and the Rothschild families. Aged five, Mathilde, ‘Tilda’, was sent to a day school in Frankfurt. In her memoirs she describes herself as having ‘a very lively and restless disposition’. At school she learned first how to knit and, perhaps a critical part of the successful teacher’s skills, how to sit still. The following year she battled ‘with vowels and consonants and the four terrible rules of primary education’.³ For a while she found herself sitting next to the city executioner’s daughter, ‘whom I pitied with all my heart, [but who] was treated with absolute contempt’ by schoolmates.

Mathilde was conscious from an early age that she ‘took great delight in [her] studies; [her] craving for knowledge was never satisfied’, and as a consequence she was regularly first in class. This was another valuable characteristic, which would re-emerge in force when she started to teach. In fact her motivation in that direction was evident to her while she was still at primary school, ‘for I have a lively recollection of not only helping many [schoolmates] with their lessons, but even at times doing their work for them’.

Her musicality, aided by her ‘happy disposition’, soon became apparent and she claimed to sing ‘from morning to night’, and was given the solo parts in performances at school. She also sang regularly at home, especially for guests, but only if they pleased her and seemed likely to appreciate her. Not unnaturally, this tough stance towards guests led to friction with her parents.

Mathilde was devoted to her mother, seeing her as ‘the incarnation of everything that is good noble and beautiful … not only an exemplary wife and mother, but also the beau-ideal of a German woman’. Because her mother saw her as specially gifted, she was allowed, from an early age, and in preference to her sisters, to accompany her grandmother to the opera in Frankfurt, where her grandmother shared a box with ‘Baron Anselm de Rothschild’.⁴ Baron Anselm, whose real name was Amschel, was the eldest son of the founding father of the Rothschild banking dynasty, Mayer Amschel Rothschild. While his four brothers established businesses in London, Paris, Vienna and Naples, Amschel stayed in Frankfurt running the ‘home office’. In one generation, all the brothers became immensely rich, rising from relative poverty in Frankfurt’s Jewish ghetto. At the Frankfurt Opera, Mathilde (with her grandmother) first heard two of the greatest singers of the age, the ‘Swedish Nightingale’ Jenny Lind and Manuel Garcia (the elder’s) daughter, Pauline Viardot-Garcia. Pauline’s brother, Manuel Garcia the younger, was to become Mathilde’s most influential singing teacher.

Following primary school, Mathilde and her sisters were educated at home by a governess and a series of ‘the best masters for literature, music, harmony, languages, dancing etc’. At the same time, she learned cooking, ironing, sewing, mending, embroidery and ‘a great deal of knitting besides’. She was happy neither to sew nor to knit until her sewing mistress began to read to her during the lessons – fairy tales and plays – a ploy which appeared to transform her dreary work.

At fifteen, ‘passionately fond of dancing’, she accompanied her parents to parties and balls in Frankfurt, claiming to have been the first in the city to take up the polka and the mazurka. This phase was somewhat short-lived as she became totally engaged, ‘heart and soul’, in the study of music – piano, harmony and singing. With friends she played the piano in quartets and trios by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Mendelssohn, and also participated in part-singing, ‘which did a great deal to further my own musical knowledge’.

…

Her first significant singing teacher in Frankfurt was Felice Ronconi, brother of the famous Italian baritone Giorgio Ronconi. Alongside his brothers, Felice had been taught by their father Domenico Ronconi, an international tenor in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, who had turned to teaching in Milan at the end of his performing career. Aside from appearances at the Mariinsky in St Petersburg, the Paris Opéra and La Scala Milan, Domenico had sung at the marriage of Napoleon and Marie Louise, Duchess of Parma, in Paris in 1810.

Mathilde was not impressed with Ronconi. She believed that he made musical demands of her for which she was not yet ready. ‘He made me sing the most difficult exercises of Bordogni’, she wrote, ‘and gave me for my first song the grand cavatina of Norma!’ This is a piece that only a few can perform adequately in our own time. She felt that she did not come up to his expectations. ‘Bitterly disappointed’, she gave up her singing lessons, concentrating instead on studying English and Italian. Nevertheless, as a teenager she felt able to begin her teaching career at this time: ‘I induced some friends to let me give them lessons in Italian and music’, she wrote. Two of them carried on taking lessons with her, but others ‘thought me too severe and left me’. This was to become the story of her pedagogical life – an unambiguous divide between satisfied and dissatisfied customers, between those who appreciated and valued her strict regime and those who did not.

At sixteen, she persuaded her parents that she could accept an invitation from family friends, the Pfeffels, to go with them for the first time to England. She was to spend three months on the expedition, fighting against homesickness, but heard for the first time an Italian opera in Italian – Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia. This was a great revelation for her, a turning point in her life, although she was sharply critical of ‘Tamburini’s endless cadenzas [which] altogether failed to please me at the time’.

Returning to Frankfurt, Mathilde discovered that calamity had struck the Graumann family. Her father Johann had lost his entire fortune. They were now penniless and their whole way of life had to be reconsidered. Mathilde’s eldest sister Marie was already married, but the middle daughter Charlotte and Mathilde herself had to decide how they might earn their livelihoods. It was determined that Mathilde should not become a professional musician (a career deemed unsuitable for a girl of her class), but instead become a governess. A well-brought-up girl, she had many of the appropriate accomplishments, including a propensity for teaching. Unfortunately, she wrote, ‘I had not the slightest inclination for that hard and unpleasant calling’. However, realising the situation she was in, she raised no objections and so, in 1843, went to stay in Vienna with her father’s sisters, Baroness von Ertmann and Madame de Schmidt, with the intention of finding a suitable position in that city.

…

Both aunts in Vienna treated her kindly. The widow of an Austrian Field-Marshal, pianist Aunt Dorothea was, however, like Mathilde’s parents, implacably opposed to Mathilde’s desire to become a professional musician. Instead she carried out Father Graumann’s wish, finding a ‘suitable’ position for her – as governess for the six-year-old daughter of an aristocratic family in Vienna. She took the job, on the understanding that she would be allowed to devote some of her time to singing. Nevertheless, she was not happy:

The Countess, a young and pretty woman, was vain and proud, her husband was old and ugly, while their little daughter of six was sickly and completely spoiled. This was no rosy prospect for a girl accustomed to a free and independent life, nor were the terms offered very brilliant … However, I agreed to everything, or, rather, my opinion was not asked.

However, help was soon in sight. Her sister Charlotte had become governess for General Lodivick’s daughter in London, and, unwilling to see her younger sister miss her vocation, Charlotte offered Mathilde her savings so that she could continue her musical studies in Vienna. Her parents in Frankfurt were persuaded and the vain Countess was informed, so Mathilde was free again to pursue the ‘career for which I had both talent and inclination’.

Back living with her aunts in Vienna, Mathilde took great pleasure from both the piano-playing of Dorothea Ertmann, and from her stories of Beethoven:

‘In the beginning,’ so she told me, ‘Beethoven had to struggle against violent opposition, as his music was considered unintelligible and tedious. Being anxious to hear his new sonatas, I went one day to Haslinger’s music shop, where I tried some of them on a grand-piano. In my excitement I failed to notice a young man standing in a corner, but presently he came up to me, and you can imagine my astonishment when he suddenly seized my hand, and thanked me in the warmest terms for my interpretation of his sonatas. It was Beethoven!’

From that moment, Dorothea and the composer formed a close friendship, Beethoven becoming ‘a daily guest in our house’. And, several decades later, Dorothea had Mathilde play Beethoven’s sonatas on a daily basis, her aunt acting as her coach. Seeing, as she did, the talents and drive of the young Mathilde, in the words of her daughter Blanche, Dorothea ‘at once understood that here was no governess, but that a great artist lay hidden behind this modest young girl’s simple ways’.

At this stage, Mathilde was most in need of a new singing teacher, and her aunts, having scoured Vienna for suitable candidates, selected the composer and conductor Otto Nicolai for the task. Aside from his greatest achievements in a short life – founding the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and composing one of the staples of opera in German-speaking countries, Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor (The Merry Wives of Windsor) – at that time Nicolai was conductor and choir-master at the Hofoper, the Court Opera in Vienna. Accordingly, Mathilde was able to attend both rehearsals and performances there, a great opportunity for the fast-learning girl. However, as a singing teacher, he was really not what she needed:

Nicolai seemed to take great interest in my studies, but he told me frankly that he understood the rehearsal of an opera much better than he did the production of the human voice … He often contradicted himself, had no physical knowledge of the voice, and, for fear of straining mine, directed his attention solely to pronunciation and delivery.

Still in need of the right teacher, perhaps the greatest value for Mathilde at this period in her life was the dazzling array of publicly-performed music in Vienna – opera, concerts from the recently-formed Philharmonic (conducted by Nicolai himself), chamber music and recitals. In addition, there was no shortage of music in private houses and it was at one of these that she heard one of Schubert’s favourite singers and closest friends, Baron Carl von Schönstein, to whom the composer dedicated several of his songs, including the great cycle Die schöne Müllerin.

In 1844 an Italian opera company opened in Vienna, with a number of star performers among the principal singers, including the great contralto Marietta Alboni and the mezzo Pauline Viardot-Garcia, whom she had first heard with her grandmother in Frankfurt as a teenager. Brought up immersed in Austro-German music, Mathilde was now able to become familiar with Italian opera. This time, she was able not only to attend rehearsals – she turned the pages for Nicolai, who accompanied the singers at the piano at Viardot’s house – but also she was taken by her aunt to meet Viardot, who heard Mathilde sing. ‘My dear child’, Viardot said to her, ‘you are not on the right road; you should go to Paris and study with my brother, Manuel Garcia’. This was to become another critical turning point for Mathilde Graumann – the most immediate problem being how to sustain such an opportunity financially.

It was around this time that Mathilde became friendly with Sophie von Löwenthal (‘Frau von L’), mistress of the Austrian poet Nikolaus Lenau, and through her with the poet himself. She wrote wittily about the upheavals as Lenau fell in love with another woman, and of Frau von L’s revenge on them both, and recorded in her memoirs a short verse that the poet had inscribed in Mathilde’s album. It is a strange piece to write into the album of a young woman friend who is neither wife nor lover. Entitled ‘Inner Court’, it ends: ‘As thought, the spirit is the light, / Warmth in the heart the spirit is through love, / What is not the spirit’s, may be forfeit for the Court, / Lust and sorrow – may they die and scatter.’

…

Persuaded that studying with Manuel Garcia in Paris was the right step, but lacking the necessary funding for such a major move, in May 1844 Mathilde returned home to Frankfurt, where she encountered stiff resistance to her plans, so she immediately began to teach voice students with the aim of building up her financial resources. While the names of these early pupils of Mathilde remain unknown, they will have represented a further important stepping stone on her journey.

In August, aged twenty-three, she made her public debut in Frankfurt in a concert organised by two young violinist brothers from Vienna, George and Joseph Hellmesberger, sons of the concertmaster of the Court Opera in Vienna, Professor Georg Hellmesberger. They were later to become significant figures in Mathilde’s life. In the programme for the concert, Mathilde’s name was modestly given as ‘M. G.’, that being the fashion for amateurs at that time. ‘I was warmly received’, she reported, without disclosing what she actually sang.

Later that same year, Mathilde first made the acquaintance of another musician who was to make a major contribution to her musical development – the composer Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. They first met at the house of the painter Jakob Becker and his wife.

Mendelssohn was a close friend of Mathilde’s aunt Dorothea and ‘it was because he remembered my aunt’s kindness that he took particular interest in me’. Mendelssohn went on to teach Mathilde how to sing his compositions, not only songs, but also trios and quartets, with the composer sometimes taking the bass line, sometimes the tenor.

It was Mendelssohn who persuaded Mathilde’s parents that it would be appropriate for her to sing in May 1845 at one of the Rhenish festivals in Düsseldorf. For this event he taught her an aria from Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito (Sextus or Annius? She does not disclose), together with the contralto part in Handel’s oratorio Joshua and the mezzo-soprano part in Mendelssohn’s great masterpiece (today rather neglected) Die erste Walpurgisnacht. Mathilde sang in three concerts and regarded the whole experience as a major breakthrough in her budding singing career, amateur though she still was.

Her success in Düsseldorf, together with the support of Mendelssohn and the rise in her financial resources resulting from her teaching work, resulted in her parents being more positive about her Parisian intentions. Yet there was a hitch. Suddenly and unexpectedly Mendelssohn pronounced a very negative attitude towards Paris. His opinion was that:

… no true and right feeling for art existed there, and that everything was sacrificed to effect – I could learn nothing, and could only unlearn what I knew.

Mendelssohn had first spent significant time in Paris in 1825, aged just fourteen, and had formed negative impressions of the musicians he met. The director of the Conservatoire, Luigi Cherubini, now a crabby sixty-five-year-old, was declared by young Felix to be ‘an extinct volcano’; writing to his sister Fanny, he was sarcastic about the most popular comic opera composer in Paris, Daniel Auber; and of a lecture by the distinguished master of Grand Opera, Giacomo Meyerbeer, ‘I laughed so uproariously’, he wrote, ‘I almost fell off my chair’.

Mathilde was shocked by Mendelssohn’s opposition to Paris. ‘I did not share his opinion’, she wrote, ‘for I could not forget Madame Viardot’s kind advice, and at last I grew so impatient that my parents, yielding to my entreaties, permitted me to start for Paris’. In October 1845 she travelled thence, partly by rail and partly by post-carriage, together with a couple from Frankfurt, the pianist-composer (and close friend of Mendelssohn) Jacques Rosenhain and his wife.

A much larger city than Frankfurt, Paris made a great impression on Mathilde. The noise and bustle in the streets was much greater than she was used to and initially she felt ‘frightened and bewildered’. She moved into a house, the Pension Lecomte, in the rue de Clichy. Mademoiselle Lecomte seemed kind and she was to share her room with a ‘pretty young English girl’. Things were looking up.

…

The following day, Herr Rosenhain took her to meet the object of her journey, Manuel Garcia, at his house in the rue de Chabanais. ‘My heart beat audibly as I mounted the stairs’, she wrote, ‘for my fate depended upon his opinion’. She sang for him ‘scales, shakes [trills], cadenzas, also several songs, and he finally made me read at sight’.

Garcia was not greatly impressed. Her voice, he told her, ‘was not strong, but sympathetic, and of good compass’. And Mathilde was not at all thrilled when he announced to her that, instead of completing her studies with him in the foreseeable future, she would have to start afresh and work with him for several years. She little knew that this was a scene that she was to re-enact over the years with dozens of hopeful young girls who wished to become her own pupils. Garcia’s judgment was doubly difficult for Mathilde, who had funds sufficient only for six months in Paris. ‘But retreat was out of the question’, she wrote, ‘so, placing my trust in God, I began my studies the very next day’.

The dynasty of singers and teachers of singing called Garcia had been effectively started by the father of Mathilde’s teacher in Paris, Manuel Garcia the elder. Born in Seville in 1775, he was a pupil of one of the greatest Italian tenors of the eighteenth century, Giovanni Ansani, who in turn was a pupil of the composer and singing teacher, Nicola Porpora. The Neapolitan Porpora is generally regarded as the father of the Italian vocal school, often referred to as the bel canto style, which has stretched from the seventeenth century to the present day. Aside from Ansani, Porpora’s pupils included the great castrati Farinelli and Caffarelli, female sopranos Regina Mingotti and Vittoria Tesi, and, perhaps surprisingly, Joseph Haydn, who was to write:

There was no lack of Asino, Coglione, Birbante [ass, moron, rascal], and pokes in the ribs, but I put up with it all, for I profited greatly from Porpora in singing, in composition, and in the Italian language.⁵

Manuel Garcia the elder (usually now known as Manuel Garcia I) enjoyed an extensive career both as singer and as impresario. He was regarded as the finest Mozart tenor of his day, unequalled in Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte, Die Zauberflöte and La clemenza di Tito, and in 1816 he created the role of Count Almaviva in Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, a part written for him by the composer. He himself composed over fifty operas (some in Spanish, others in Italian). In his 1823 biography of Rossini, Stendhal summed up the tenor’s abilities: ‘I have always particularly admired the quality of assuredness in Garcia’s singing…’⁶

From 1829 his voice was in decline and he turned his energies to teaching, foremost among his pupils being his own children – his son Manuel Garcia the younger (usually known as Manuel Garcia II) and two daughters, the great Maria Malibran and her sister Pauline Viardot-Garcia. In his teaching, according to Beth Mary Williams, he combined ‘florid and dramatic Spanish elements with Italian aspects of the technique that Ansani taught’.⁷ His pupils all had great flexibility, coupled with, as Elster Kay puts it:

… sudden or gradual messa di voce in a way which emphasises the dynamics and the varying emotional content of the music; and the melismatic passages are executed with startling finesse and ease.⁸

The two daughters of Manuel Garcia I, taught by him, both had outstanding careers as singers. The older one, Maria, was a mezzosoprano who was able to encompass soprano and contralto roles. Known for her volcanic temperament, she became one of the most famous opera singers of the early nineteenth century. She was to engage in great battles with her tyrannical father, both having powerful egos. At seventeen she joined the chorus at the King’s Theatre in London, quickly rising to prima donna status as Rosina in Il barbiere di Siviglia. At the end of that season (in 1825), Manuel Garcia I took his company (with all his family) to New York, the first time that Italian opera had been performed in America, Maria singing leading roles. A year later she returned to Europe, where she sang the title role in Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda. In 1836 she fell from her horse, sustaining injuries from which she never fully recovered. She collapsed on stage in Manchester in October that year and died aged just twenty-eight.

Maria’s sister Pauline, also a mezzo-soprano, but who took piano lessons with Liszt, was thirteen years younger than her sister. She made her debut in Brussels in 1837, five years after the death of her father. She created Fidès in Meyerbeer’s Le Prophète, a role she sang over 200 times.

The oldest of the three siblings, Manuel Garcia II, studied with his father as a baritone, making his debut as Figaro in Il barbiere di Siviglia in 1825, but his voice declined quite early, probably the result of too much singing at a pitch far above his natural tessitura, and by 1829 he had retired from singing in order to concentrate on teaching. At the same time, he claimed that his enjoyment of performance was destroyed by the overbearing behaviour of his father.

The bel canto style of singing, which both Manuel Garcias, father and son, taught was still completely current when the son started to teach. And it did not only apply to works by Italian composers. The operas of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and their contemporaries in Austria-Hungary and Germany adopted bel canto practices – much of their work being composed to Italian libretti. Introduced in the seventeenth century, it focused initially on a solo melodic line together with sparse chordal accompaniment, either from orchestra or keyboard. Arias especially demanded that singers – in particular sopranos and (in the earlier times) castrati – demonstrate their extreme agility and virtuosity, not only in rapid runs and trills, but also in improvised ornaments and embellishments. The way in which singers could float above the instruments with gymnastic ease came to be described as coloratura.

Manuel Garcia II taught first in Paris, joining his father’s school there in 1829, but they clashed and Manuel junior stopped teaching and joined the French Army. Working in military hospitals, he was able to begin to research the anatomy and physiology of the human voice, work that was to continue for decades. He published his first thesis on the subject in 1840, following up with a more extended work in two volumes, A Complete Treatise on the Art of Singing. In 1848 he moved to London, where he joined the staff of the Royal Academy of Music as a professor. He was to remain there over the ensuing decades, finally retiring in 1895 aged ninety. He taught both men and women, his pupils including Jenny Lind and Catherine Hayes, and a number of outstanding singing teachers of the next generation – Julius Stockhausen, Sir Charles Santley, Salvatore Marchesi and Salvatore’s future wife, Mathilde Graumann.

After studying with Garcia II for several months in Paris, Mathilde decided something had to be done about her parlous financial situation. So she sat down and wrote to all the Graumann family’s wealthier friends and relations in Frankfurt, asking for help. There was no response. Then, quite by chance, returning ‘sad and melancholy’ one day from her lesson with Garcia, she ran into ‘my dear friends from Frankfort, Mr and Mrs Reis, in the rue de Richelieu’. They could see that she was despondent, and asked her what the problem was. Immediately they promised to help, the only proviso being that they would check with Garcia concerning her talent and her application. Garcia spoke of her to the Reises in glowing terms and the consequence was that the Reises granted her a monthly allowance until her studies were complete.

For the first time delighted with a new teacher, Mathilde found Garcia’s approach, his method, ‘clear, intelligent and thorough’. Not only that, his ideas concerning the development of the female voice were ‘a revelation’ to her. With her former teachers, Nicolai and Mendelssohn, she had studied exclusively music, both instrumental and vocal, from the Austro-German tradition. Now, with Garcia, she was

… initiated … into the style of the Italian school, as at that time a florid execution was the principal aim of all good singers. Rossini’s, Bellini’s and Donizetti’s compositions were the chief objects of study, and I was obliged, therefore, to work away at countless scales, arpeggios etc, and, what was worse still, with the metronome, which sometimes rendered me almost desperate.

Nevertheless, in spite of her trials, this, the core of Garcia’s method, remained at the centre of Mathilde’s own approach, teaching hundreds of young women over the following half century. Mathilde remained faithful to it, even when Wagner and Puccini and their contemporaries and followers moved vocally in completely new directions, with the traditional Italian school gradually losing its place in opera houses around the world.⁹

A second major plus for Garcia II in Mathilde’s eyes was that he was unique in having embarked on a thoroughgoing study of human anatomy and physiology as they related to singing. While there were other teachers, none had Garcia’s combination of scientific study and practical methodology. One specific and tangible outcome of Garcia’s research was his invention of the laryngoscope in 1854. This came about as a result of watching the movement of the larynx and vocal cords. This is how Mathilde’s daughter Blanche described the moment of discovery:

The living larynx had never been seen by anybody. One day, however, Garcia II, in a desperate attempt to see his vocal cords, attached a small mirror to a pencil, let it gently down his throat, and held a second mirror in front of his face and mouth. Whilst attacking a high note he suddenly saw the glottis – the two white vocal cords – in full function.

Garcia was overjoyed. The invention of the laryngoscope transformed not only Garcia’s research, but also medical science.

…

While his methodology was consistent and reliable, his timekeeping could be distinctly inconsistent. Pupils could patiently wait for him for several hours and when at last he appeared, he would frequently send them straight home, announcing, ‘I am tired, children; will see you tomorrow’.

Nevertheless, Mathilde claimed that ‘all Garcia’s pupils, both male and female, were enthusiastic about him’, and that when he had missed a lesson with them, ‘this wonderfully gifted man’s next lesson made us soon oblivious of the previous day’s deprivation’.

At one stage he described to Mathilde the way that he had helped Jenny Lind to save her voice and regrow her abilities and reputation such that she became the most famous singer of her generation. Jenny’s voice was discovered when she was nine years old and, helped by the principal dancer of the Royal Swedish Opera, Mlle Lundberg, she gained a place as a pupil at the Royal Opera School, the normal minimum age requirement being fourteen. Her remarkable musical gifts were swiftly appreciated, her first major triumph coming when she was still a teenager in 1838, as Agathe in Weber’s Der Freischütz. She had already suffered a vocal crisis at twelve, recovering satisfactorily from it, but constant performance in leading roles, allied to a faulty technique, meant that her voice became severely damaged by overuse. Jenny went to seek help from Manuel Garcia II in Paris in 1841, still only twenty years old. This is what Garcia told Mathilde:

After I had tried her voice, I said to her, ‘Mademoiselle, you have an originality of style which requires training, but either your voice is worn or you have never had one. You must take a few weeks’ rest, after which I will hear you again … I advise you to assist at the lessons I give to your countrywoman, Henriette Nissen.’

Lind followed Garcia’s instructions – not singing, but sitting in his lessons with Nissen. When he heard her again some weeks later, he could see that there was already a noticeable improvement in her higher notes, the lower ones remaining veiled. She was to become an ideal student, staying with Garcia for nearly two years. Garcia told Mathilde: ‘I do not remember ever having had a more attentive, intelligent pupil. Never had I to explain anything twice…’ But she also had more musical competencies, Garcia commenting, ‘I never heard her sing a hair’s breadth out of tune, so perfect was her natural ear’.

Jenny Lind went on to become the most celebrated opera singer of her generation, initially in Italian roles taught to her by Garcia – in Lucia di Lammermoor, Norma, La sonnambula, L’elisir d’amore and others – but also in the emerging operas of Meyerbeer. From 1849 she renounced the opera stage and concentrated on the concert platform, her most famous tour being for the showman PT Barnum throughout America in 1850–52. Nevertheless, while