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Nellie
The Life and Loves of a Diva
Robert Wainwright
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Nellie
The Life and Loves of a Diva
Robert Wainwright
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'In this highly readable biography of Nellie Melba...Robert Wainwright tells the story of the girl with the incredible voice who, by sheer force of her personality and power of her decibels, took the operatic world by storm and managed to escape from her violent husband' Ysenda Maxtone Graham, DAILY MAIL Nellie Melba is remembered as a squarish, late middle-aged woman dressed in furs and large hats, an imperious Dame whose voice ruled the world for three decades and inspired a peach and raspberry dessert. But to succeed, she had to battle social expectations and misogyny that would have preferred she stay a housewife in outback Queensland rather than parade herself on stage. She endured the violence of a bad marriage, was denied by scandal a true love with the would-be King of France, and suffered for more than a decade the loss of her only son - stolen by his angry, vengeful father. Despite these obstacles, she built and maintained a career as an opera singer and businesswoman on three continents which made her one of the first international superstars. Award-winning biographer Robert Wainwright presents a very different portrait of this great diva, one that celebrates both her musical contributions and her rich and colourful personal life.
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Musikbiographien1
OPPOSITES ATTRACT
Helen Porter Mitchell was an unusually naughty child; incorrigible, unreasonable and unmanageable, incapable of behaving even by accident. These were her own words, an unkind self-assessment delivered much later in life, possibly as a means of justifying why her parents did their utmost to prevent her from pursuing a career as a singer.
Her father, David Mitchell, was a God-fearing man who would have regarded his oldest daughterâs voice as a heavenly gift, and yet he could not abide the notion of her taking the stage professionally. It was one thing to sing at a charity concert for the church or the local school but entirely another for a woman to warble for moneyââshilling entertainmentsââmuch less in costume and grease paint. That would be promiscuous and lacked respectability before God; and his Nellie, as Helen would always be known, would not be a part of it.
When she was an eager teenager, Nellie decided to hold a drawing-room concert to raise funds for the repair of a cemetery fence at the local church. She wrote to friends asking them to donate and attend the concert, even creating and pasting colourful posters on walls around the neighbourhood advertising the show, but when her father heard about the event he wrote to each of the invited guests asking, as a personal favour, that they stay away. When Nellie stepped out onto the makeshift platform there was an audience of just two. She sang anyway but never forgot the experience.
Neither time nor her success would dull her fatherâs hardline view. Many years later, when she returned to Australia as the most famous soprano in the world, Nellie sang in Scotsâ Church, Melbourne, which her father had built. It was a magnificent homecoming and yet, afterwards, when she asked her father if he had liked her singing, his only response, delivered in his gruff Scottish burr, was âI dinna like your hatâ.
And yet her father was her hero; a strong and dependable rock but impenetrable and unyielding.
David Mitchell had arrived in Melbourne penniless and yet he made a fortune, hewn from his learned skills as a stone mason. He was responsible for many of Melbourneâs most enduring sandstone buildings, including the Royal Exhibition Centre.
He met dark-eyed Isabella Dow, the daughter of a business associate, at church one Sunday in 1857 and they married a few months later. They would start a family immediately but, tragically, their firstborn, a girl, and then a boy would both die in infancy. Nellie was their third child, born on 19 May 1861. The Mitchells watched anxiously over her and celebrated with prayers when she reached her first birthday.
There would be another seven Mitchell children, roaming around a large, turreted house called Doonside, built by their father in inner-city Richmond, but Nellieâs heart lay at the end of an 80-kilometre stagecoach ride out of the city to an old cattle station known as Steelâs Flats, which was beyond the town of Lilydale.
It was here that she thrived, happy fishing or swimming alone in the nearby creek, exploring bush tracks and gullies beneath towering eucalypts filled with raucous birds or clambering into the foothills of the ranges behind the homestead; her wanderings limited only by the endurance of her pony and her imagination.
Nellie was a contradiction, a young woman who was happy in her own company and yet someone who needed affirmation. She was stung by criticism but ultimately used it as a driving force to succeed.
But it was her father she so desperately sought to please. âIf he was a stern master then I was a willing pupil,â she would later write in her memoir. As much as she looked like her mother, it was her father after whom Nellie took; they were both resourceful, fearless and determined but also stubborn and quick to angerâcharacter traits that would serve her well but also have consequences.
She could never say from where her abilities came. David and Isabella Mitchell were both musical but neither was more than accomplished, and certainly far from extraordinary. Nellie would sit beside her motherâs feet as she practised the piano and on her fatherâs knee as he played the harmonium.
Singing seemed as natural as breathing, her constant humming around the house an irritation to her mother but, in retrospect, an unintentional vocal exercise that helped develop her famous trill.
Nellie was six years old when she performed at a Sunday school production and just eight when she sang in public for the first time, at a fundraising concert in the Richmond Town Hall in which she accompanied herself on the piano and earned several encores. An enthusiastic reporter from The Australian newspaper observed: âShe is a musical prodigy and will make a crowded house whenever she is announced again.â
Nellieâs parents were hoping for âdocilityââfor their daughter to conform to the expectations of the time that young women should stay quiet and not express an opinionâbut they only succeeded in entrenching her rebellion and forming an enduring sadness about being misunderstood. She hated the strict boarding school she was sent to, especially as it was so close to home she could see her father riding to work.
Those memories would never fade: âA girl should not be brought up too strictly,â she remarked in an interview in 1910. âParticularly, she ought to be allowed to choose what she will do with her life.â
Although she found school distressing, it was the music program at the Presbyterian Ladiesâ College in Burwood that set her on the pathway to success. It was here she found her first singing teacher, Mary Ellen Christian, a concert contralto who had studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London. When she left school, Nellie continued studying singing with Pietro Cecchi, a tenor who had studied in Romeâs Academy of Music. The foundations had been laid.
Nellieâs mother died in October 1881 at the age of forty-eight. It wasnât unexpectedâshe had been ill with chronic hepatitis for some timeâbut, even so, her death from liver failure came as a shock.
In her last days, she had made Nellie promise to take care of the youngest child, four-year-old Florence, known as Vere. Not simply to watch over her but to protect her as a mother.
In the bleak months that followed the funeral, Nellie, aged twenty, felt the weight of that solemn vow. The sight of Isabellaâs body being lowered into the ground in a coffin and covered with dirt was haunting. But death was also a beginning, and there were consequences for the living; her little sister had become a responsibility in a life that, until now, had none.
Nellieâs response was to move Vereâs cot into her own room, to tend the child as one would a newborn baby. It was as if she could not let Vere out of her sight lest something happened and yet, despite her attention, one evening barely three months later Vere fell ill. It was too late to call a doctor, so Nellie put the feverish girl to bed and hoped her temperature would subside by morning.
Unable to sleep, she listened with increasing concern to Vereâs wheeze, clearly the girl had an infection in her chest. As she finally began drifting off to sleep, Nellie was disturbed by the sense that a third person was in the room. Unable to rid the notion, she sat up to see what she thought was a dark figure near the fire. In her anxiety and drowsiness she pictured her mother wearing the simple black dress in which she had been buried. Nellie watched, transfixed, as the spectre moved slowly across the room and stood over Vereâs cot where it raised its hand and pointed at the child before making a sweeping motion and disappearing. Nellie raced to the cot where Vere was asleep, peaceful and cooler to the touch. Was it possible or the hallucinated vision of a stressed mind?
The next morning she told her father what had happened, including the appearance of his late wifeâs apparition. David Mitchell, on his way out to attend to business, dismissed his daughterâs concerns with a wave of his hand and insisted that she delay calling a doctor to tend Vere until he returned that evening.
But he was tragically wrong. The little girlâs condition worsened through the morning, her raw throat causing her to gasp for breath. Nellie waited, hoping her father would return so they could call the doctor, but by the time David Mitchell returned, his young daughter had choked to death.
Nellie was distraught. She had failed her mother, and her sister who had died in a horrible fashion. The funeral and Vereâs tiny coffin being laid next to their mother only heightened her shame.
She would later recall her fatherâs condescending words when she pleaded for a doctor: ââTut, tut girl. Get those foolish notions out of your head.â By the evening it was too late. My sister died at four oâclock. These are the facts, unadorned. I do not seek to explain them.â It was as close as she would ever come to criticising David Mitchell.
A renewed pall of doom settled over Doonside. Nellie, who now shared home duties with her sisters Anne and Belle could not shake the sense of shame over the deaths of her mother and Vere. âDeath on my youthful horizon shocked and bewildered me,â she would write four decades later, the memories still powerful.
David Mitchell, normally so unemotional, could see the impact the losses were having on her. There was nothing he could do to bring back his wife or youngest child but he could save his oldest.
He had taken a contract to build a mill for a property at Marian, 24 kilometres inland from the township of Mackay in northern Queensland. He decided to take Nellie on a business trip north for several months, leaving the other children to the care of staff. The change of atmosphere might lift her spirits, he thought. It was a decision that, in a perverted way, would be her making.
Mackay, built low and spare at the edge of mangroves, had a population large enough to justify three newspapers, six schools, two banks, a hospital, library and a dozen hotels to slake a tropical thirst. Nellie would describe the town as barbaric, despite there being a thriving social and cultural community into which she soon fell, joining an amateur company as a pianist and second-string singer. Her first two performances were to raise money for a cricket club and another for the local church. She was well received by audiences who flocked to the townâs wooden theatre but considered inferior to a local girl named Julia Wheeler.
But, by the end of the year, Nellie had become an indispensable performer, ârapturously encoredâ according to one report in the Mackay Mercury, which concluded: âThis lady has firmly established herself as a favourite and no amateur concert is likely to be held without her assistance.â
The applause only confirmed to Nellie that she desperately wanted a career on the stage, as she intimated in a letter home to Cecchi. The letter also revealed a competitive streak that would be both a blessing and a curse: âI had great success at two concerts I sang at, so much so that all the ladies up here are jealous of me. I was encored twice for each song, and they hurrahed me and threw me no end of bouquets.â
The sunshine of Queensland had thawed Nellieâs spirits, as David Mitchell had hoped, and she settled into Mackay society with its endless rounds of tea parties, riding and boating trips, even writing home about the fun she was having flirting and then fending off the eligible young men of the town.
At age twenty-one, Nellie Mitchell was handsome rather than pretty, with dark, almond-shaped eyes and a fine-lipped mouth that seemed lost between a long, distinctive nose and prominent oval chin. Her hair was usually worn tied up with tight curls splashed across her forehead, hinting at her motherâs Spanish heritage, as did her light-olive complexion and shapely figure accentuated by a tiny waist.
She was a young woman whose attractiveness came as much from her personality, with a magnetism that radiated the sense that she was someone with whom to be reckoned. She possessed a mind of her own at a time when women were supposed to be meek and complacent. It lent credence to a story that she once stripped off to swim nude in the Yarra River with the boys of Richmond and another story that, during a particularly tedious church service, she played âCanât You Dance the Polka?â on the organ instead of the requested hymn.
She enjoyed the attention in Mackay and took none of it seriously, although there was one young man she couldnât shake off. Charlie Armstrong was rangy, good-looking and strong in the lean manner of someone who has lived an outdoors life, with ice-blue eyes and a shock of blond hair bleached almost white by the sun. He had a demeanour to match; an authority that made men wary and women feel protected.
He was the antithesis of his background, the youngest son of an ageing Irish baronet who was in his mid-sixties when Charlieâhis thirteenth childâwas born. The baron died when the boy was aged five. It was little wonder then that Charlieâs early adult life was spent wandering from job to job, trying to find his place.
At the age of seventeen he was sent to Australia to work on the family station outside Brisbane. He thrived in the bush where his skills and bravery were admired and no quarter was expected or given. Along the way he had picked up the nickname Kangaroo Charlie, which some linked to his ability to stay aboard a bucking stallion until its snorting fury had calmed, while others attributed it to his devastating boxing skills, able to dispatch opponents with calm ring craft rather than brutal thuggery.
Either way, it was clear that he and Nellie came from different worlds. Nellie was the oldest child of a self-made man and Charlie the youngest of an entitled baronet; Nellie was a city girl who wanted to ride in carriages and dreamed of singing opera while her beau was a rodeo-loving country boy whose int...