Disdaining mealy-mouthed modesty, Nellie Melba liked to claim she had “put Australia on the map”. Such bravado wasn’t baseless: this opera soprano, born Helen Mitchell in Melbourne in 1861, was certainly the frontier continent’s first global celebrity, her fame spread by her recordings as much as her live performances and still enshrined 90 years after her death (from septicaemia contracted after cosmetic surgery) in the names of a peach dessert and oven-cooked toast.
She was not a particularly attractive person. Venal and mercenary, as well as foul-mouthed and brutally competitive on occasion, she was mistress of all the games of the prima donna. You did not mess with Melba; nobody’s fool, she expected and received regal deference wherever she went. Implausibly impersonated by Kiri Te Kanawa, she features as a guest of Lord and Lady Grantham in an episode of Downton Abbey – an appearance that reflects her actual success in being received in several aristocratic households as a social equal. “I’m a damned snob,” she admitted, and she played the game of arriviste very cleverly, too.
Yet, as someone who fought her way out of a cultural backwater without significant help or advantages and made her own high place in a man’s world, she commands a certain respect. Her patina of toughness was a necessary defence against exploitation, and like the heroines dreamt up by Ibsen and Shaw, she embodies something of the phenomenon of what was known in the late 19th century as “the new woman” – a type determined to pursue an independent professional career and insisting on the freedom to speak out candidly and even dictate the terms.
Talent, nurtured by hard work, was her passport: through the hiss and crackle of the surviving evidence, her singing voice may sound alien and squawky now – fragments of it can be found on You Tube – but in her prime it was considered a thing of astonishing purity and clarity, built on impeccable technique. Hatchet-faced, she couldn’t act for toffee and was never imaginative or spontaneous on stage, but the sound she produced was disarmingly sublime – “a ball of light”, wrote her awestruck rival Mary Garden after hearing her pianissimo top C. “It left everything and came over like a star and went out into the infinite. I have never heard anything like it in my life.”
Melba’s latest biographer, Robert Wainwright, is uninterested in the question of anyone’s artistry; although he gets the basic facts right enough, his is not a study of any subtlety, let alone one to be recommended to an opera lover. His focus is more on Melba’s marriage to Charlie Armstrong, the runt of an Irish baronetcy, and her affair with Philippe, duc d’Orléans.
