Melba, Nellie (1861–1931) first Australian prima donna and, with the gramophone, the first Australian woman to achieve world fame, contributed uniquely to Australian pride, musicality, language, and confusion as to Australian identity. She also bequeathed and provoked a pot-pourri of small lies and sensational legends about herself, which, despite John Hetherington's popular Melba (1967), were not plumbed historiographically until Thérèse Radic's biography and
Jim Davidson's ADB entry, both in 1986.
She was born Helen Porter Mitchell in the Melbourne suburb of Richmond, the eldest daughter of David and Isabella Ann Mitchell, migrants from Forfarshire, Scotland. Father and daughter were both ruthless and painstaking exemplars of the colonial Calvinist dynamic. She enjoyed the privileged childhood conferred by her father's rising wealth as a contractor who built Scots Church (he was a lifelong choir member), Charles Pearson's Presbyterian Ladies College (where Nellie became a day student), Menzies Hotel, and the 1880 Royal Exhibition Building, as well as Doonside, where she grew up.
Her high spirits already showed, but the tale told by her organ teacher and flourished by
Jack Hibberd in his play A Toast to Melba (1976), that she used to swim naked in the Yarra with Richmond boys after school, still looks tall.
In contrast to Ethel (‘Henry Handel’) Richardson, also a product of PLC, who was taken, fresh from school, by her mother to Leipzig music studies and marriage to an English academic, but felt obliged to write her expatriate novels under a man's name, Melba took longer to escape. In 1882 she had a swiftly breaking marriage to Charles Armstrong, genteel Anglo-Irish sugar plantation manager, in humiliatingly uncouth and humid Port Mackay, and a son (George, born in 1883).
Jack Hibberd in his play A Toast to Melba (1976), that she used to swim naked in the Yarra with Richmond boys after school, still looks tall.
In contrast to Ethel (‘Henry Handel’) Richardson, also a product of PLC, who was taken, fresh from school, by her mother to Leipzig music studies and marriage to an English academic, but felt obliged to write her expatriate novels under a man's name, Melba took longer to escape. In 1882 she had a swiftly breaking marriage to Charles Armstrong, genteel Anglo-Irish sugar plantation manager, in humiliatingly uncouth and humid Port Mackay, and a son (George, born in 1883).
She then returned to Melbourne for seven years of singing classes with Pietro Cecchi before her début at a Liedertafel concert in the Melbourne Town Hall on 17 May 1884. She was almost 25 by the time she went to London in March 1886 with her husband, son, and father, who was Victoria's Commissioner to the Indian and Colonial Exhibition.
Unlike Richardson, Melba was able to brandish her sex, and her comeliness clearly helped her voice get a fair hearing in a cut-throat competition where patronage could be decisive. Australian artists of all kinds had to grapple with the severest anti-colonial prejudices in London.
Unlike Richardson, Melba was able to brandish her sex, and her comeliness clearly helped her voice get a fair hearing in a cut-throat competition where patronage could be decisive. Australian artists of all kinds had to grapple with the severest anti-colonial prejudices in London.
Unsinkable, she weathered her dismal first recital on 1 June and the lukewarm listening of Sir Arthur Sullivan and went off to Paris where her audition with Mathilde Marchesi proved the turning-point: ‘If you are serious, and if you study with me for one year, I will make something extraordinary of you’, she declared and rushed upstairs to tell her husband: ‘Salvatore, j'ai enfin une étoile!’
Madame Nellie Melba (‘my operatic nom de guerre’) was introduced to the world at Marchesi's matinée musicale on 31 December 1886, saluting what George Sala had nicknamed Marvellous Melbourne in 1885. She was an apt pupil (‘It was her brain that made Melba's voice’, insisted Marchesi), and refined her birdlike ‘Melba trill’, pianissimo touch, and Australian French. Her exhilarating opera début was at Brussels as Gilda in Rigoletto on 13 October 1887: the start of her phenomenal 38 years on the world stage.
Madame Nellie Melba (‘my operatic nom de guerre’) was introduced to the world at Marchesi's matinée musicale on 31 December 1886, saluting what George Sala had nicknamed Marvellous Melbourne in 1885. She was an apt pupil (‘It was her brain that made Melba's voice’, insisted Marchesi), and refined her birdlike ‘Melba trill’, pianissimo touch, and Australian French. Her exhilarating opera début was at Brussels as Gilda in Rigoletto on 13 October 1887: the start of her phenomenal 38 years on the world stage.
But Covent Garden did not warm to her on 24 May 1888; not until her triumphant Paris Opera début as Ophélie in Thomas's Hamlet on 8 May 1889 did her English patron, Lady de Grey, persuade her to return. After more apathy, the Prince of Wales and Princess Alexandra were in the ardent audience when she sang Gounod's Juliette in French on 15 June and captivated Covent Garden for a whole generation. In 1891 the Tsar invited her to St Petersburg, and in 1893 she graduated grandly as Lucia at La Scala, Milan.
Offstage, she began an affair with the young Duc d'Orléans, Pretender to the French throne, in 1890—abruptly ended in 1892 when her husband cited him in divorce papers, the embarrassing scandal explaining why the Westminster Gazette blithely called her ‘an artist and a woman of the world’. She began two decades at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, in 1893, but switched to Oscar Hammerstein's Manhattan Opera House in 1907.
Offstage, she began an affair with the young Duc d'Orléans, Pretender to the French throne, in 1890—abruptly ended in 1892 when her husband cited him in divorce papers, the embarrassing scandal explaining why the Westminster Gazette blithely called her ‘an artist and a woman of the world’. She began two decades at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, in 1893, but switched to Oscar Hammerstein's Manhattan Opera House in 1907.
She made her first recording in 1904. In 1974 J.B. Steane ranked her in important respects the best of all the recorded singers: ‘Hers was the purest and firmest of voices, the most perfect scale, the most exact trill’, and her records ‘the crowning glory of the age called golden’.
In 1962 Geoffrey Hutton quoted an estimate of £500 000 for her earnings, plus £200 000 for charity. She found an excellent business manager in Australian flautist John Lemone, and controlled her finances cannily—and from 1910 she was free of her husband, who obtained a Texas divorce for desertion. Percy Grainger's father had built Melba's Coombe Cottage at Coldstream, outside Melbourne, following her extraordinary 16 000-kilometre bush concert tour in 1909. Melba lived there during most of the Great War, which she spent singing to troops, and raising money and morale by means that included a film clip with Charlie Chaplin in Hollywood. Her reward was a DBE in 1918 and a return to Covent Garden for the first postwar season.
Chewing wattle-gum at Covent Garden, she boasted that ‘I put Australia on the map’; this reflected real pride in her country, even if there is no reason to doubt Clara Butt's word that, about to tour Australia, Melba advised her: ‘Sing 'em muck; it's all they can understand.’ She was also proud of being very modern; on each return visit she gave classes on the Marchesi teaching method, and she published The Melba Method (1926).
In 1962 Geoffrey Hutton quoted an estimate of £500 000 for her earnings, plus £200 000 for charity. She found an excellent business manager in Australian flautist John Lemone, and controlled her finances cannily—and from 1910 she was free of her husband, who obtained a Texas divorce for desertion. Percy Grainger's father had built Melba's Coombe Cottage at Coldstream, outside Melbourne, following her extraordinary 16 000-kilometre bush concert tour in 1909. Melba lived there during most of the Great War, which she spent singing to troops, and raising money and morale by means that included a film clip with Charlie Chaplin in Hollywood. Her reward was a DBE in 1918 and a return to Covent Garden for the first postwar season.
Chewing wattle-gum at Covent Garden, she boasted that ‘I put Australia on the map’; this reflected real pride in her country, even if there is no reason to doubt Clara Butt's word that, about to tour Australia, Melba advised her: ‘Sing 'em muck; it's all they can understand.’ She was also proud of being very modern; on each return visit she gave classes on the Marchesi teaching method, and she published The Melba Method (1926).
She also helped both the university and Marshall–Hall orchestra introduce normal pitch instruments, laid the foundation-stone of Melba Hall in 1913, established the Albert Street Conservatorium in 1915, and bequeathed £8000 to it for a singing scholarship ‘in the hope that another Melba may arise’ as well as possibly ‘the purchase or building of an Opera House’. In 1920 she took part in direct radio broadcasts of music (possibly the first international artist to do so). Inevitably, she sang at the 1927 opening of the new Parliament House in Canberra.
Her aggressively Australian jokes could be near the bone as demonstrated by her shipboard bon mot in 1908 (when offered a limp jelly at table): ‘No thanks, there are two things I like stiff, and jelly's one of them.’ Linguistically not hers were pêches Melba and Melba sauce; ‘to do a Melba’ posthumously celebrated the diva's prolonged and repeated international adieus that began in October 1924 with a farewell to grand opera in Melbourne and ended there on 27 September 1927—the year she was promoted to Dame Grand Cross of the British Empire.
Her aggressively Australian jokes could be near the bone as demonstrated by her shipboard bon mot in 1908 (when offered a limp jelly at table): ‘No thanks, there are two things I like stiff, and jelly's one of them.’ Linguistically not hers were pêches Melba and Melba sauce; ‘to do a Melba’ posthumously celebrated the diva's prolonged and repeated international adieus that began in October 1924 with a farewell to grand opera in Melbourne and ended there on 27 September 1927—the year she was promoted to Dame Grand Cross of the British Empire.
She died at St Vincent's Hospital, Sydney, following infection from a face-lift in Europe, and she was embalmed and buried (next to her father) in Lilydale Cemetery after a huge funeral at Scots Church and a marathon procession, flatteringly patronised by many thousands of ordinary Australians, partners of this strange love–hate relationship—a fitting finale.
Noel Mclachlan
How to cite this entry:
Noel Mclachlan "Melba, Nellie" The Oxford Companion to Australian History. Ed. Graeme Davison, John Hirst and Stuart Macintyre. Oxford University Press, 2001. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 9 December 2011
Noel Mclachlan
How to cite this entry:
Noel Mclachlan "Melba, Nellie" The Oxford Companion to Australian History. Ed. Graeme Davison, John Hirst and Stuart Macintyre. Oxford University Press, 2001. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 9 December 2011
