"New Zealand’s most famous daughter" began her career in Europe, singing at Covent Garden, La Scala and the Opera-Comique in Paris, and became a star member of the New York Metropolitan Opera, one of the world's most enduring and distinguished opera companies. She has been described as "one of the great voices of the Twentieth Century.”
Born in Christchurch in 1879, she gained early success as a light operetta singer in Melbourne. At 22 she set forth for Europe and established herself in the tough, competitive world of European opera. Her performances captured the attention of Arturo Toscanini and Giulio Gatti-Casazza of La Scala, two of the most powerful figures in world opera, and she sang at La Scala for three seasons from 1906-1908.
Then she was taken on as a member of the New York Metropolitan Opera, probably the leading opera company in the world. She became one of the Opera’s enduring stars until her retirement in 1929, triumphing over early back-biting by critics and her own tempestuous marriage to Gatti-Casazza. Always versatile, she brought opera to small American towns and became one of the first opera stars to appreciate the developing medium of radio. She also toured New Zealand and lauded its virtues, recording Maori music and being associated with New Zealand in the American imagination.
A Musical Dynasty
The woman who later became Frances Alda was born Fanny Jane Davis in Christchurch in 1879. Her early life was unstable: her parents’ marriage was split by the conflict between father, David, who wanted her mother Leonore, a promising singer from a family of musicians, to settle down in Christchurch. Leonore had other ideas and in 1880, divorced David to resume her singing career. After false starts in Australasia, she took Fanny and her younger brother to San Francisco in 1883. Leonore remarried, but died of peritonitis in December 1884, a few months after her marriage.
The two children found a settled home in Melbourne with Leonore’s parents, Martin and Fanny Simonsen (after whom young Fanny was named). Fanny was one of the leading sopranos on the Australasian stage and later a singing teacher. Several other Simonsen relatives were also well-known singers.
The early singing career of the then "Francie Adler" began in Melbourne, in light operettas, Gilbert and Sullivan operas and pantomime. Yet there were limited possibilities for serious opera singers in Melbourne’s rough-and-ready provincial society. Letters from her aunt Frances Saville, principal soprano with the Vienna Hofoper, encouraged her to step onto a wider stage. Changing her name from Fanny Jane to "Frances Jeanne", the young singer left for Europe in 1902.
European Success
In Europe, Frances had singing lessons with her aunt’s teacher, the well-known Mathilde Marchesi. Although Marchesi probably did relatively little to change Frances’ singing technique, she had significant influence in other ways. She imparted the polish and sophistication needed to succeed in an opera career: The finesse, language ability, stage movements; and off-stage, the etiquette needed for Europe’s more formal society. She also provided important contacts and an elegant, Italianate stage name for her pupil: Frances Alda.
Alda debuted as Manon in Massenet’s "Manon" at the Paris Opera-Comique in 1904. Over the next few years, she appeared at La Monnaie in Brussels and stood in for the other great Australasian soprano of the day, Nellie Melba, at Covent Garden in 1906.
They had one quality in common - the determination necessary for obscure young singers from the edge of the world to make it in the ruthless and exploitative international scene. But Melba did not take kindly to rivals. Alda saw six further performances at Covent Garden cancelled without any reason and realised that she had been the victim of Melba’s professional jealousy.
Yet her debut at Covent Garden was enough to bring Alda to the attention of Arturo Toscanini, the conductor of La Scala, and Giulio Gatti-Casazza, its general manager, two of the most powerful figures in European opera at that time. She sang at La Scala from 1906 until 1908, when Toscanini and Gatti-Casazza took over the direction of the New York Metropolitan Opera and she went with them to join the company, one of the most distinguished in the world.
Trouble and Strife
In America, Alda also began a relationship that would affect the rest of her professional and personal life. She married Gatti-Casazza in 1910: as she commented, with typical forthrightness in her 1937 autobiography "Men, Women and Tenors" - "The two most grievous errors I made were when I married him and when I divorced him." Her autobigraphy is acclaimed as one of best known titles in classical music bibliography.
Alda’s relationship with Gatti-Casazza was fraught with difficulties from the beginning. He wanted her to give up her name like a demure Italian wife and sing as Madame Gatti-Casazza, but she felt she had earned her stage name and identity, so refused. Nor did her association help her professionally - she never took advantage of his role at the Metropolitan to secure herself better parts.
In fact, being his wife soon made Alda vulnerable to the ill-feeling of Gatti-Casazza’s enemies who, in the guise of musical criticism, attacked Alda’s Metropolitan debut as a way of attacking the Italian impresario. Her first notices - "The young singer who made her debut last evening comes from the land of the sheep and she bleated like one of them" - almost made Alda flee back to Europe where she had been appreciated, but encouragement from one of the leading sopranos of the day, Lilian Nordica, made her stand her ground.
Despite the personal and professional difficulties, in her relationship with Gatti-Casazza (the couple were soon leading amicable but separate lives, but did not formally separate until 1928), Alda prospered at the Metropolitan, winning over critics and audiences with performances such as Mimi in "La Boheme" (singing the role 63 times at the Metropolitan alone), as Desdemona in "Othello", Marguerite in "Faust" and Margherita in "Mefistofele".
Rediscovering New Zealand
Frances Alda was also a proud and patriotic New Zealander. Though she spent little time in the land of her birth, her New Zealand tour of 1927 reawakened her feelings for her country. She heard traditional Maori music in Rotorua and recorded several Maori songs. She came to disdain Australia, although Australia claimed her as one of their own.
As Adrienne Simpson recounts, in a profile of Alda in "Women’s Studies Journal", Alda expressed her feelings about the two countries in her inimitable style after her 1927 tour:
"When the SS Aorangi docked in Vancouver, bringing her back from the antipodes, North American reporters were treated to a display of the famous Alda temperament as she launched into a tirade about the inadequacies of Australia and the virtues of New Zealand. Her comments, she claimed, were absolutely impartial, despite the fact ‘that New Zealand is my birthplace’."
For the rest of her life she would be associated with New Zealand in the American press.
More Than A Diva
Alda was a forthright woman, her temper, as she noted, as fiery as her red hair. She knew well that a successful opera career demanded skilled self-management, as much as projecting the image of the fragile, doomed heroines she portrayed so successfully on the stage, and was a shrewd businesswoman used to dealing with unscrupulous concert promoters. In the polished and artificial world of New York opera, Alda was seen as plain-spoken and unconventional, a stickler for the terms of the contracts she signed with accompanists and other musicians, and quick to take slight. She was certainly never afraid to venture her opinion.
In Birmingham, Alabama, in early October 1919, Alda was on tour with well-known American Soprano Charles Hackett. Not known for her diplomacy, Frances expressed her disappointment over the small audience, and despite the fact that she had just been paid, berated the committee for failing to completely fill the house. The president of the concert association tactfully replied that Birmingham was the loser artistically and the association financially. "Well, after all", declaimed Alda, "nobody knows Hackett anyway". "Yes" replied the president, "but they do know you!" and disappeared through the door.”
Yet she was also a friend to many fellow artists, a supporter to younger artists starting on their careers (in contrast to the jealous behaviour of Melba) with strong opinions on the fair and professional treatment of young performers, as she showed through her membership of the Musical Union of Women Artists.
After her retirement from the Metropolitan in 1928, Alda continued to do radio recordings and vaudeville performances. She indulged in her love of travel and revelled in the role of the grand ex-diva and married again in 1941, to an American, Ray Vir Den, ten years her junior. This union was much happier than her first marriage, as Vir Den shared her unconventionality and sense of humour.
Frances Alda died in Venice on holiday in 1952 at the age of 83. Her death was marked by tributes in newspapers throughout America. In 1997, some of her many recordings were re-issued by the National Library of New Zealand and Atoll Records as "Alda in Opera and Song: Historic Recordings 1910 - 1928".
Francis Alder, International Diva, Interview material courtesy of Earl Okin.
Copywirght nzedge.com, Executive Editor Brian Sweeney. Subheadings our addition.
