FRIDAY'S HISTORY LESSON: DAME NELLIE MELBA 1861-1931

Helen Porter Mitchell adopted the professional name "Melba" to acknowledge her birthplace, Melbourne. Melba was the eldest of 10 children. Although she first sang in public when 6, forming a lifelong attachment to 'Comin' thro' the Rye', it was her humming that visitors noticed. Unwittingly she had hit upon what she would later describe as an effective vocal exercise. She also whistled, and generally behaved like a tomboy.

Melba began to study and singing seriously after her marriage in 1882. Following appearances in Sydney and London, she made her operatic debut in Brussels in 1887. It was the start of a phenomenal 38-year career on the World stage.
Melba won acclaim at Covent Garden, London, and the Metropolitan Opera, New York, and then in most of the leading opera houses of the world until her retirement. Divorced in 1900, she could be forthright, vain and scandalous, so the papers said. Australians saw her living a gilded lifestyle among the best of international society, and she became the epitome of glamour and fame. She was mobbed on her return home in 1902.
In 1909 Melba undertook a sentimental tour of Australia, and was greeted with adulation wherever she went. During the war, international travel was restricted, but she was energetic in her war work. Melba was appointed a Dame of the British Empire in 1918 and elevated to Dame Grand Cross in the order in 1927. It was as 'the Voice' that Melba sometimes chose to describe herself. "Good singing", she stated, "is easy singing"; nature had given her an almost perfect larynx and vocal cords. Her range was fully three octaves, while her registers were so well blended that even an eminent throat specialist thought they were one. A scientific measurement of her trill produced twenty feet of undulations between perfectly parallel lines. Instrumentalists admired her, not least for the way that, despite her imperious temperament, she scrupulously sought to realize the composer's intentions.

From 1904 Melba began recording, she issued over one hundred records and helped to establish the gramophone. In 1920 she also became the first artist of international standing to participate in direct radio broadcasts.
In 1928 Melba performed in Geelong where she was to sing in her last Australian concert. Feeling that she had been away too long, Melba left for Europe for two years, and sang in Brighton before moving on to Paris and Egypt, where she developed a fever. She never quite shook it off, however, she did manage to sing one last time at a charity entertainment at the Hyde Park Hotel, London.

Dreading another Northern winter, Melba decided to return to Melbourne, but her health grew worse on board ship. Partly in the hope of getting better medical care, she later went to Sydney where, in St Vincent's Hospital, Darlinghurst, she died on 23 February 1931 of septicaemia, which had developed from facial surgery in Europe some weeks before. Dame Nellie Melba was aged 69.

I could not leave you without having a link to have a listen to Dame Nellie Melba's voice could I? Nope..so HERE it is..enjoy! Oh, and one more HERE.