Marvelous Melba: The Extraordinary Life of a Great Diva Review

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(More customer reviews)Nellie Melba became the first internationally known opera singer from Australia, and when she hit the top, she stayed ther for forty years. Ann Blainey's biography is what they used to call compulsively readable, and will provide even those who thought they knew Melba with many new insights. Perhaps it might have reached five star level had we learned more about Melba's music itself, but Blainey is not a musicologist per se and seems more interested in aspects of 19th and 20th century performance style, and of course the progress of a flamboyant woman through the world, than she does about what made Melba so special as a singer.
That's okay, there is still plenty left to admire about this book. Melba was born Nellie Mitchell and even from birth seems to have been headstrong and willful, not content to stay on the farm and stay married to good old Charlie. Her treatment of her son, George, was even more cold you might say--basically she just abandoned him and went on to Europe and England to further her career, though in later years, as Blainey shows, she became fairly obsessed with reconnecting with the boy she had left behind, and he did indeed come back to her in middle age. Melbourne, the town where she was born (as was Ann Blainey) was of two minds about her, pride and scorn mixed together. She was in some ways the victim of Australia's "tall poppy syndrome," wherein those who stand a little taller than the run of the mill populace are put down and pilloried. But Melba loved Melbourne and indeed, changed her name to remind people of where she was from. Her name was her way of keeping herself real, even when she went on to live the life of an international diva and take on more affectations than most opera stars before and since. People loved her though, because she never forgot her roots. She co-starred with Caruso, with John McCormack, with her favorite Jean de Reszke. and in some of the most glittering productions of her day, but she always went home when she could, back to Melbourne. In this way she reminds me of my favorite pop singer, Kylie Minogue, whose career followed a similar path, back and forth from Melbourne. Well, Kylie is very different of course, excuse me opera buffs.
Kings and princes adored Melba, and musicians loved her, too. Early on she became a particular favorite of a generation of French composers whose works she triumphed in--Gounod, Ambroise Thomas, Delibes, many more. Saint-Saens created an opera for her, Helene. She tried singing Wagner though her heart wasn't into it, primarily because shifting markets wanted a singing actress in their opera now, following Wagner conception of opera as total theater, a totalizing art form that would combine all arts into one. And oh how she loved her jewels! And yet we see that Melba fetishized her love of jewels and made it a prominent part of her press releases in part to imitate the earlier diva, Adelina Patti.
Valiantly fighting rumors of facelifts, Melba met her maker in 1931. Thanks to Ann Blainey, something of her spirit is still aliove, just as she herself predicted many years ago now. She shines.

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