Word: melba
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...Unretiring Diva It's a pity that your "Brief History of: Un-Retirement" focused on sports stars [July 28]. Otherwise, it might have mentioned the celebrated case of soprano Dame Nellie Melba. The phrase "More farewells than Nellie Melba" still has currency in her native Australia. After her official farewell at London's Covent Garden in 1926, she returned to Australia two years later to sing farewell in Sydney and, over the next few months, Melbourne, Geelong, and finally Adelaide. No matter whether the arena is sporting, theatrical or musical, no one can really be said to have "done...
Their voices float eerily across more than eight decades, ghostly echoes of a fabled operatic golden age: Nellie Melba, Emma Calvé, Jean de Reszke, Lillian Nordica and others, recorded live at the Metropolitan Opera by an enterprising music lover armed with an Edison cylinder machine. The sound is strictly low-fi, the scratchy surface noise is sometimes overwhelming, and the tantalizing fragments often break off abruptly with a singer in mid-phrase. But listening to them is thrilling, like hearing Lincoln recite the Gettysburg Address...
Here is the effortless technique of Melba, formidable in the mad scene from a 1901 Lucia di Lammermoor. Here is the Italian tenor Emilio de Marchi, the first Cavaradossi, ringing the rafters with a triumphant Vittoria! in a 1903 Tosca. Here too is the white-hot French soprano Emma Calvé, a peerless Carmen; the Polish soprano Marcella Sembrich, who negotiates the Queen of the Night's treacherous coloratura con molto brio in a 1902 Magic Flute; and the soaring American soprano Nordica (née Norton), who must have been one of the most glorious Brünnhildes in history. And here...
...sapling-sized mimih sculptures. Visitors are advised to take a catalog, as you can get lost in this forest trying to connect the names. Start with the most mischievous of mimih by the late Crusoe Kuningbal, then jump to the mimih of his late wife Lena Kurinya, daughter Melba Gunjarrwanga and son Crusoe Kurddal. Next, leapfrog to the Lorrkkon logs of Ivan Namirrkki, son of the late bark pioneer Peter Marralwanga, then to those of Namirrkki's sister Kay Lindjuwanga, her husband Mawurndjul, and his siblings James Iyuna and Susan Marawarr...
...love," warbles George. "Your love," croons Melba, as if correcting...