Word: melba
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...attempted to dazzle her audience by singing an Italian aria. Her father was a storekeeper who played professional baseball in the summertime. Though money was scarce, Geraldine was determined to be an opera-singer. She studied in Boston and in Manhattan where she stood in line to hear Melba, Calve, Lilli Lehmann, Jean de Reszke. The Metropolitan offered to let her sing in a Sunday-night concert but, even at 16, she wanted something better. She persuaded her father to sell his Melrose store and, raking and scraping together some $30,000, set out for Europe on a cattle boat...
Evensong (by Beverley Nichols & Edward Knoblock; Arch Selwyn & Sir Barry Jackson, producers). Glib, ultra-British young Beverley Nichols used to be employed on the personal staff of Dame Nellie Melba. He cashed in on this experience when he wrote Evensong, a novel about a declining diva's race against time. Dramatized and produced in London, the story had a remunerative run. Produced for the first time on a U. S. stage, Evensong again sets one to wondering if the English often go to the theatre just to get out of the rain...
While her mother lay ill in her girlhood home at Meriden, Conn., Soprano Rosa Melba Ponselle gave a concert at Hartford. In the midst of "Home, Sweet Home" she broke down, fled weeping from the stage. Said Robert Kellogg, impresario: "It was the overflow of her vast emotional reservoir...
...performers. The old Tivoli Opera House started its career in 1875. Beer flavored the performances there but, alternating light opera and grand, the house managed to keep open all year round-an achievement never equaled in the U. S. The Metropolitan Opera visited San Francisco three times-with Calve, Melba, Eames, Schumann-Heink, Fremstad, Gadski, Sembrich. Caruso, the de Reszkes. Early one morning during the third visit the earth started rumbling and quaking, knocked the entire company out of bed, frightened Enrico Caruso so badly that even though he was offered $25,000 he would not go back...
...open umbrella so that the sound of their own voices comes back to them. One old Italian teacher used to train his pupils on the syllables bee-bah-lo-nee exclusively. Methods and phobias outnumber teachers. Alda's teacher, the late great Mathilde Marchesi, who also taught Melba and Calve, would never permit a pupil of hers to have her hair washed...