What's in a famous name? Publicity if not a career ...

 

BALFE, Victoire  [BALFE, Victoria] (b Paris 1 September ?1837; d Madrid 22 January 1871)

 

Miss Balfe had a very small career. And a very small voice. She was also apparently somewhat neurotic as a person and a performer, but, on the other hand, she was exceptionally good-looking and, when she felt like it, easy on the stage.  Sometimes. She also had – like poor Miss Delcy – a stage father. But whereas poor Miss Delcy scurried through something of a career for her well-known father, before waning away into anonymity; Miss Balfe got out of the music business quite quickly and into marriage and all sorts of reference works, including the Dictionary of National Biography. For having sung four operas in three years? Yes. But she really made those august pages because (a) her father was the great Irish opera composer M William Balfe ‘who wanted to make of her another Malibran’ (b) because she was publicised and paragraphed outrageously from her mid-teens as another Piccolomini and (c) she married into both the English and Spanish aristocracy, accompanied by no little fuss. The Dictionary of National Biography, having chosen to include her, then gives her an atypically clear-eyed entry, which makes her inclusion all the more mysterious.

 

As early as 1853, having allegedly trained at the Paris Conservatoire, with Manuel Garcia and in Italy, she was said to be about to make her appearance on the lyric stage. But she didn’t. It wasn’t until four years later (‘only eighteen years old’ – she was twenty or maybe more) – that Gye, playing his season at the Lyceum, gave her her debut. As Amina in La Sonnambula. Gardoni and Ronconi supported the young woman, the event was largely puffed, and society responded. ‘Since the debut of Mlle Piccolomini in La Traviata we have not witnessed such enthusiastic demonstrations of delight’, one paper reported, but remarked that her voice was ‘wanting in strength and volume’. ‘A high soprano, veiled but very agreeable in quality, flexible and under perfect control,’ reported another, but not all agreed. One of Europe’s great music writers, Francesco Regli, would write ‘La Balfe non poteva piacere né all'estero, né in Italia, d'incerta intonazione qual era e d'un metodo scorretto’. 

 

On 21 July, Gye put forward his new soprano as Lucia di Lammermoor, supported by Neri-Baraldi and Graziani, and then sent her on tour. She was not the prima donna of the company: Angiolina Bosio took virtually all the main roles. Misses Balfe (Sonnambula, Lucia) and Parepa (L’Elisir d’amore) gave her a few nights off. She gave her two roles in Dublin, Belfast, Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham, after which the company gave concerts. She gave ‘Come per me sereno’ ‘Son geloso’ with Gardoni, and the Rigolettoquartet, but her notices were mixed. Her voice, the provinces decided was ’wanting in power and quality’. But the puffing went on. We are told by a memoirist, quoted in the DNB that, after her somewhat exaggerated reception at her debut, she was ‘too well received … it turned her head, and made her … vain and presuming’. Maybe. Certainly, her career did not take off in a manner commensurate with her press coverage.

 

She spent winter in Paris and sang at some aristocratic salons which were reported in the English press, and in April continued to Dublin where she sang at the Philharmonic Concerts and the Anacreontic Concerts.  The Dublin press liked her ‘Convent Bell’, but was indifferent to her ‘Come per me sereno’ and stated bluntly ‘The young lady should not sing ‘The Last Rose of Summer’ in Ireland if she do not improve on last night; for she was cold unimpressive and painfully formal in every way’. In May, she appeared alongside the senior members of the opera world in a State Concert, and her name appeared on the prospectus for the Covent Garden Opera. But she didn’t appear. An apologist ran a long piece in the press depicting the poor little girl awaiting her turn which never came. I have a feeling it mightn’t have been quite like that.

 

Her principal engagement for the season came down to the Birmingham Festival. But there again, she took no part in the oratorios, where Novello, Castellan and Viardot Garcia reigned supreme, merely gave her operatic pieces in the concerts: ’Di piacer’, ‘Il soave bel contento’, ‘Ti prego’ with Dolby and Montem Smith, I Martiri duet with Tamberlik, Rigoletto quartet, Cosi fan tutte quintet with ‘considerable executive power and a tendency to sing sharp’.

 

It was next bruited that she had been hired as prima donna for the San Carlo, Naples, but that too didn’t happen, and it was not till 19 February 1859 that she reappeared on the stage. At Turin’s Teatro Regio, where father had got her a job for a few weeks. She was going to play Lucia di Lammermoor and L’Etoile du nord. She opened in La Sonnambula again and was reported again to have made a big hit. She may have performed the scheduled operas, but I can only find her, on 16 March, coming out as Zerlina in Don Giovanni. Anyway, thus ended Miss Balfe’s Italian career, and in April she was back in London, contracted to appear with the E T Smith opera at Drury Lane. She opened as La Sonnambula alongside Mongini and Badiali, and followed up as Lucia di Lammermoor before Don Giovanni was staged, with Victoire as Zerlina to the Anna of Titiens and the Elvira of Vaneri. She apparently played and sang ‘with infinite ease and irreproachable taste although occasionally a little more force was desirable’. ‘This was scarcely as advance on former occasions. Whilst Miss Balfe sings with great care – with charming ease of vocalisation; whilst it is perfect when heard, it is constantly unheard …’.

Eugene Charles Badiali

 

On 11 July the Italian version of Balfe’s The Bohemian Girl (La Zingara) was revived at Drury Lane, with Miss Balfe as Arline. She did well enough, but was wiped out by the Gipsy Queen of the magnificent Carolina Guarducci. It was to be the last time the British public would see her.

She was announced for some concerts (‘her first appearance in the London concert room’) but I can’t find her actually taking part in one. In 1860 she was engaged, with her father, to lead out a Willert Beale concert party on a large tour. But that didn’t happen either. Mr and Miss Balfe went off, in the Autumn to St Petersburg where, according to the press, she made a huge hit in concert. And when it came time to return to fulfil the Beale contract, they simply refused to come. Mr Beale replaced Victoire with Amalia Corbari (and doubtless won in the exchange artistically, if not publicitywise), the Balfes stayed in Russia. And Victoire married (31 March 1860). And retired.

 

The gentleman she married was Britain’s Ambassador to the Russian Court, and formerly to Washington, Sir John Fiennes Twistleton Crampton, thirty years her elder and apparently as eccentric as she. It didn’t succeed, and when Lady Crampton met the Duke de Frias, she sued for annulment of her marriage on the grounds of non-consummation. Her husband, she told the world, was impotent. He refused a medical examination from the Queen’s physician, and she was granted her annulment (20 November 1863). And, in October 1864, at the chapel of the Spanish Embassy, London she was wed to Jose Maria Bernardino Fernandez de Velasco y Jaspe, the Duke de Frias (1836-1888). This marriage lasted a bit longer, and produced three children, before Victoire died at the age of 33. 

Much ink was spilled on the ‘scandal’ of Lady Crampton. 30 years after her death, the subject was still worthy of lengthy paragraphs in the world’s press, with Crampton usually coming out as the virtuous and chivalrous party, and the claims of impotency noted as risible, his refusal of an examination which would have revealed the truth as evidence. Queen Victoria was scandalised by the affair, Queen Isabella no less, de Frias resigned his court appointments and left Spain for France. And his Duchess … made her way into the reference books of the world.