Agnes Molteno: Melbourne's prima donna

 

MOLTENO, Agnes Maud (b Launceston, Tasmania ?8 October 1867; d London 1947)

 

Agnes Molteno was one of the musical family of a bookseller turned schoolmaster, Frederick James Molteno, and his wife Laura Antoinette née Sheridan. The couple were wed in 1856 (19 March) and in the thirteen years allowed them before Laura’s death produced an almost end-to-end run of children of which the majority participated in music to a professional level.

 

Mr Molteno left Britain for Australia in the gold-rushed year of 1852. His father, John Molteno, a lawyer, had died in 1828, leaving his wife, Caroline, with plentiful children and less money than his position suggested. She can be seen in the 1841 census running a boarding school in Peckham, and with the three youngest still at home. The elder boys set off to foreign parts, to found their fortunes, and it must be said that they succeeded. John Charles (1814-1886) went to South Africa and ended up being Premier and a Sir, while Frank (1816-1869) went south to Australia, and thence to Hawaii, became a whaling Captain, married a local woman and stayed. Frederick followed Frank and sister Alicia (Mrs Arthur Hartley, b 1825; d Maclaren Street Sandhurst 23 April 1857) to Australia. He opened a bookshop and employment agency in Mundy Street, Bendigo, then, after his marriage, changed profession and became a school-teacher at the Geelong National Grammar School, then latterly at the Launceston equivalent. There, in Tasmania, his last two daughters were born on 2 September 1867 and 8 October 1868. One must have died, the other was Agnes. But Lord knows which one. They were baptized without Christian names. So, birth date 50/50. With a slight leaning to the second.

Sir J C Molteno

The first Molteno child to shine in the music world was six-year-old Frederick John (b Pakington Street 28 March 1859), who made a public debut as a violinist at the Melbourne School of Arts on 1 February 1866, accompanied by the usual kiddie prodigy noises. He was well received, and took up an engagement supporting the Lancashire Bellringers on tour. He died during that tour, at William Street, Norwood, Adelaide 2 September (sic) 1866.

 

The next child to come before the public was nine-year old Alice [Edith] (b Melbourne 5 June 1857; d Salisbury 23 February 1931) who appeared at White’s Rooms, Adelaide 1 October 1866 with Mr and Mrs George Loder, top-billed as ‘the Australian juvenile harpist’. Later, she performed with her younger sister, [Laura] Ada (b Emerald Hill 30 January 1861; d Norwich 1927), violinist. The girls would have a juvenile career, which included a brief 1873 visit to America (‘The Miniature Minstrels’ with Lizzie Coote, Humpty Dumpty at the Olympic), leading to a teenage one, before becoming music teachers, and then, respectively, Mrs Wallis (Madame Molteno-Wallis) and Mrs Arthur Isaac Durrant.

Ada

 

Life did not treat Mr and Mrs Molteno very kindly. They lost two baby daughters, and, travelling to Tasmania, to father’s new post, on the Black Swan, they suffered a shipwreck, and lost quasiment their all. A Benefit concert raised them 40 pounds. Finally, the family decided to return to England. They left by the Swiftsure in August 1869. Soon after their arrival, Mrs Molteno also died (4 Belinda House, Cold Harbour Lane, Brixton 11 December 1869). The rest of the family soldiered on.

 

Little Agnes did not, apparently, have the juvenile career that her sisters did. But she was, on the other hand, to have the longest, and most successful, life in music of any family member.

 She first surfaces to my view in 1883, singing with the Peterborough Choral Society (‘Golden Love’, ‘Give me back my heart’, ‘La Serenata’) before, in 1884 she and her sisters all joined Lila Clay’s ladies troupe. Ada played violin, Alice harp and Agnes the harmonium. Apparently, jobs were hard to find, for, in March 1887, Agnes advertised ‘niece to the late Sir Charles Molteno, formerly Premier of the Cape Government. Talented musician with good voice. Situation wanted as companion to a lady’. But she didn’t have to go companioning. After a few dates at the Royal Victoria Ballad Concerts, in May 1887, she was hired for the Oxford Music Hall and there, as ‘Agnes Branson’, she sang nightly until November. That engagement led to another, as a take-over for Violet Cameron in Cellier’s The Sultan of Mocha, for the tag end of its London run.

And then, in December 1888 came the decisive step: she was hired as a principal soprano with Arthur Rousbey’s ambitious touring English Opera Company.

 

She made her first appearance as Arline in The Bohemian Girl, played Countess Almaviva to the Susanna of the company’s other leading lady, Emily Vadini (‘sings better than she acts’) and went on to add Maritana, Marguerite, Zephyrina in Belphegor, Donna Elvira in The Rose of Castille, Leonora in Il Trovatore, Donna Anna in Don Giovanni, Lucia di Lammermoor, Eily in Lily of Killarney, Gilda in Rigoletto (‘a voice of singular purity and sweetness…’) et al to her escutcheon.

In 1892, she left the company and went on tour with a production of The Sultan of Mocha, before joining up with J W Turner’s Opera Company, with whom she played Lucia, Marguerite, Amina and Violetta, and a four-week season at London’s Standard Theatre.

 

She would rejoin Rousbey for 1894-5, but now in the company of her new husband (10 March 1893), the troupe’s second baritone, Frank [George] Land (1865-1914). On 5 October 1895 she gave birth to a daughter, Eileen Molteno Land, and took up performing again, as Fairy Coraline in the Dublin pantomime.

 

In 1896 (15 April) she appeared as Arline in a brief production of The Bohemian Girl at Drury Lane, before she and Frank turned again to the road, first with Rousbey tenor, W H Hillier, and then back in the Rousbey ranks, and briefly with the Moody-Manners company (Bertha in La Poupée de Nuremberg), before travelling to South Africa with Rousbey, sharing the lead roles (Marie, Santuzza, Lucia, Maritana) with Mrs Rousbey while Frank shared the baritone ones (Alfio, Silvio, Plunkett, Ashton) with Rousbey himself.

 

The death of Rousbey on the homeward journey put an end to the company and the couple’s long-term engagement with it, and they turned to a series of minor jobs, such as the John Ridding opera company, Henry Swinerd’s The Squatter’s Daughter, Harry S Parker’s The Fisher Girl, George Nielson’s very unpretending opera company, as well as singing operatic and ballad music in the music-halls.

 

In 1903, in a last burst of operatic glory, Agnes was called in to play The Bohemian Girl with the Carl Rosa company, at the Queen’s Theatre, Manchester, and then it was the music-halls all the way. And by no means as prima donna. I see her billed in small print under the banner line of the whistler Frank Lawton at Ardwick Green. Elsewhere she is billed underneath performing cats and dogs. Her act consisted of more, however, than singing. It was ‘staged’: ‘The Holy City’ and ‘Ave Maria’, for example, were sung on an electrically-lit set of a church. In 1908-1910, she took out a scena entitled An Old Time Story or A Dolly and a coach, in 1912 she travelled Her Fairy Princess. 

 

In 1912, her daughter Eileen Land (‘a charming comedienne with a sweet voice’) travelled with her. Later, as Eileen Molteno, she would play leading roles in The Arcadians and The Pearl Girl, for Robert Courtneidge, on tour. She apparently retired to become Mrs Frank Ernest Simpkins, and died, at the age of 88, in 1983.

 

I last see Agnes performing, on the radio, in 1924.

 

I don’t know what became of Frank latterly. The couple can be seen playing together in The Fisher Girl but, then, while Agnes turned to the halls and ‘The Holy City’, Frank continued in opera, with the Moody-Manners and Hilton St Just until 1905, after which I lose him, to murmurs of illness. I see references to ‘Frank Land, the Irish baritone’ (apparently, he spent his childhood there) and some of the (unusually diligent) family historians have him buried in 1922 in Limerick. But The Era says otherwise. The issue of 18 November 1914 dutifully records his death ‘aged 50’. Yes, in Limerick. And, just to set the record straight, he was born in Brockhurst, in the Isle of Wight.

I wonder if he is the Frank Land ‘strolling player’ born Tipperary, aged 45 listed in the Irish census for 1911. With a wife Janitza … 42 …