What's going on here?
It's for ME?!!!!!!
I'm not going for ANOTHER operation .. I WON'T .. I SHA'N'T ...
Oh it's that nice young Tyler chap from Invercargill. I'm going back to Tisbury! Wendy, can I take my nice new warm coat ...? And my LED ankle-warmers ...?
Bye Wendy! Bye Kurt!
I don't make the pages of the TLS much these days. I used to. First as an author, then (with my brother) as the translator of the works of Petrus Borel. So when my friend Greg Ralph le premier (there are two) messaged today to say 'you are in the TLS', I thought ... a review of my latest?
No. Halléluia! It is quoting me as an authority! How nice to be taken seriously in this mostly frivolous and factious world!
And it's a piece about Baudelaire, no less. I was translating him just this month and our version his poem 'The Cat' even got us the accolade of 'Poem of the Week' in The Guardian years ago! Here it is:
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
Last April, a surprising photograph appeared on the Wikipedia page devoted to Jeanne Duval, the long-term mistress of Charles Baudelaire and the “Black Venus” who inspired some of the most powerful poems of Les Fleurs du mal (1857; The Flowers of Evil). Baudelaire’s feelings about Duval were complex, ranging from love, affection and pity to hatred; he wrote in 1845 that she was his only consolation, in 1852 that she had become an obstacle to his happiness and writing, and in 1856 that he craved her company. It is hard to imagine what his poetry would have been without her. If this striking photograph is of Duval, and I think it is, its discovery matters, because we know so little about this key figure in the Parisian artistic world of the time, who has nevertheless faded from the record, written out by snobbery, racism and general bad luck.
Until now, there have been no confirmed photographs of Duval, though it has sometimes been speculated, notably by the artist Maud Sulter, that she is the subject of a Nadar photograph, apparently from the 1850s, entitled “Young Model” (Duval would have been around forty at the time, but the title may have been playful). We do have some clues as to what she looked like. The photographer Nadar (a.k.a. Gaspard-Félix Tournachon) recounted that as a very young man he saw her speak one line, in a minor role on stage, and was immediately smitten by her electrifying beauty and her untouchable, aloof air: he claimed to have taken her to bed immediately afterwards. Baudelaire sketched her with large eyes, lips and bust, dark hair and a narrow waist. A shadowy image of her emerges from the corner of the canvas of Gustave Courbet’s “The Painter’s Studio” (1855), just above Baudelaire’s head, where the artist has scratched her out, for unknown reasons, but apparently at the poet’s request. (Perhaps they had argued, or one of them disliked the portrait.) In 1862, she was the apparent subject of a painting by Édouard Manet, usually entitled “Baudelaire’s Mistress”. This title was confirmed by Manet’s wife, Suzanne, after his death, during a studio inventory, but some scholars have questioned the identity of the sitter. The rigid pose and facial expression are often explained by Duval’s partial paralysis, after a stroke, likely syphilis-induced, in 1859. I will return to this strange painting, enigmatic like so much of Manet’s work.
In 2024, Ali Kilic and Catherine Choupin, two French researchers working independently of one another, published archival evidence indicating that Duval was born in Haiti in 1818, travelled to France in 1821 and died in horrendous conditions in a Saint-Denis poorhouse in 1868. We know that people saw her as a woman of colour, and that she was often criticized in her own time and afterwards on racist grounds, as Therese Dolan and Robin Mitchell have convincingly shown, but we know too that she may only have had one Black grandparent. We know that she also went by the surnames “Prosper” and “Lemer”, and that she worked for a time as an actress, probably using the stage name “Berthe”. We know that she could read and write, but was not always an admirer of Baudelaire’s poetry, or particularly interested in talking about politics and literature. We also know that Baudelaire’s mother disliked her and burnt all of her letters. But we have little sense of who she really was, or what she thought and felt.
And suddenly here it was, on the Wikipedia page devoted to her, a photograph allegedly of Duval, as if out of nowhere. Some light digging revealed that the photograph had first been posted online in early 2021, on a subscription-only blog (A Writer’s Notebook) by a Paris-based American writer, Summer Brennan. Brennan suggested that the photograph was of Duval, citing a couple of descriptions by those who had met her and comparing the image to Baudelaire’s drawings. She had found the photograph on a small carte de visite in the archives of the Bibliothèque nationale. The card – about the size of a business card of the kind produced on an industrial scale in the early 1860s – has the name “Jeanne” handwritten on its front and back. The back shows the renowned red signature imprint associated with the photographic studio of Nadar, and a date: August 18, 1862.
As of today, the photograph does not appear in the extensive online archive of digitized Nadar photographs held by the Bibliothèque nationale. Nor does it feature in the Musée d’Orsay’s collection of Nadar prints. Until its appearance on Wikipedia, in fact, the image seems only to have existed in the alphabetically organized boxes of cartes de visite stored in the Bibliothèque nationale’s archives in Paris, and on Brennan’s Substack. It seems incredible that nobody had noticed it before.
As a Baudelaire scholar, I was initially bothered by a few details. While there is no evidence that Duval ever had much money, in 1862 – the date given on the back of this photograph – she was definitely broke. We know that on leaving hospital in March 1861, Duval had been obliged to sell her furniture to pay debts, and that in early 1862, she had asked the poet’s mother for money and tried to sell some of his books and drawings to his friend and publisher Auguste Poulet-Malassis. It is extremely unlikely that she could have afforded the elegant clothes that the woman in this portrait wears. Duval was described by Baudelaire, long before 1862, as an old and sickly woman, and scholars have taken this description literally, despite the fact that she would only have been in her forties at the time. But the woman in the photograph looks neither aged nor frail. Finally, the woman in the photograph is wearing a ring on her wedding finger. She and Baudelaire were never officially married, and by 1862 it is generally agreed that they had separated definitively, after nineteen years together.
These quibbles seemed to hinge obscurely on the 1862 dating of the portrait, so I set out to discover whether the card portrait had been recycled from an earlier print, perhaps from before Duval’s stroke of 1859, which left her weakened by paralysis on her right side. I trawled the online archive of Nadar photographs to see if I could find clues that would help me confirm the date of the photograph. The best lead I found was the background prop in the carte de visite: a round, polished brass table top with a black spiral stem. The same table features in at least three other card portraits made by Nadar in 1862, which makes the 1862 date plausible. Further research revealed something unexpected: in total, I found twenty-three other (undated) photographs featuring the table, all differing in three key respects from the photograph of “Jeanne”.
In each of these portraits, the sitter is photographed leaning one elbow on the table. “Jeanne” is not pictured in this way. Also, in none of these portraits is the sitter photographed full-length, as “Jeanne” is. Finally, no other sitter wears a hat, the elegant table appearing to indicate an indoor setting. What could explain these anomalies?
Brennan had noticed that the bonnet and bow worn by the photographed sitter are fashionably similar to those that feature prominently on the women dressed in yellow in Manet’s famous group painting of 1862, “Music in the Tuileries Gardens” (© The National Gallery, London). Intrigued by this similarity, and by the position of the woman on the left just below the painted profile of Baudelaire, Brennan wondered initially if Manet had intended “some stealthy (albeit whitewashed) nod to Jeanne herself”, though she decided that coincidence was the more likely explanation.
As it happens, her astute observation indirectly confirms the photograph’s date. After all, fashion is ephemeral by definition, as Baudelaire himself observed in his essay “The Painter of Modern Life”. In fact, referencing Brennan’s post, Justine De Young’s recent book The Art of Parisian Chic: Modern women and modern artists in impressionist Paris (2025) reproduces two fashion plates from summer 1862 to highlight precisely how “on trend” Nadar’s Jeanne is, with details such as the black ostrich feathers pinned to the crown of the straw hat, and a lapel at the back “to protect the neck from the sun”.
But Jeanne’s appearance tells us even more than the likely date of the photograph. Her posture and outline closely match those of the woman on the left in the foreground of Manet’s painting. The photographed sitter, like the painted woman on the right, is also holding a fan. We know that Manet often worked with photographs and cartes de visite in the production of his paintings. Could the photographic portrait of Jeanne have been intended to help him place her at the heart of his painting of Second Empire Paris? Scholars have long seen this painting as a kind of homage to Baudelairean aesthetics, with which Duval was closely associated. The possibility that she was modelling for Manet’s “Music in the Tuileries”, presumably for much-needed money, would explain her fine clothing – he could have lent the outfit to her. It would also explain why the photographed sitter is, unusually, seated in front of the table, pictured in full length and dressed incongruously in a bonnet.
Further suggestive of a link to Duval in Manet’s painting is the fact that the woman on the right, in the foreground, displays a fan that looks identical to the one held prominently by Duval in Manet’s “Baudelaire’s Mistress”, which, like “Music in the Tuileries”, was painted in 1862 (one of the titles it goes by is “Lady with a Fan”). It is striking, too, that the hands of the woman on the left are painted brown, ostensibly to suggest gloves, but also connoting dark skin, while the woman on the right wears a black veil. In Madame de Duras’s celebrated novella Ourika (1823), a piece of black crepe is used symbolically to represent dark skin when it is worn by the dancing partner of the female, African-born protagonist. To the left of the women, a black furry animal, sometimes read as a cat, sits on a chair. Baudelaire compares Duval to a cat in his poems: her gaze, like a cat’s, “cuts and splits like a dart”, and her body, like a cat’s, is “elastic” and “electric” (“Le Chat”; my translations throughout).
There is more. While viewing the photograph of the seated Jeanne in the Bibliothèque nationale, I came across a second carte de visite attributed to “Jeanne”. In fact, there were several of women called Jeanne in the box, but this one was dated August 18, 1862, the same as the first card portrait. It, too, was a Nadar photograph, and an examination of the legal deposit register showed that it was registered as “idem” (the same), just beneath the entry for the first carte. This second Jeanne, standing rather than seated, was wearing different clothes, looked more fair-skinned and appeared to have straight rather than tightly curled hair. She did not, at first glance, look like the same person. However, this woman shared the ballerina-like shoulders of the seated Jeanne: dropped shoulders are also a feature of some of Baudelaire’s sketches that are presumed to be of Duval. (Both Brennan and De Young mention the sitter’s curved shoulders.) In addition, the records held by the French library show that no other Nadar card portrait was made of a “Jeanne” in 1862, so why would a second one have been made on the same day unless it was of the same woman?
I ordered a high-resolution copy of the tiny card portrait and, after a few weeks of nervous waiting, finally saw what I was hoping to see: a close-up of the face shows that the standing Jeanne shares the same hairline as the seated Jeanne. She has the same blemish in the centre of her forehead and she wears a ring on the same finger. It looks, too, from the slightly long left arm and the dress fabric pooling on the floor, as if this allegedly very tall woman may be propped on a stool from behind to mitigate the effects of her partial paralysis. This would explain the tensed neck as well as the stiff posture, which is highly uncharacteristic of Nadar’s photography.
There is another thing that I was hoping to see, apart from a resemblance to the seated Jeanne. I had noticed, on close inspection of the miniature, card version of the photograph, that the standing Jeanne was wearing large earrings and had a piece of jewellery around her collarbone. The high-resolution reproduction revealed that this piece of jewellery was, as expected, a crucifix. The woman in “Baudelaire’s Mistress” also wears a crucifix high around her neck, as well as large earrings. Her expressionless face, her slightly downturned mouth, the shadow below her mouth and the continuation of her hairline below the top of her ears match the features of the standing Jeanne. In both the painting and the photograph, the subject stares directly at the viewer.
The physical resemblance between the photograph and the subject of Manet’s painting is particularly striking in the watercolour study for “Baudelaire’s Mistress”, but the emotional, expressive likeness is stronger in the oil painting . The art critics Griselda Pollock and Therese Dolan have previously suggested that Manet worked from a photograph, and even a carte de visite, in his portrait of Baudelaire’s mistress. The photograph of the standing Jeanne from 1862 is almost certainly that card.
It is impossible to be sure that the two 1862 Nadar photographs of “Jeanne” are indeed of Duval, but I believe that – thanks in particular to Manet – there is enough circumstantial evidence to validate the identification. The two photographs are, in turn, important for the new readings they open up of Manet’s art. The possibility of an oblique connection between “Music in the Tuileries” and “Baudelaire’s Mistress” opens the way to a new interpretation of the group painting. Could the bearded man a little to the left of Baudelaire, wearing what resembles (thanks to the Phrygian bend applied by a strategically placed top hat) a red revolutionary cap, be Victor Hugo, the same man discreetly alluded to in “Baudelaire’s Mistress”, according to Dolan, who finds a reference to Hugo in the ghostly lace motif at the fingertips of the phantom-like sitter?
Hugo was in exile on Guernsey at the time, in protest at the government of Napoleon III. By referencing both Duval and the author of the recently published Les Misérables in “Music in the Tuileries”, the Republican Manet may have wished to inscribe discreet allusions to absent figures, or ghosts, at the heart of his apparently celebratory depiction. Indeed, some Manet scholars, such as Nancy Locke, have discerned the hazy figure of a woman carrying a baby just to the left of the man in the top hat standing in the centre foreground of “Music in the Tuileries”. Her ghostly presence, along with the possible allusions to Duval and Hugo, could gesture towards those humans whom the government preferred to push into the margins, most notably in its sparkling transformation of the city of Paris around this time.
The photographs of Duval are not just important for what they tell us about Manet, and they are not just valuable, either, for the story they may tell about her connections with three famous French men of the nineteenth century (who happened to be close friends). They are also highly significant because they tell us something of Duval’s side of the story. This is important, because her letters have not survived, and the stories that have been told about her, both in her own time and afterwards, have often condemned her as Baudelaire’s immoral and unfaithful tormentor. These two newly discovered photographs tell us, first of all, that Duval wore a wedding ring, despite never having been officially married to Baudelaire (or anyone else as far as we know). Did she consider Baudelaire to be her husband, even after their separation? She also wore a crucifix around her neck, something that Manet’s portrait had already indicated. One of Baudelaire’s poems inspired by Duval, “Jewels”, describes her as naked but for her “sonorous jewels”: “Eyes fixed on me, like a tamed tigress, / With a vague and dreamy air, she tried out poses”. It is hard to imagine a crucifix in this context. In fact, neither the wedding ring nor the crucifix sits comfortably with the legend passed down to us of Duval as a diabolical seductress (even if the riding crop she holds in her left hand, in the standing portrait, gives pause for thought).
The photographs testify, too, to Duval’s strong-mindedness and independence: how psychologically challenging it must have been for her, as an impoverished, partially paralysed woman, to present herself at the fashionable studio of a former lover, and what a physical ordeal her changes of costume must have been. Recent archival findings appear to show that she spent her last years journeying daily across Paris, presumably on crutches, to work as a hospital cleaner, before dying in the poorhouse in 1868. While the Nadar card portraits, taken just a few years previously, do not evidence quite this level of fortitude, they do suggest that in 1862 Duval was more self-reliant and resourceful than scholars have generally understood, and certainly not the “old, infirm woman” described by Baudelaire in a letter of 1861.
Duval is associated, in Baudelaire’s poetry, with the triumphant transcendence of physical constraints through the senses and the imagination: “Are you not the oasis where I dream, and the gourd / From which I slowly drink the wine of memory?” (“The Head of Hair”). If these newly discovered photographs tell us anything about Duval, what they say has very little to do with transcendence, and everything to do with resilience. What these photographs confirm above all is Duval’s strength of character, and that is surely what Manet was trying to capture in his portrait of her.
Maria C. Scott is Associate Professor of French Literature and Thought at the University of Exeter.
Reply there came from Cambridge
Not the least interesting section of Maria Scott’s closely argued piece on Baudelaire’s “Black Venus”, Jeanne Duval (Commentary, January 23), concerns her laying to rest of her initial “quibbles” concerning the recent Wikipedia assumption that Duval is the “Jeanne” who features in a carte de visite photograph by Nadar from 1862. My own “quibble” is fundamental: the “Jeanne” in both this photograph and a second one discovered by Professor Scott herself, and taken by Nadar on the same day, is not Duval at all. The clue is contained in the handwritten inscription (by person unknown) that appears on the second photograph: “Jeanne (Mlle)”, a conventional form of stage name adopted by Parisian actresses at the time. Virtually nothing is known about Mlle Jeanne, but she certainly appeared at the Bouffes-Parisiens as the second page in the original version of Jacques Offenbach’s Geneviève de Brabant (1859) and, it now seems, in other roles.
Scott rightly acknowledges that the strikingly different outfits in the two photographs are at odds with Duval’s impoverished state in 1862. They are, however, perfectly appropriate to the actress Mlle Jeanne. They are theatrical costumes and, aided by related attention to make-up and coiffure, may be seen to advertise the actress’s versatility. Further research might lead to identification of the roles. That two such different photographs should have been taken by Nadar on the same day need therefore no longer arouse surprise.
A blog of June 2019 by “Kurt of Gerolstein” (the music theatre historian Kurt Gänzl) mentions Mlle Jeanne as one of the actresses of the Bouffes whose images formed part of a collection he had come across in a photographer’s catalogue (kurtofgerolstein.blogspot. com/2019/06/ladies-of-bouffes-parisiens-1855-1860.html). Gänzl reproduces an undated photograph of her in a visually different role, not by Nadar this time, but by the establishment firm of Mayer et Pierson. It may also be viewed currently on French eBay. It bears on the reverse side the annotation “Jeanne (Bouffes)”.
Michael Tilby, Selwyn College, Cambridge
Purely on skin-colour, I don't think either of the Mlle JEANNEs pictured on my blog could be described as 'the black Vénus'. As the correspondents note, there were a number of Mlle Jeannes around at the time. The photos are taken from the archive of photo discovery.
https://kurtofgerolstein.blogspot.com/2019/06/ladies-of-bouffes-parisiens-1855-1860.html
One of the most appreciated American Lieder singers on the international platform of her era, New Orleans's Lena Little is little remembered today ...
LITTLE, [Martha] 'Lena' (b New Orleans, 19 September 1853; d 2321 Esplanade Avenue, New Orleans, 5 July 1920)
American mezzo-contralto who specialised in German music.
Lena Little was born in New Orleans of a Canadian father, builder Robert Little, and a Pennsylvanian mother. I don’t know if there was German blood a generation back in her family, but she became effectively a ‘honorary German’ in, at least, her musical career.
I first spot Lena singing in her home-town in 1875 (15 February) singing at the Temple Sinai ('impressive and delightful voice'), with the Anthon Memorial Church Choir, at the Sylvester Larned Institute ('O Rest in the Lord'), in 1876-7 with the New Orleans Philharmonic Society, sang the role of Zerish in Esther the Beautiful Queen (2 May 1876), in various church concerts ('O Salutaris', Massé's 'Adoration'), and in 1878 (17 May), in a Festival of local performers (‘O crudel perche’, Mattei’s ‘Entends-tu’).
In 1880, she moved to New York, where she became the contralto at All Souls Church, 14th Street and 6th avenue, and made her first local appearances as a concert vocalist, amongst which at Steinway Hall, under the baton of Dr Leopold Damrosch. On 4 March 1882, she made one such appearance singing Handel’s ‘Furibondo spiro il vento’ (Partenope) and Schumann songs. The latter were better liked than the former, she was tagged a ‘pleasant light mezzo’ rather than a contralto, and her vibrato was noted, but she was nevertheless accepted as a ‘promising debutante’ and the critic honed in on what would be – rather than a voice of particular quality -- her career-long speciality as a vocalist: ‘[She is] not only the possessor of a sweet voice but has the musical gift which enables her to interpret the works of a great master in acceptable style’. Miss Little, from the beginning, was recognised as singer for the composer, rather than one wishing only exhibit her voice.
She sang in a number of other Damrosch concerts, including the New York Oratorio Society’s presentation of the conductor’s Sulamith (Steinway Hall, 21 May 1882), and on various other local programmes -- including a society Lady Jane (Patience) -- with songs by Greig, Rubinstein etc, until June 1883, when she sailed for Europe ‘with Mr G Schirmer and his family to study in Europe with Mme Garcia and Stockhausen’. She was reported to be in Frankfurt with Stockhausen, but the ‘study’ lasted less than a year before she set foot in London.
My first sightings of Miss Little in the London concerts confirm the Stockhausen-German connection. She turns up at St James's Hall singing Schumann's The King's Son, on 30 April singing with Lieder star Thekla Friedländer at Frln Jeffe's concert and at Prince’s Hall, 27 May 1884, performing, in tandem with her teacher’s prize pupil, Sophie Löwe, the complete (16 songs) Schumann Dichterliebe. The occasion was noticed as 'rather above average' and Lena as being 'of more than ordinary promise', and attracted much notice. During the next year, I see her also on the London platform with American-Paris colleague, Gertrude Griswold, at the Crystal Palace, at the New Club with an Austrian Band, and in further concerts with Miss Löwe (Prince’s Hall, Crystal Palace, Emil Mahr) and Dannreuther. She and Miss Griswold also took part, with expatriate amateurs, in a ‘a Grand American Concert’ (23 June 1885) in which their singing of the Lakmé duet, and Lena’s ‘When the heart is young’ saved the night.
Manchester 1885
In April 1885, Lena netted the job which would be the backbone of her British career, and establish her reputation by the opportunities it provided. In 1880, violinist-impresario Hermann Franke had launched the Richter concerts, conducted by Hans Richter from Vienna, and which displayed mostly German music with great popularity. Lena Little was hired to sing in the five provincial concerts (‘Che faro’, Clemenza di Tito) preceding the London season, and thereafter she featured in the concerts, in both London and the provinces, for four seasons, performing the Alto Rhapsody, the Choral Symphony, Beethoven’s Mass in D, and in the Rhinemaidens’ Music. A series of Liszt songs (‘Kennst du die Land’ ‘Three Gipsies’, ‘Loreley’), and pieces by Beethoven, Schubert, Jensen, Massenet or Widor, were also amongst the vocal pieces featured, in her ‘rich deep contralto voice’.
She had evidently come on since early days, since the press now referred to her ‘earnestness and intelligence ... her voice seems to increase in richness of tone and in expressiveness every year, and her occupying a leading position amongst our concert singers is merely a matter of time’ but still of ‘the refinement and depth of feeling for which that artist is famous’.
Franke formed a quartet – of a typically American-German nature -- which featured at the Richter concerts and his other concerts, in which Lena was teamed with Miss [Elizabeth] Hamlin, William J Winch and Emil Fischer.
The American connection found Lena Little plenty of work. She appeared with Miss Griswold, and with her old church-choir partner Orlando Harley, for S G Pratt, but most importantly she became an ally of another German-American artist, Georg Henschel, with ambitions both as a composer and an impresario. When Henschel mounted his London Symphony Concerts, Miss Little was there to sing Berlioz’s ‘La Captive’, an early Beethoven cantata and other such pieces. She also shared concerts in town and in country with Mr and Mrs Henschel, joining them in periodic performances of Henschel’s Serbisches Liederspiel.
She also performed several times with the young Bauer family (14 May), shared Lieder concerts with Liza Lehmann (26 April), sang for Oscar Beringer, Marie Wurm and Wilhelm Ganz, turned out for the Wagner Society, and in 1887 was engaged for the Norwich Festival (Giuditta in Mancinelli’s Isaiah, The Golden Legend).
1887 saw her also engaged at the St James’s Hall Popular Concerts (Wagner’s ‘Träume’, Massenet’s ‘Qu’importe l’hiver’) -- and the old criticism of excess vibrato resurfaced – which would become a regular employment, once she teamed with the Henschels and William Shakespeare to present, first, repeated performances of Brahms’ Gipsy Songs, and then the Liebeslieder Walzer and other popular German works.
When another German-American, Max Heinrich, turned up in London, Lena appeared frequently alongside him, and at his concerts, joining him in duets by Dvorak, Schumann, Cornelius et al.
Although she was heard largely in various combinations of German song, Miss Little did appear elsewhere. She repeated the Norwich Isaias at the Albert Hall (20 February 1889), sang Joachim’s Demetrius scena at the Crystal Palace with the composer, gave Parry’s Judith with the Bach choir, and several works of Goring Thomas, notably a new aria, from his Nadeshda, on a bill with Marcella Sembrich at St James’s Hall, as well as two duets with Heinrich at one of his concerts. In November 1889 she appeared with Heinrich and the Henschels in a run of Saturday and Monday pops with the inevitable Gipsy Songs, and four days later she boarded a ship for America.
Back in America, she sang with Walter Damrosch at the Metropolitan and visited New Orleans for the successful Saengerfest in February 1889, but by June she was back in England, for another round of Richter concerts (Alto Rhapsody, Rhinemaidens, Siegfried), an appearance with Heinrich at the Philharmonic Society (‘La Captive’), and a performance of Charles Braun’s Sigurd at Liverpool. In December she appeared in The Messiah at Bradford, at the concerts of Richard Gompertz and once more at the Pops, joining with the Henschels in the ‘Gipsy Songs’ and Liebeslieder Walzer. And this time when she left for America, it was for good.
When Miss Little gave her first concert, at New York’s Chickering Hall 5 March 1891, the press commented that, although Louisiana born and bred, her ‘artistic life has been spent in England’. Lena’s programme showed what she was all about: Schumann (‘Mit Myrthen und Rosen’), Schubert (‘Auf dem Wasser’), Brahms (‘Ruhe Süssliebchen’, ‘Vergebliche Standchen’), Secchi (‘Love me or not’), Gounod (‘Ruth’s Song’)., Liszt (‘Lucia’), trad ‘Charmante Marguerite’, Wagner (‘Träume’), D’Albert (‘Das Mädchen und der Schmetterling’), Rubinstein (‘Es blinkt der Thau’), Grieg (‘Zwei augen braun’), Hiller (‘Im Maien’). The press reported that the Secchi had gone down best, because it was in English and could be understood.
Lena sang the Verdi Requiem at Pittsburgh, took a little tour in support of Charles Santley, repeated her The Repentance of Nineveh and Israel in Egypt, along with Bruch’s Arminius at the Worcester, Mass, Festival, and gave a pair of concerts at New York’s Music Hall. She gave, this time, Tschaikowsky, Brahms, Wagner, Bach, Ries, Schumann, Bruch, Jensen and Secchi (not in English) and, this time, got a critic who understood what she was offering: ‘this artist prefers to interpret music to her audience instead of singing for the purpose of displaying her voice, and this being a rich contralto, excellently trained and under perfect control … Never sentimental… never verging on operatic or theatrical … intense and eloquent whenever this is required …’
From her home in Boston, she went out to the Chicago Exposition, the Cleveland Saengerfest, but, although she continued to appear in concert, she devoted herself more to teaching, and to private performances for local high-and-wealthy society. My last sightings of her as a public vocalist are in Brooklyn November 1907
My last sighting of her, altogether, in in 1920. She is listed at 1592 Peters Avenue, New Orleans in the local social register, and also in the census of the year. For some reason she left her high society nest in Boston and returned to her roots, in about 1908.
Plagued by ill health, she committed suicide by gas in 1920. She left a tidy sum, and a bequest of paintings to the local art gallery.
Almost seventy years ago I first ventured on to a racetrack and saw my first harness race. It was at Richmond, Nelson, and I was there because the course at Nelson doubles as the A&P grounds, and my parents thought they were sending me to enjoy healthy A&P-ish entertainment while our household goods were being unloaded from the pantechnikon into our new home ...
Their error launched in me a passion which lasts to this day. And has cost me probably $1m. Because thirty years ago, on my return to New Zealand, I took the fatal step of buying a racehorse of my own. Worse, DAVEY CROCKETT won five races ... so I bought another, then another ... then I bred my first own foal ...
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| That fatal first win |
Well, I see that -- all in all -- I've now owned or part-owned the winners of 59 races in New Zealand, Australia and France and I'm still going. EMILY (8 wins) is going back into training in a week or three ...
But I shall be watching her from my invalid's chair, on the television. A day at the races, alas, is now too much for me. This week, I sponsored the main trot at the Rangiora club's winter meeting. Which meeting just happened to fall on Wendy's birthday. The club invited us to lunch at the track ... so for the first time in a few years I donned decent clothes and headed down the road ...
I had presumed on my forces. Lovely lunch, light beer, but with 'our' race still an hour away I could feel myself weakening. Well, I invariably have at least an hour's post-prandial snooze ... There was nothing for it but to head for the President's Bar (which 20 years ago was run by me!) and its stock of whisky. Well, thanks to Mel Higgins, sommelier par excellence, I made it ...
It is just as well that I did, for I realise now that it was in all likelihood my last raceday adventure. There's just so much an old bloke can manage. Even with the help of a great dollop of whisky!
And it was a fine race to go out on. I was a bit sad when the fields came out to see that the best horses in the South Island had chosen to race elsewhere -- FIERY BANDITO and HIDDEN TALENT down south, MR LOVE at Addington -- for equivalent stakemoney. And I was a bit sad that the favourite for our race declined to leave the start line. But I was thrilled with the result!
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DELCY, Miss [Catarina] [LACY, Catherine Josefa] (b Liverpool c 1819; d 11 Leighton Grove, Pancras, London 15 October 1889)
The history of the theatre and of music is filled with stories of ‘stage mothers’. The young lady known as ‘Miss Delcy’ seems to have been the victim of an overweeningly ambitious stage father.
The father in question was the gentleman known, indeed quite well-known, in the musical and theatrical worlds as Michael Rophino Lacy. Whether that were his real name, and whether any of the details concerning him and his family which have reached the reference books of the nation – and all, doubtless, descended from one hearsay source -- are true, I have no idea. But, for what they are worth, here they are. He is supposed to have been born in Bilbao, the son of an Irish merchant (no name ever given), and the date most often quoted is 19 June 1795. Or, occasionally, 1793. But, by 1817 – and probably well before -- he was living in Liverpool, with his wife Sarah née Norton, an actress at the local theatre (m Dublin 21 November 1817).
He tried his hand in several branches of showbusiness: as a child violinist (‘pupil of the celebrated Kreutzer’), and later as an actor, a playwright, a songwriter, a ‘teacher of violin, piano and Spanish guitar’, ‘leader of the Liverpool concerts’ and for several seasons of the King’s Theatre ballet, and a musical arranger, but it was as a librettist or, more precisely, a theatrical ‘adaptor’ and de- and re-constructor – a pinner-together of well-considered trifles -- that he would ultimately find his success.
His first venture into the field seems to have been on no less a stage than Drury Lane, with a sort of a remake of Rossini’s Il Turco in Italia as Turkish Lovers (1 May 1827) in which Braham, Fanny Ayton, Horn, Mrs Geesin – and Harley and Miss Kelly in two invented comic characters – took part. ‘The drama was as heavy and inane as any it has ever been our fortune to sit out’ bewailed The Times. Lacy persisted, however, with versions of several of Scribe’s plays, including the little La Vieille, for which he fabricated a Rossinian score, arranged and composed by himself, and which, as Love in Wrinkles, proved a happier vehicle for Braham. Over the next few years, he flung himself into compiling a series of semi-pasticcio operatic spectaculars, scoring notable success with The Maid of Judah, a compound of Scott’s Ivanhoe, its French stage adaptation and music from a selection of often lesser-known Rossini works (Semiramide, Le Comte Ory, Torvaldo e Dorliska, Maometto, Armide et al) and a Cinderella, or the Fairy and the Little Glass Slipper which glued together a version of the preferred English pantomime version of Perrault’s tale (thus the fairy and the glass slipper) with another Rossini pastiche, centred around the principal pieces of his Cenerentola. If this latter drew the horrified thunders of some more knowledgeable music critics, it proved extremely successful with the public, and was long and widely played on English stages, in preference to the original opera.
He also committed versions of Robert le diable, Der Freischütz, Le Serment and Fra Diavolo, and put together a scriptural stage spectacle around a mixture of Rossini and Handel entitled The Israelites in Egypt, or The Passage of the Red Sea ‘an oratorio consisting of sacred music, scenery and presentation’ (22 February 1833) which caused a certain stir. He reappeared in the area as late as 1849, by which time his style of piece was less acceptable, with an unsuccessful Auber pasticcio entitled The Blind Sister.
Another of his later projects which failed to come off was the promotion of his daughter, Catherine, as the prima donna of the era.
Quite how good, or not, Catherine Lacy (‘Miss Delcy’) was as a vocalist we shall probably never know, as the figure of her father – publicising, proselytising and posturing -- seems to get in the way at every turn of her effortful half-dozen years as an operatic vocalist. The press, which through that time reviewed her performances with violently opposing and extreme appreciation or ridicule, appears to have taken sides almost from the outset, or maybe even before. There seems little doubt that Lacy heavily overdid the puffing of his prefabricated prima donna, and, while some papers were willing to go along with his designs, others reacted vigorously against them.
‘Miss Delcy’ was brought out at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, on 12 November 1839, in her father’s most famous opus, the English Cinderella, in the company of Frazer, Leffler, Morley, Hammond, Misses Betts and Collett and Mrs Alban Croft. ‘She scarcely seemed more than seventeen…’ reported The Times. She almost certainly was. But I can’t be exact. In the 1851 census (the first in which I find them), Lacy says he is 47, his wife Sarah is 50, and his daughters, Catherine and Sarah (both ‘born Liverpool’), are 26 and 25. Lacy was, of course, something like a decade older than that. The girls probably were too. I suspect Miss Delcy may have been twenty-ish on her official first night.
For some noticed that it wasn’t her first night at all. ‘She has been for some years past known in the northern provinces and was, so we understand, a favourite at York and Hull’ reported The Analyst in explanation of her poised performance, going on to comment ‘Her voice is strong, piercing and extensive in the upper part of the scale … [she] will therefore be a useful, although, we apprehend, not a highly attractive singer’.
And, six months earlier, The Age had copied a paragraph from the Doncaster Gazette,which claimed she had sung in Yorkshire, two years past, but had not yet been seen in London because terms and standards had not been acceptable.
And they were perfectly correct. I have before me a set of reviews from December 1836 and January and February 1837, of the Hull Theatre Royal, where Miss Delcy ‘pupil of Mr Rophino Lacy’ (why? asked the good Hull critic, not simply ‘Miss Lacy’?) is appearing to a volley of praise, supported by the members of the stock company, among whom Creswick, in Cinderella and Der Freischütz. And even that was evidently not a debut, for the reviewer speaks of ‘report’ (apparently from York) which has already spoken so highly of Miss Delcy’s abilities…’. She went on to play in Fra Diavolo, and The Barber of Seville opposite Binge, but cancelled The Marriage of Figaro through influenza, during a two-month engagement littered with farewells, indispositions and Benefits.
But, back to the ‘official’ debut. There was no doubt that ‘the undertaking was arduous’, following Mary Ann Wood in ‘one of her greatest parts’, but the first night – if the press can be believed – went off pretty well. ‘We have rarely seen a debut for which less allowance was needed’, ‘A favourable impression was at once made by her singing the little opening ballad; her low notes were excellent and though her voice was trembling with anxiety the purest taste and the most delicate feeling were manifest. The high notes appeared at times rather forced and it was natural to think that the middle and low notes, which were beautifully clear and full, were alone of the first quality. However, the finale to the first act immediately dissipated all doubts as to any capabilities of her voice; her first nervousness was broken through, her high notes became rich and sweet and in the full flow of melody which she poured forth, the correctness of her intonation, the infusion of soul, and the quiet commanding facility of her execution gained the whole audience…’ (Times)
‘The debutante is young, apparently about seventeen or eighteen, girlish, with small features, and a merry, expressive, dark eye. As is generally the case in England, she has been hurried upon the stage rather prematurely and therefore we must speak of her great promise rather than her finished performance …’ ‘She has an organ of great power and compass,.. The lower and middle notes are excellent and it was only when she strained her voice to the highest pitch that it became harsh and unpleasing... we have seldom witnessed a debut of one so young from which we could augur a more brilliant future... [she] bids fair to be one of the chief musical ornaments of our stage..’ (Literary Gazette)
Father didn’t stay in the background. He came on with the young singer on her first night when she took her calls.
Miss Delcy followed up in Lacy’s versions of Freischütz and Fra Diavolo and the response seemed positive: ‘she has all the requisites by nature to make a fine singer. Her appearance is prepossessing, her enunciation clear and distinct, and her voice powerful, well toned and of large compass. As Agatha … she was loudly and deservedly applauded.’ ‘If this young lady will not fancy herself already a first-rate singer we have great hopes of her becoming such’.Report had it that ‘Mr Lacy is getting up one of Boieldieu’s operas for his daughter…’ but it didn’t happen. Mr Hammond’s management went belly up, and Miss Delcy’s starring season came to an end.
In June, Miss Delcy was seen in a pasticcio entertainment staged for Mr Dowton’s Benefit, but she was almost immediately thereafter heard of in France. Painfully prepared paragraphs were floated back to the London papers: [‘Miss Delcy] has created no little sensation in the musical world … The most distinguished judges here (M Berlioz among the number) place this lady’s voice at once amongst the very finest of the day, and pronounce her style from its breadth, musician-like purity and dramatic expression, as altogether unrivalled in France since the regretted retirement of Mademoiselle Falcon…’
‘Elle a chanté avec grand succès pendant la dernière saison a Drury Lane’ echoed Le Gazette Musicale de Paris assuring that ‘elle fait sensation dans le monde musicale’. The ‘sensation’ doesn’t seem to have left too many traces.
I spot her at 1843 – ‘Signora Caterina Delci, pupil of Pasta’ – billed, and widely paragraphed, to sing in La Sonnambula with Gardoni at La Scala, but ‘La rappresentazione nella quale doveva cantare la signora Delci fu protratta per ignoti cagioni’. Embarrassingly, the British newspaper Brother Jonathan reported her as a ‘great sensation’ in the part. In 1844, she shows up (or was announced, at least) at the Teatro Filarmonico, Verona (Il Barbiere di Siviglia) and Venice … where, The Liverpool Post agreeably printed, she apparently somewhere showed ‘a versatility unknown since Malibran’. But it doesn’t say where and how. Elsewhere, it was paragraphed that she had become ‘the favourite pupil of Pasta’. The Italian press said she had studied ‘several months’ with Pasta.
In 1844, the Lacys returned to Britain, and on 1 October Miss Delcy again took to the Drury Lane stage, this time under the management of Alfred Bunn, as Cinderella. The response was not enthusiastic: ‘[She] has been absent for three years in Italy and now returns to play one of her old characters scarcely as well as ere she left her native country’. She followed up again with Freischütz and Fra Diavolo, but was no competition for The Bohemian Girl or for Balfe’s new The Daughter of St Mark. After a few performances, Miss Delcy was seen no more.
A few months later, Mr Lacy made one more throw as a star-maker. In August, he and Catherine, along with Liverpudlian tenor Fred Gardner, who had played supporting parts with them at Drury Lane, set out for America. Once again, the puff flew high, and once again – and with even more vigour than in Britain – the press split into pro-Delcy (‘This debut will be one of the most brilliant ever witnessed in this city’ puffed the New York Herald) and anti-Delcy camps. Lacy apparently had the New York Herald firmly behind him: which automatically meant that he would find opposition elsewhere. And poor Miss Delcy? She just went on and sang.
She sang first on 15 September at the Park Theatre in La Sonnambula with Gardner as leading tenor and William Brough as Rodolfo. ‘One of the most successful debuts on record’, trumpeted The New York Herald, at the head of the approving press. When that press reached England, the Musical World reacted: ‘If this be true of Miss Delcy, then is Miss Delcy another Miss Delcy that the Miss Delcy who appeared at Covent Garden as Zerlina in Fra Diavolo? We shall be glad to hail her back to England thus wonderfully advanced beyond her former self’. Lacy (who took the baton for the Delcy performances, and apparently, thus, put up the backs of another section of the press and performers) followed up with Cinderella and the rest of his repertoire, and then continued on to Philadelphia (Chestnut Street Theatre) and Baltimore for opera and concerts ‘with pretty good success’ reported the Herald ‘they gave a concert in Baltimore which was numerously and fashionably attended’.
On 17 November, they reopened in New York, with a new attraction: America’s first Lucia di Lammermoor. This time, the press controversy really moved into high gear, and some of the pro- papers deserted the camp. The Broadway Journal, which had allowed the prima donna to be ‘young, showy and attractive in her manner besides being a singer of no ordinary merit’, now howled: ‘The performance of Lucia di Lammermoor was as good a specimen of musical murder as we have witnessed’. The New York Heraldpersisted ‘a very select and fashionable audience… Miss Delcy has much improved during her southern tour and sings the music of Lucia with taste and feeling ... a rich mezzo-soprano voice and great artistical skill’.
Catherine’s final role in New York appears to have been that of Rosetta in Love in a Village, which she played on 3 December 1845 for William Brough’s Benefit, and on the 5 December she appeared for her own Benefit as Lucy of Lammermoor (sic), before 'her final performances in America' at the Howard Athenaeum, Boston, from 16 December, where she sang Der Freischütz, still supported by Mr Gardner ‘principal tenor from Drury Lane Theatre, London’… and still puffed extravagantly … ‘Miss Delcy’s first evening at the Athenaeum will not fail to crowd the hall with a large audience even for that popular lace of resort, and as far as may be judged from the reputation of this accomplished artiste …’
The Lacys returned to England, where Miss Delcy’s ‘first appearance since her return from America’ was billed on 4 May 1846 at the Theatre Royal, Dublin. She played The Maid of Judah to Fred Gardner's Ivanhoe and Lucia di Lammermoor to his Edgar and continued on for a series of performances at the Liverpool Adelphi (La Sonnambula).
There don’t seem to have been many more.
Lacy put on some lecture concerts (‘Handelian opera concerts’) at the Hanover Square Rooms in May 1847 in which Catherine sang the illustrations with Maria Hawes, Charles Manvers and Henry Phillips … but, thereafter, she seems to have left the public arena.
By the 1851 census she is ‘a music teacher’. In 1861, with her parents and her sister, at 7 Euston Rd, she is ‘teacher of music and languages’.
Things did not, thenceforth, go well for the Lacy family, it seems. Before Rophino Lacy died, on 20 September 1867, they were reduced to advertising in the press for financial help.
Catherine and Sarah can be seen in the 1871 census at 51 Great Russell Street – an address later more famous as the home of Pear’s Soap, and nowadays, less famously, as a Starbucks coffee house – but, after that, I see them no more.
It seems that Sarah Groenima Lacy died in 1878. And Catherine is the ‘Catherine Josefa Lacy’ listed in the Pancras death records for 1889. If those records are correct, at 71 years of age, she was a tiny bit older even than I guessed.
‘Miss Delcy’ did not entirely vanish from the musical world after her abandonment of the stage. A handful of songs have survived for which she provided words (to her father’s music) and/or music. ‘By the dark mountainside’, ‘Whither, whither away’, ‘Somebody’s waiting’ and ‘Children of the earth, farewell’ by ‘C J D’ or ‘Catherine J Delcy’ did not make her any more fame than her stage exploits. But at least they were not puffed out of existence.
DECK, [?Joseph] Richard (b Guebwiller, Alsace, 27 September 1821; d London, 1882)
The career of the bass singer, Richard Deck, is somewhat murked in mystery. In fact, very little would be remembered about him at all, were it not for the fact that he, apparently, at some stage during whatever years he spent in England, had an encounter with the writer George Bernard Shaw, which has resulted in his being mentioned in all those books written, down the years, about Mr Shaw.
In those biographies we are told that he was ‘an Alsatian basso profundo opera singer’ with extremist (anarchist, communard, Proudhonist) political views, that he was ‘a brother of the famous French ceramist’, Joseph-Théodore Deck (1823-1891), that Shaw spent, at one time, ‘three nights a week visiting his house … to learn French and help Deck improve his English. .’ at which time, the singer was ‘a poverty-stricken old man … with a room in Kentish Town’. Not that old! He died at 60. Shame that they don’t specify when this happened.
My own first sighting of Richard Deck, as a vocalist, occurs 14 March 1846, at the concert given by one Mlle Péan de la Rochejagu, at the Paris Hôtel de Ville, singing her operetta Lully with Mesdames Sabatier and Cico. The next, in February 1848, when, with his ‘belle voix de basse’, he turns up at a concert given by MM Savart, Ropicquet and Mlle Girod, chez Mons Fite, in Paris, alongside a Mlle Boutet ‘pupil of Rubini’.
I spot him next, in January 1851, as ‘première basse et des Hermann-Léon’ at the theatre of Montauban, in a season opening with Lucie de Lammermoor: ‘M. Deck, première basse, dont le timbre de voix est parfaitement approprié à la nature des rôles dits de Hermann-Léon, chante avec facilité, et prend une bonne part au succès des pièces. Dans la Dame blanche, il a toujours été convenable, et, certes, le rôle qu'il remplissait n'est pas écrit pour faire briller l'artiste’.
‘Le rôle un peu difficile du capitaine Rolland (Mousquetaires de la reine) a été mal joué, mais bien chanté par M. Deck. Ce jeune artiste manque d'expérience, d'habitude, mais sa voix est fort belle. C'est un bloc de marbre d'où peut jaillir un chef-d'oeuvre; il n'y a qu'à le travailler, le ciseler et le polir’.
In Le Barbier de Séville ‘L'air de la Calomnie, a également valu des bravos à M. Deck’.
The company also included a young and pretty Madame Deck who seems to have been more skilled on the piano than as the Queen in La Part du diable and Isabelle de Bavière in Charles VI.
Then, in 1857, he turns up in London, vaguely mentioned as being ‘primo basso profundo from the Grand Opera at Dresden’. The occasion is Jullien’s Benefit at the Royal Surrey Gardens (29-30 June), for which Deck was engaged as a deputy for an ailing Karl Formes. He sang ‘In diesem heil’gen Hallen’ and joined in a selection from Don Giovanni with the Gassiers, which earned him praise for ‘a first-rate organ and knew how to use it’.
In the 1857-8 season, Richard Deck was seen regularly on the concert platforms of London, usually with his Zauberflöte aria. I spot him at the Réunion des arts, singing Carafa’s ‘Le Valet de chambre’ with Mme Borchardt ('Made a great impression by the quality of his powerful bass voice, and the energy of his style'); at Jullien’s concerts at Her Majesty’s Theatre giving ‘La ci darem’ with Jetty Treffz; at the Crystal Palace with Mme Borchardt, and with Mlle Finoli, giving Mazel’s ‘L’orage à la grande chartreuse’; at St Martin’s Hall, with Spohr’s Faust aria ‘Stille noch dies Wuthverlangen’ and the inevitable Sarastro aria, or, billed as ‘the celebrated German basso’ at the Alhambra Monstre Concerts. On 27 March 1858 he was on the bill at the opening concerts of the St James’s Hall.
In May and June of 1858, he appeared in a whole run of public and private concerts, the last of which on 16 July at the Crystal Palace, alongside Sims Reeves, Louisa Pyne, the Weisses and Charlotte Dolby, and giving his ‘Isis und Osiris’ ... in Italian.
Richard Deck had evidently been well enough appreciated during his year or so on English platforms, but the 1858 season done, he simply vanishes. No little British paragraphs saying ‘Herr Deck who is so well-known here ... is now doing such-and-such’. Nothing. Where is he?
And thus it stays for a whole decade. Until, in April 1869, he resurfaces in London, at the New Philharmonic Society, with his same old Zauberflöte aria, and launches into a second period, of little more than a year, on the British concert platform. The engagements were, this time, a little less classy and a little less frequent, and after just a fair season Deck went out on the road, apparently as a replacement for Perunini (the Bath press suggested that ‘Perunini’ was Deck under another name), singing the bass music in a little concert party put together by Louisa Bodda Pyne and her husband. He gave his Zauberflöte and ‘Miei rampolli’ and joined in the company’s ensemble music, for something like six months around some medium and small provincial dates. And here, for the first time in ages, I see Madame Deck (the same one?) accompanying her husband, in a masonic concert.
Back in town for the 1870 season, he turns up just occasionally on bills of mostly second-rate concerts, ‘Herr Ricardo Deck’ accompanied by ‘Mme Deck’ (4 May), and the last appearances which I have spotted are on 10 July 1870, at Madame Montserrat’s concert, singing a French operatic trio, and in 16 July 1870, at a charity affair, in which he performed an aria from Le Châlet and the Carafa duet.
My last sighting of him is in an advertisement, in October of the same year, seeking engagements from a boarding house at 45 Tavistock Square. Well, no. My last sighting is in the death records of the British nation, which include a Richard Deck who died in St Pancras in 1882, at the age of 59. I imagine it is he. Or is it?
Because, peculiarly enough, Richard Deck does not seem to appear in any other official document that I can find, and notably in the censi. Maybe his ‘anarchist’ politics included such civil disobediences as skipping censi.
But, after the Franco-Prussian war, Richard Deck of London filled in a form declaring his date and place of birth as an Alsatian 'optant' -- choosing French nationality -- so we have at least one solid fact (on his say so) to go on. Son of François-Pierre Deck (1789-1846) and Rose née Ferne (1791-1852)? Of course, it means his age on his death certificate is wrong, but that's nothing unusual ...
So, there it is. A very incomplete record of the life and career of a very curious basso. Maybe more will surface some day. Maybe all those ‘empty’ years may be filled. And maybe not. But for the meanwhile, here you are, ye next hundred Dickens dissectors! The truth about the old man in the garret, for your footnotes! Gimme a credit!
PS In an Alsatian journal of 1933 I find .. "Richard Deck, brother of Théodore Deck ... was Königlicher Hofsánger in Dresden .. went to England and sang with his wife, a good pianist, in many concerts". Many? When? Where?
