'Mrs Elwood Andrea': a Corkonian contralto in two halves

 

It is over two decades since I began nosing around in the world of Victorian vocalists. 

Sometimes I worked beaverishly on the long list of known, less-known, hardly-known vocalists that I'd exhumed. Other times, when working on another book or, after Ian's death, as I floated round the world in search of .. what? The project was shelved for a while or two.

Nowadays, I'm more inclined to go to my Dropbox and supply, when wished, an unused article from earlier years for a magazine or my blog ...

But, where there is the thrill of the chase? The winkling out of the true identity of an artist from behind a morass of pseudonyms?

Well, I've come to a wee hiatus. I've passed my 80th anniversary. I have two completed books in the works ... maybe, I thought, today I'll try once more to exhume some of those facts, dates and identities with which I failed ten and twenty years ago. I mean, I got Millie VERE by dint of pure persistence, Jeff even got Geraldine ST MAUR ... maybe ... just one?

I clicked on my index. Peeeugh. The 'As' are not good.  I've already written up 'Haydée Abrek' and failed the find which French Duchess she was. Annie ANYON died at 29. 'Mr ARTHURSON' the wipsy tenor I've followed through his multiple name-changes. 'J O ATKINS' in infuriatingly reticent ... and as for 'Mrs Elwood ANDREA' ... I mean, what?

Hey, guess what folks, I nabbed one! I sha'n't go into the details of how, but when you've been doing this as long and as minutely as I have ... sometime you hit the bull's balls!

Mrs Elwood Andrea was neither Mrs, nor Elwood, nor Andrea  (2) she was not 'of London'.  The lady in question, who surfaced in the 1860s as a deep contralto vocalist, was from Cork, Ireland. And by 1860, she was nearly 40. Her three younger sisters (Anne, Sarah Catherine, Ellen Frances) were married ... she wasn't and never would be.

He real name was Eliza Agnes SULLIVAN and she was a daughter of one Thomas Sullivan who was for many years a well-known liquor-merchant ('whiskey and port') in Bristol's College Green. 

Eliza clearly had a tendency to music from her youth for the 1841 census lists her as 'professor of music'. She appears locally from 1838, with Millar and Mrs Loder, and thereafter, in 1840, I see a Miss Sullivan singing in a Tewkesbury Music Festival and at Cheltenham ('Adieu to dear Cambria'), in 1841 in concert, when her 'Come Ever Smiling Liberty' was adjudged 'deficient in softness and melody'), and regularly with the Bristol Choral Society ('a celebrated vocalist from Cheltenham'), in Newport ... but by 1843 she is advertised as 'of London'...

In September 1859 'Miss Sullivan' can be seen singing the Rossini Stabat Mater with Mme Guerabella... but then things changed. Mrs Sullivan died, and Eliza decided to become Madame Elwood Andrea. 

'Madame Andrea' apears as such in November 1860, at a concert in Westbourne Hall given by J Theodore Petters, 'blind pianist'. Mr Petters was supported by Charlotte Gilbert, and Eliza appeared thereafter with Charlotte and her husband, Alfred Gilbert, in a goodly number of their lecture programmes and concerts at the Arion, the Society of Fine Arts et al ('Il Segreto', 'To Thee', 'The Native Greek Girl', 'Three Fishers', 'Viva la patria terra', The Minstrel Boy') and over the next thirteen years she was heard frequently in suburban concerts, in pretty good company, to pretty good reviews (' a lady of the most accomplished musical talent'). Bath found 'she possesses a magnificent contralto voice of great compass' and when she stepped in to part-cover Louisa Pyne in The Creation with the National Choral Society she was adjudged 'a decided success'. A less likely jump-in came at a Charity concert at the Hanover Square Rooms when she replaced in extremis no less a basso than Willoughby Weiss!

On several occasions she sang the Stabat Mater with the Gilberts, she appeared with the Chelsea Harmonic Society in Samson, in various Messiahs, at Hackney in Judas Maccabeus, and after having sung the supporting contralto music, behind Lucy Franklein, in Elijah, scored another 'West End' credit when she took the second contralto role, to Janet Patey, in a performance of Placida the Christian Martyr at the Albert Hall (November 1872). 

One concert followed another: Miss Sullivan sang, she played piano, she recited ... and then she vanished. 

I am guessing that someone was ill. She was living at this stage with her accountant brother John and his wife in Harley Road, Hampstead. 1 August 1878 Mrs Sullivan died. A little more than a year later, it was Eliza.

Eliza, by any other name had been an ubiquitous performer around the suburbs of London for over thirty years. Not a top-of-the-bill name, not often in major venues, but a solid and agreeable singer. Who it has taken me 20 years of digging to discover was one person, not two ...   Brentwood, Kentish Town, Hackney, Chelsea, Westbourne Grove, Epping, Dorking, Hornchurch .. even Windsor and Woolwich will have missed her.

And I? At least I have sorted out who she was!

And I see Google has decided to insert blue links into my text. Hopefully they won't show.

PS Obviously neither of the two Misses Sullivan was deemed worth a portrait. But one may turn up before my demise.