Dame Nellie Melba’s most famous farewell of all captured on record

SHE may have taken her stage name from her home town of Melbourne, but Dame Nellie Melba, had strong connections to the eastern suburbs.

Dame Nellie Melba made her final farewell of all in St Vincent’s Hospital, Darlinghurst.

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SHE may have taken her stage name from her home town of Melbourne, but Helen Porter Mitchell, better known as Dame Nellie Melba, had strong connections to the eastern suburbs.

Melba is currently enjoying a bit of a revival with star soprano Emma Matthews recently portraying her in a Hayes Theatre Company production, and also with the release on the Decca Eloquence label of her emotional farewell concert at Covent Garden, London, in 1926.

Melba’s connection to Potts Point and the eastern suburbs goes a lot deeper than Ms Matthews’ stage tribute, however. Towards the end of her life the most famous soprano in the world lived in the gracious Manar building in Macleay St, in apartment 5.

And she died of blood poisoning in St Vincent’s Hospital in 1931 after a five-week stay, complications from having caught paratyphoid fever in Cairo the year before.

Album artwork for Decca Eloquence release of Dame Nellie Melba's farewell recording.

Her endless farewells have passed into Australian folklore, but this newly released Eloquence recording is one for the collection as it features more than half an hour’s worth of her final appearance at the London opera house with which her name was irrevocably linked. It was all captured live by the newly invented microphone, and thanks to Decca’s boffins and access to the original masters the quality is surprisingly good and shows the diva was still in top form despite just having turned 55.

TEARS

There are none of those scratches which so bedevilled the earlier releases of her studio recordings and the orchestra sounds much fuller than usual, even if the balance sometimes has its failings. The two excerpts from Verdi’s Otello and the scenes from Puccini’s La Boheme, including Mimi’s Farewell and They Call Me Mimi — she studied the role with the composer — still strike home today and give us a much better idea of what she must have sounded like live.

As a dubious bonus we get a three-minute speech from former Governor of Victoria Lord Stanley of Alderley as well as Dame Nellie’s farewell speech, after which she flees the stage in tears.

The supporting singers are excellent and include three hand-picked Aussie mates in tenor Browning Mummery, baritone John Brownlee and bass Frederic Collier.

The earlier studio recordings on this generous 77-minute album include arias from works by Charles Gounod, Jules Massenet, Herman Bemberg, Puccini and Antonio Lotti, along with songs by Francesco Paolo Tosti among others. It finishes with her last recording, the spiritual Swing Low Sweet Chariot, made in December 1926.

Melba’s Farewell comes with excellent liner notes and is available at Fish Fine Music for a bargain $9.99.