Ernest brought his wife gently back to reality: “It would be better to prepare for your tour of the United States and Canada, my darling.”
Emma harboured a lingering bitterness towards her homeland. “My fellow Canadiens want to make it up to me,” she thought. “It's easy for them, now that I'm well-known all over the world: they don't have to take a chance on me.”
Wagner breathed his last while Albani and her husband, as well as fellow opera star Adelina Patti, her impresario, and their small troupe, were aboard the Pavonia, sailing from Liverpool to New York.2 The two-week crossing was a bad one, and Emma spent all but two days of it in her bunk, prostrated by seasickness. She arrived in New York greatly weakened and late for her rehearsals. In spite of this, she was ready on time for the scheduled performances.
After her twenty-year absence, Emma was eagerly awaited in Montreal. She was welcomed as an official guest: a reception committee met her at the American border and brought her into the city on a private railway car. A crowd of ten thousand greeted her as the train drew into Bonaventure Station. The snow-covered streets appeared fairy-like; members of the Snowshoe Club, dressed in their sporting outfits and carrying flaming torches, lined each side of the street when Albani and company emerged from the building.
Emma whispered happily to Ernest: “Snow-shoeing was my favourite sport when I was a girl.” A brass band struck up the traditional “Vive la Canadienne” as Emma and her friends climbed into the two sleighs assigned to take them to the Windsor Hotel. Having performed in Boston the previous evening, Emma was exhausted, but how could she have resisted such a fervent salute? She forgot her aching head and smiled at the cheering crowds.
Emma's father was waiting at the hotel. After happy greetings on all sides, he told her that tickets for her concerts at Queen's Hall on March 27, 29, and 31 varied in price from three to five dollars, and that special trains had been scheduled for those evenings to bring people into the city from outlying areas.
A reception in Albani's honour was organized the next day at Montreal's city hall. Emma was seated on the mayor's throne. After the official speeches, Ernest spoke to express thanks on his wife's behalf. “Tell them how happy they've made me,” she whispered as he rose to his feet. The ceremony ended with the reading of an ode written for Emma by Louis-Honoré Fréchette, Quebec's most recognized poet. Her eyes blurred with tears as she listened to the last verse:
'Tis no matter; with the confession of our expiated sins, Allow us to lay at your feet, Albani, All our best wishes, which, tonight, merge as one! Yonder, you were given fame and fortune; Your country, proud of you, comes to offer in its turn Its most fervent tribute and its most tender love.
Emma remained on the dais for over two hours afterwards, shaking hands with hundreds of admirers. Montreal's stores and offices were closed that day, and the streets thronged with people celebrating her return home.
At her recitals, when Emma sang Souvenirs d'un jeune âge, an aria from the opera La Pré aux clercs by Ferdinand Hérold that ends with the words: “Rendez-moi ma patrie, ou laissez-moi mourir,”3 the audience would stand and applaud lustily, sometimes for more than five minutes. The score of this aria was republished, with Albani's photograph on the cover page, and it came to be considered a Québécois national song.
One journalist wrote: “Last night at Queen's Hall, the public was beside itself. There wasn't a seat left in the balcony, where several people remained standing for the entire performance. Madame Albani possesses a voice of exquisite tenderness.”
To show her appreciation for the way she had been welcomed in Montreal, the international star who had been “the little Lajeunesse girl” donated five hundred dollars from her concert takings to the mayor's office, to be distributed among the city's poor.
Fortunately, Emma had enough free time to see old friends and relatives. She visited her father, her brother Adélard, who was now a priest, and even her grandmother Rachel in the begonia-surrounded house in Chambly. And the great Emma Albani proudly went to sing Ave Maria in the chapel of the Sacred Heart Convent in Sault-au-Recollet, where she had sung so joyfully as a young pensionnaire many years before.
Naturally, Emma was moved by all this attention and heartfelt gestures of appreciation. However, for her, “home, sweet home” was now England.
Albani during one of her numerous Atlantic crossings, with her husband Ernest and (probably) her sister Cornélia.
1. Private concerts were very popular among the aristocracy; there was great competition to obtain the artists most in vogue for these musical soirées.
2. “Concert parties” were popular in these days: opera singers would go on tour with other singers and musicians.
3. “Give me back my country or let me die.”
9
The Star Fades
“Roberto, blacken the sides of my gown, please,” Albani told the costume assistant at Covent Garden. It was the dress rehearsal of Gounod's Roméo et Juliette, in which Emma was singing the role of the tragic heroine.
“But, Madame, it has already been done.”
“Do it again, then. And don't roll your eyes at me! I'm not the only one making demands here. You've already heightened the tenor's heels so that his voice will project more; You've loosened his shirt so he can breathe better, and You've changed his velvet jacket for a brocade one that won't absorb the sound as much!”
“She's only taking her stage jitters out on me,” said the costume assistant to himself. “I should be used to it by now!”
Albani was thirty-six years old that season, while Juliette, the heroine of the play and the opera, is supposed to be fifteen. The great cantatrice was still able to create the necessary illusion on stage to fit her roles – resorting to the occasional artifice, such as darkening the sides of her costumes to appear slimmer. In any case, opera-lovers are notably blind to physical short-comings as long as the singer's voice is worth listening to, and Albani's voice was still in full flower.
In spite of her continuing worldwide success, it seemed that people were beginning to lack the appropriate reverence towards the diva – perhaps because Ernest Gye was no longer in charge of Covent Garden. The theatre had declined under his directorship, and he had resigned as its manager. The official reason given out was that Ernest had decided to dedicate all his energies to managing his wife's career.
This did not prevent Albani from triumphing in Lohengrin – sung in German – at the same Covent Garden Theatre. Emma was able to savour her victory more sweetly after the opera and the festival season ended, ensconced in a country residence that one of her admirers, Lord Fife, had offered for her use the previous year.
Old Mar Lodge was a large hunting pavilion in the valley of the River Dee in the Scottish Highlands, in a landscape of lakes, islands, forests, and hills that reminded Emma of Canada. However, the mysterious countryside, along with its relics of battles among the clans and the piercing notes of the bagpipes, was pure Scottish. Albani and her family would sojourn for vacations in the land of Donizetti's Lucia and Verdi's Lady Macbeth for five years.1