As time went on, it became customary for Emma to sing, accompanying herself on the piano, at intimate receptions at Balmoral. Victoria, lulled by the music and the warmth from the open hearth, would often drift into slumber. Once, she was rudely awakened when Emma fell onto the carpet at her feet; a leg of the piano bench had suddenly given way. The Queen, still half asleep, unthinkingly uttered her famous stock phrase, the severe “We are not amused,” and the guests burst into laughter at the incongruity of the situation.
Emma returned Victoria's invitation, and the Queen came to the Lodge for tea on several occasions. The young Ernest Frederick was impressed: “Oh, Mummy, what a little woman for such a big queen!” he said one day.
These holidays in Scotland were the only times that the boy could see both his parents as much as he liked. What joy! His father took him on expeditions into the hills, and his mother read him Peter Rabbit and other Beatrix Potter stories before he went to bed. Knowing that she would go off on a singing engagement all too soon, he would hug her tightly.
When the holidays ended, Emma would return to London, and the season of opera performances and festival recitals would start up again. In 1885, she sang again in the Handel Festival at the Crystal Palace,2 and at the Birmingham Festival, where she created a new oratorio, Mors et Vita, composed for her by Charles Gounod.3 The composer and the soprano collaborated together in preparing the concert; he addressed her as “my dear great interpreter,” and rewrote certain sections of the score that Emma found difficult.
Queen Victoria attended the first performance of the oratorio and invited Albani back to Balmoral; Emma had become a regular member of the royal entourage in Scotland. Victoria took out a page of her diary and gave it to Emma, after writing on it: “To Madame Albani-Gye, with my warmest thanks for the great pleasure I had upon hearing her sing. – Victoria Regina, Balmoral Castle, September 24, 1885.” Emma kept it carefully among her most valued souvenirs, among tributes from Gounod, Brahms, and Franz Liszt.
Liszt came to London in April 1886 for the premiere performance of his oratorio, The Legend of St. Elizabeth, created by Albani. Emma was in awe of the illustrious black-caped composer with the face of an ascetic – by this time, he had been ordained a Franciscan and styled himself the Abbé Liszt. After the performance, he wrote to thank Emma and expressed his admiration for her art. She never saw Liszt again: he died later that year.
Albani had a gift for inspiring composers. A few years later, during a tour of Austria, Hungary, and Bohemia, she met Johannes Brahms in Vienna. He reportedly wept when he heard her sing his Requiem.
At the beginning of the 1887 Berlin opera season, Albani sang Lohengrin and Die fliegande Holländer in German, and La traviata, Rigoletto, and Faust in Italian.
Her valise bulging with musical scores, Emma crisscrossed Europe, returning to Covent Garden to sing Antonida in A Life for the Tsar by Mikhail Glinka – the story of a peasant hero who died saving the first Romanoff tsar in 1613. The work brought back poignant memories of St. Petersburg, where Albani's fresh beauty and innocence had captured Russian hearts. Now, she was almost forty and would soon begin an inevitable decline as far as her singing voice was concerned.
But Albani hadn't yet reached that precarious stage, and Ernest arranged her third North American tour. In January 1889, they set sail for Canada on the Etruria, accompanied by a convivial party of other talented singers and musicians. Rehearsals were held every day of the voyage; on rough days, the piano had to be bolted to the floor.
The steamer made its entry into the scenic Gulf of St. Lawrence. When Albani and her troupe disem-barked at Quebec City, they lodged at the Château Frontenac Hotel, with its sweeping view of the river. Emma was invited to the Quebec provincial parliament and was the guest of honour at the luncheon given by Premier Honoré Mercier after the morning's session.
“The weather here is pleasant; I hope it will still be so at the time of your visit,” wrote Sir John A. Macdonald, enjoining Emma and her husband to stay at Earnscliffe, the prime minister's official residence perched on a cliff overlooking the Ottawa River. The couple travelled to the national capital in a private railway car provided by William Van Horne, the president of the Canadian Pacific Railway; it was lavishly fitted with beds, a parlour, and a kitchen.
They enjoyed their time in the nation's raw new capital; Ernest even went tobogganing with Sir John!
After a zigzag into the United States, their itinerary took them to Montreal, where Albani gave the farewell concert of her tour. This city also had its château: a huge castle built entirely of ice! A masterpiece of the imagination, with towers and turrets hacked from the frozen St. Lawrence River, and illuminated by electric lights, it gleamed and sparkled in the night.
In the sleigh that carried her to the performance hall, the diva hummed some of the arias and songs she would perform that evening. She glanced fondly at the familiar passing scene: the show-filled streets, passers-by hailing horse-drawn taxis, and children hurling snowballs that burst against greystone buildings that reminded her of parts of The City, London's business district.
Emma arrived back in London for the start of the opera season. She sang for the Shah of Persia during his official visit to England in July 1889. The potentate was resplendent in his uniform, glittering with diamonds and other precious stones – he shone more brilliantly than a jewellery shop window. The Shah, amused by the sight of the musicians tuning their instruments, applauded; for etiquette's sake, the rest of the audience imitated him. He slept through most of the performance, rousing himself every once in a while to admire the ballerinas. When he wondered aloud if he might obtain some of them for his harem, he was told that in England, these arrangements were made more discreetly.
It was during that season that Nelly Melba made her Covent Garden debut in Rigoletto. The wide range and beautiful timbre of her voice, the quality of her phrasing, and her exceptional lung capacity immediately made her the house darling.
Emma realized that Albani's star was fading at last. In the newspapers she read that “the Covent Garden management has decided to stop basing its opera programme on the cult of a single star performer. Now, secondary roles as well will be sung by great artists. Nonetheless, we deplore the loss of Madame Albani, who has enchanted audiences of the Royal Italian Opera in her grand roles for many a year. In future, she will no longer have the exclusivity of these roles.”
George Bernard Shaw, the sharp-tongued Irish playwright, essayist, and man-about-town, was a relentless critic of Albani and other opera divas. He wrote of Emma: “her acting is calculated, with an obvious lack of spontaneity.” He admitted, however, that she was unsurpassed as an interpreter of Wagner's music.
Emma was still in demand for touring contracts, and her busy schedule did not allow her to ruminate on comments such as Shaw's. In autumn 1889, she left for a tour of the United States and Mexico as part of a troupe that included the legendary Adelina Patti and Francesco Tamagno. On its way to Mexico City, the large convoy of opera stars, musicians, and choral singers, with their mountains of baggage containing costumes, instruments, and stage sets, were obliged to delay for a day until a stretch of the railway track could be repaired, completely throwing them off their tour schedule.
Mexico City is situated at an altitude of over two thousand metres; the nights are chilly, and most of the houses and hotels are unheated. Emma warmed herself by drinking the fortifying cordial that she had used for years, a concoction called Mariani wine. Charles Gounod had introduced her to the benefits of this elixir based on pulverized coca leaves. Newspaper advertisements of the period proclaimed that “Mariani wine stimulates and clears the throat and strengthens the chest. Approved by the Medical Academy of Paris, this drink has gone around the world. It is known as ‘the wine of athletes.’”
From Mexico, the troupe returned to the United States, then to Canada, where Emma sang La traviata and Lucia di Lammermoor. It was the first time in Canada that two full-length operas were presented by a troupe mounted for the occasion. Albani's visit ended