The following year, at Covent Garden, she sang Desdemona in Verdi's Otello, opposite Jean de Reszke, who sang the role of the jealous Moor. In Albani's dressing room hung a photograph of the celebrated tenor, inscribed: “With the very affectionate homage of her devoted partner.”
True to himself, George Bernard Shaw wrote of the performance that Desdemona was “pleasantly plump – rather too plump for the role.” This barb finally succeeded in annoying Emma. “Him again! Won't he ever leave me in peace?”
To the devil with Shaw! It was no pasty, evanescent Desdemona who gave throat to her first aria, Mio superbo guerrier, addressed to Otello, but a passionate and loving wife who poignantly begged for mercy, crying “Non uccidermi!”4 And afterwards, brokenhearted and without hope, intoning “Emilia, distendi sul mio letto la mia candida veste nuziale se morir dovessi”5 before uttering the desperate plea, “É perchè t'amo che m'uccidi?”6 as Otello glares at her with maddened eyes before strangling her.
“De Reszke has the habit of changing the stage directions to maximize the effect, without telling his partners in advance,” mused Emma. “I hardly know what to expect: tonight, he's so convincing that I don't know if I'll come out of it alive!” However, after grasping Desdemona's corpse in his arms for the finale, Otello raised her up and led her forward to bow to the wildly applauding crowd.
Glowing with success, she returned to the United States for a three-month contract at the Metropolitan Opera of New York City. Her Met debut was as Gilda in Rigoletto on December 23, 1891.
While Emma and Ernest took the train to Montreal to spend Christmas at the Villa Albani with Papa Lajeunesse, their son Ernest Frederick spent his holidays in England with Aunt Nelly and his paternal relatives. In Chambly, on the Rue Bourgogne, a typically English Christmas dinner was served: turkey, mince pie, and plum pudding. Real candles on the Christmas tree had been replaced by little electric lights. Emma reminded the assembled family members that the tradition of the Christmas tree had been introduced to England by Victoria's beloved Prince Albert, who had brought it from his native Germany.
In Montreal that winter, Albani sang in two operas, with singers from New York. Returning to the Metropolitan, she was acclaimed until the end of March, 1892, in Faust, Otello, Don Giovanni (as Elvira), Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots (in the role of Valentine), and Wagner's Lohengrin, Die fliegende Holländer, and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (as Eva).
In New York, Albani's name not only appeared in print for her performances, but also her wardrobe: the Redfern shirtwaist dresses that she wore were considered daring. She was also known for wearing hats with fine veils of different hues. “They give rainbow nuances to the face,” gushed a feature writer in an American fashion magazine.
In 1893, her career was still in full swing with a demanding agenda of opera tours in Austria, Hungary, and Bohemia, as well as a full slate of English festival performances. A whirlwind schedule, as usual.
In 1894, Ernest organized for Emma a German tour, which ended in Switzerland where their son was at boarding school. He was fifteen years old and hoped to make a career for himself in the British foreign service. “You'll have to study very hard, Freddy,” his father advised him. “You know how difficult the civil service entrance exams are.”
In the train on their way back to England, Emma said to her husband: “How Freddy has grown! I hardly know him, really, being so busy with my singing and all the travelling. When he was little, we used to take him with us, but those days ended so soon. Do you remember how he used to hang on to us, begging us not to go? And when he was ten, how he learned my part in Mors et Vita by heart so we would return more quickly to hear him sing it? And the drawings of us he used to do when we were away? I don't believe he has ever really understood how much I love him, in spite of everything.”
Two years later, Albani was booked for a new North American concert tour at the beginning of 1896. New York City seemed more electrifying than ever; the first public cinema screenings had just been inaugurated and were attracting eager crowds.
On this trip, Ernest Frederick accompanied his parents. He was now a handsome youth of seventeen, but very reserved, having been brought up under the Victorian edict that children were to be seen and not heard. He was all eyes and ears on the tour, as he took in new impressions. When they reached Quebec City, it was Carnival time, with its opening ceremonies of military parades. His mother sang, accompanied by two hundred choristers, a violinist, and the combined bands of the Royal Canadian Artillery, the Quebec Rifles, and the Canadian Hussars. Before sailing for England, the Gyes visited Chambly, where Ernest Frederick saw his maternal grandfather for the first time in many years. “It's a beautiful country,” he told the aging Joseph Lajeunesse. “I'll come back for a holiday as soon as I can.”
The return to London was tinged with sorrow, as it was to be Albani's last season at Covent Garden. Her final repertoire there was a celebration of the three great opera composers, Mozart, Meyerbeer, and Wagner. The critics all agreed that Albani's rendering of the Liebestod, Isolde's great love song to the dead Tristan, was the apogee of her art. Over the years, Emma's voice had gained in substance and had deepened from the lighter coloratura soprano to the dramatic soprano style suitable for the role of Isolde.
Thus, Albani left the stage where she had shone so brightly for twenty-four years of her career and gracefully made way for the younger soprano stars. Nonetheless, it was painful for her to strip her dressing room of all the lovingly placed evidence of her long reign at Covent Garden: the silver candlesticks, her red brocade divan, her Venetian mirror. This had been her second home.
To raise her spirits, Emma went to take a thermal cure in Auvergne in south-central France. “The waters here are a sovereign elixir for the throat and bronchial tubes,” she wrote to her devoted friend, the poet Louis Fréchette. She was to see him soon, for a cross-Canada Albani tour was scheduled for November 1896.
Touring a country of such vast dimensions was not without problems. In Calgary, for example, the lighting was inadequate; for the garden scene in Faust, a locomotive headlamp was brought in! Some of the newspaper critics along the way were lukewarm towards Emma's performances. From the Hamilton Spectator: “Her voice no longer has the freshness and purity that it once had. There are signs of exhaustion in the high register. The quality is slightly laborious and the intonation hesitant. However, the voice remains full and ample, and is carried with the art and subtlety that have made Miss Albani one of the great artists of our time.”
Emma felt a sense of panic when she read these comments. Was the end of her career at hand? One thing she knew for certain: she was getting old.
In 1925, King George V conferred on Albani the title Dame Commander of the British Empire.
1. In her autobiography, Emma recalled these stays at Old Mar Lodge with fondness.
2. Albani stared in the Handel Festival at the Crystal Palace every year for two decades.
3. Other composers who wrote music for Albani included Antonín Dvorák and Arthur Sullivan, who became one of her greatest friends.
4. “Don't kill me!”
5. “Emilia, lay my white wedding dress out on my bed, if I must die.”
6. “Is it because I love you that you will kill me?”
10
The Curtain Falls
1897. Albani was fifty years old, and it was Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, marking the sixtieth year of her reign. “My dear friend,” the monarch wrote to Emma, “we are greatly pleased: imagine that we were captured in the first moving pictures during our Jubilee Parade! It is very tiring for the eyes to view it,