Memoirs of an American Prima Donna

by Clara Louise Kellogg

The rehearsal at Buckingham Palace was held in the great ballroom with the Queen's orchestra, under Cusins, and the artists were Titjiens, Lucca, Faure, and myself. These concerts were composed of picked singers from both Covent Garden and Her Majesty's and were supposed to represent the best of each. As my mother notes, I first met Pauline Lucca there—such an odd little creature. She amused me immensely. She was always doing absurd things and making quaint, entertaining speeches. She was not pretty, but her eyes were beautiful. On this occasion, I remember, Titjiens was rehearsing one of her great, classic arias. When she had finished we all, the orchestra included, applauded. Lucca was sitting between Faure and myself, her feet nowhere near touching the floor, and she applauded rhythmically and quite indifferently, slap-bang! slap-bang! slinging her arms out so as to hit both of us and then slapping them together, the while she kicked up her small feet like a child of six. She was regardless of appearances and was applauding to please herself.

Lucca used to warn me not to abuse my upper notes. We knew her as almost a mezzo. She told me, however, that she had once had an exceedingly high voice, and that one of her best parts was Leonora in Trovatore. She had abused her gift; but she always had a delightful quality of voice and put a great deal of personality into her work.

The approach to the Palace on concert nights was very impressive, for the Grenadier Guards were drawn up outside, and inside were other guards even more gorgeously arrayed than the cavalry. In the concert room itself was stationed a royal bodyguard of the Yeomen of the Guards. The commanding officer was called the Exon-in-Waiting. The proportions of the room were magnificent and there were some fine frescoes and an effective way of lighting up the stained glass windows from the outside; but the general impression was not particularly regal. The decorations were plain and dull—for a palace. The stage was arranged with chairs, rising tier above tier, very much like a stage for oratorio singers. Before royalty appears, the singers seat themselves on the stage and remain there until their turn comes to sing. This is always a trial to a singer, who really needs to get into the mood and to warm up to her appearance. To stand up in cold blood and just sing is discouraging. The prospect of this dreary deliberateness did not tend to raise our spirits as we sat and waited.

At last, after we had become utterly depressed and out of spirits, there was a little stir and the great doors at the side of the ballroom were thrown open. First of all entered the Silver-Sticks in Waiting, a dozen or so of them, backing in, two by two. All were, of course, distinguished men of title and position; and they were dressed in costumes in which silver was the dominant note and carried long wands of silver. They were followed by the Gold-Sticks in Waiting—men of even more exalted rank—and, finally, by the Royal Party. We all arose and curtesied, remaining standing until their Highnesses were seated.

The concerts were called informal and therefore long trains and court veils were not insisted on; but the men had to appear in ceremonial dress—knee breeches and silk stockings—and the women invariably wore gorgeous costumes and family jewels, so that the scene was one full of colour and glitter. The uniforms of the Ambassadors of different countries made brilliant spots of colour. The Prince of Wales and his Princess simply sparkled with orders and decorations. I happened to hear the names of a few of her Royal Highness's. They were the Orders of Victoria and Albert, the Star of India, St. Catherine of Russia, and the Danish Family Order. She also wore many of the crown jewels, and with excellent taste on every occasion I have seen her. With a black satin gown and court train of crimson, for example, she wore only diamonds; while another time I remember she wore pearls and sapphires with a velvet gown of cream and pansy colour. Such good sense and discretion in the choice of gems is rare. So many women seem to think that any jewels are appropriate to any toilet.

Tremendously august personages used to be in the audiences of those Buckingham Palace concerts at which I sang then and later, such as the Duke and Duchess of Teck, the Prince and Princess Christian of Schleswig-Holstein, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, the Crown Prince of Sweden and Norway, the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh. Indeed, royalty, peers of the realm and ambassadors or representatives, and members of the court were the only auditors. In spite of this the concerts were deadly dull, partly, no doubt, because everybody was so enormously impressed by the ceremony of the occasion and by the rigours of court etiquette that they did not dare move or hardly breathe. There was one woman present at my first Buckingham Palace concert, a lady-in-waiting (she looked as if she had become accustomed to waiting) who was even more stiff than any one else and about whose décolleté there seemed to be no termination. Never once, to my certain knowledge, did she move either head or body an inch to the right or to the left throughout the performance.

A breach of etiquette was committed on one occasion by a friend of mine, a compatriot, who had accompanied me to one of these gilt-edged affairs. She stood up behind the very last row of the chorus and—used her opera-glasses! Not unnaturally, she wanted for once, poor girl, to get a good look at royalty; but it is needless to say that she was hastily and summarily suppressed.

When the Prince and Princess were seated the concert could begin. There were two customs that made those functions particularly oppressive. One was that all applause was forbidden. An artist, particularly a singer or stage person of any kind, lives and breathes through approbation: and for a singer to sing her best and then sit down in a dead and stony silence without any sort of demonstration, is a very chilling experience. The only indication that a performance had been acceptable was when the Prince of Wales wriggled his programme in an approving manner. A hand-clap would have been a terrific breach of etiquette. The other drawback—and the one that affected the guests even more than the artists—was that, when once the Prince and Princess were seated, no one could rise on any pretext or provocation whatever. I think it was at my second appearance at the Royal Concerts that an amusing incident occurred which impressed the inconvenience of this regulation upon my memory. The Duchess of Edinburgh, daughter of the Czar, entered in the Prince of Wales's party. She looked an irritable, dissatisfied, bilious person; and I was told that she was always talking about being "the daughter of the Czar of all the Russias" and that it galled her that even the Princess of Wales took precedence over her. Those were the good old days of tie-backs, made of elastic and steel, a sort of modified hoop-skirt with all of the hoop in the back. The tie-back was the passing of the hoop and its management was an education in itself. I remember mine came from Paris and I had had a bit of difficulty in learning to sit down in it gracefully. Well—the Duchess of Edinburgh had not mastered the art. She was all right until she sat down and looked very regal in a gown of thick, heavy white silk and the most gorgeous of jewels—encrusted diamonds and Russian rubies, the latter nearly the size of a pigeon's eggs. Her tiara and stomacher were so magnificent that they appalled me. The Prince and Princess sat down and every one else followed suit, the daughter of the Czar of all the Russias among the others in the front row. And she sat down wrong. Her tie-back tilted up as she went down; her skirt rose high in front, revealing a pair of large feet, clad in white shoes, and large ankles, nearly up to her knees. There was a footstool under the large feet and they were very much in evidence the whole evening, posing, entirely against their owner's will, on a temporary monument. The awful part of it was that the Duchess knew all about it and was so furious that she could hardly contain herself. It was a study to watch the daughter of the Czar of all the Russias in these circumstances. Her face showed how much she wanted to get up and pull down her dress and hide her robust pedal extremities, but court etiquette forbade, and the Duchess suffered.

The end of everything, as a matter of course, was God Save the Queen and, as there were nearly always two prime donne present, each of us sang one verse. All the artists and the chorus sang the third, which constituted "Good-night" and was the official closing of the performance. I usually sang the first verse. When the concert was over, the Prince and Princess with the lesser royalties filed out. They passed by the front of the stage and always had some agreeable thing to say. I recall with much pleasure Prince Arthur—the present Duke of Connaught—stopping to compliment me on a song I had just sung—the Polonaise from Mignon—and to remind me that I had sung it at Admiral Dahlgren's reception at the Navy Yard in Washington during his American visit.

"You sang that for me in Washington, didn't you, Miss Kellogg?" he said; and I was greatly pleased by the slight courteous remembrance.