My father loathed modern German Opera. Mozart, Donizetti, Rossini, and Verdi enchanted him, and my mother, steeped in classical music as she was, preferred Italian operas to all others. Patti was given full marks both for voice and méthode, and Trebelli, Albani, and Nilsson were greatly admired. But Wagner was thought noisy, and Faust and Carmen alone of more modern operas really tolerated.
Sometimes my mother would teach me the accompaniments of the airs in Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia, while she played on the concertina, and she used always to say: “Do try and get the bass right.” The principle was, and I believe it to be a sound one, that if the bass is right, the treble will take care of itself. What she and my Aunt M’aimée called playing with a foolish bass was as bad as driving a pony with a loose rein, which was for them another unpardonable sin.
On the French stage, tradition went back as far as Rachel, although my mother never saw her, and I don’t think my father did; but Desclée was said to be an incomparable artist, of the high-strung, nervous, delicate type. The accounts of her remind one of Elenora Duse, whose acting delighted my father when he saw her. “Est-elle jolie?” someone said of Desclée. “Non, elle est pire.”
Another name which meant something definite to me was that of Fargeuil, who I imagine was an intensely emotional actress with a wonderful charm of expression and utterance. My father was never surprised at people preferring the new to the old. He seemed to expect it, and when I once told him later that I preferred Stevenson to Scott, a judgment I have since revised and reversed, he was not in the least surprised, and said: “Of course, it must be so; it is more modern.” But he was glad to find I enjoyed Dickens, laughed at Pickwick, and thought Vanity Fair an interesting book, when I read these books later at school.
We were taken to see some good acting before I went to school. We saw the last performances of School and Ours at the Haymarket with the Bancrofts. My mother always spoke of Mrs. Bancroft as Marie Wilton: we saw Hare in The Colonel and the Quiet Rubber; Mrs. Kendal in the Ironmaster, and Sarah Bernhardt in Hernani. She had left the Théâtre français then, and was acting with her husband, M. Damala. This, of course, was the greatest excitement of all, as I knew many passages of the play, and the whole of the last act by heart. I can remember now Sarah’s exquisite modulation of voice when she said:
“Tout s’est éteint, flambeaux et musique de fête,
Rien que la nuit et nous, félicité parfaite.”
The greatest theatrical treat of all was to go to the St. James’s Theatre, because Mr. Hare was a great friend of the family and used to come and stay at Membland, so that when we went to his theatre we used to go behind the scenes. I saw several of his plays: Pinero’s Hobby Horse, Lady Clancarty, and the first night of As You Like It. This was on Saturday, 24th January 1885.
One night we were given the Queen’s box at Covent Garden by Aunt M’aimée, and we went to the opera. It was Aïda.
We also saw Pasca in La joie fait peur, so that the tradition that my sisters could hand on to their children was linked with a distant past.