User:Humbeede/Sara Flower

General Statement

Sara Elizabeth Flower (c.1820 _ 1865)[FN1]: British-born contralto singer now almost forgotten to history. She began a very promising musical career in London in the 1840s but decamped to Australia late in 1849 for reasons that were, and still remain, obscure, since at the time she was considered England's answer to the great Italian contralto Marietta Alboni, then in London, and her professional future seemed secure. Very soon after her arrival in Melbourne early in 1850 on board a migrant ship she began her career as THE Australian vocal phenomenon of the era. In 1852, fifty years before the triumphal return of Nellie Melba to Melbourne in1902, she displayed her remarkable capacities in Sydney in the first production in Australia of Bellini's iconic work, Norma, still considered a serious challenge by any aspirant to 'diva' status. Flower was, by definition then, Australia's first diva. It is thus an important Australian story, but one that was quickly extinguished. It is this very extinguishment however that creates perhaps her most valuable gift because it turns on the flashing signal that excites historical curiosity. Why was she written out of the story- excised - from Australian cultural history? Read for yourself the entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) and note the flimsy banality beneath the veneer of the known 'facts', which we have, though, only because your humble Wikipedia contributor (humbeede) happened in the late 1970s to stumble upon a 1905 newspaper piece in an old scrapbook, and went looking, and contacted an Australian opera journal seeking possible reader assistance. No responses. Nothing was known. Its then editor was the author of the current ADB article, and she did well to garner as much as she did from the prompts provided. Since then humbeede has spent many years on the project on and off, eventually doing a PhD using Sara Flower's scotomisation (which is to say her casting out from the historical field of view),  to explore the problem of Voice in history, in  Australian history in particular, vis-a-vis Word.[FN2]  All of the information in this Wikipedia article will be distilled from it.

The Voice

Sara Flower's having died before the development of sound-recording technologies there are therefore no recordings of her voice, but from contemporary reports of its compass and affect it can be imagined perhaps as something of a cross between the English contralto Kathleen Ferrier (1912-1953) and the Norwegian Wagnerian soprano Kirsten Flagstad (1895-1962): Ferrier's because of the voice's warmth, delicacy, and the immediacy of its emotional affect; Flagstad's because of its all-encompassing power, penetration and versatility, and, as with Ferrier, the simplicity and directness of its production. All three, although trained mostly in the Italian vocal 'method', were quintessentially northern European voices which goes some way to justify what must otherwise seem, and probably is, a rather subjective speculative proposition. There follows here, however, a selection of contemporary attempts at describing Flower's voice and vocal affect, so that you will be no less able than me to make your own 'insupportable' conjectures.

volume; melody; compass; resonance; sonorousness; simplicity; cultivation; powerful; exquisite; flexible; rich; full; distinct; nervous; rare; delicious; sweet; mellow; liquid; welling; gushing; wonderful; expressive; clear; enchanting; perfect; delightful; wonderful; extraordinary; thrilling; electrifying; melancholy; noble; pure; magnificent; splendid; glorious; astonishing; commanding; great; masterly; force of expression; sensation; harmony; charm; liveliness; ease; heart-pathos; depth of feeling; emotional power; tenderness; a host in itself; divine; beyond praise; heaven; a treasure; the great contralto.

When she made her debut in opera in London, anonymously, at Drury Lane on 7 January 1843, as an all-but non-singing Felix (Pippo) to Sabina Novello's Annette in a hybrid Macready-style production of Rossini's opera La gazza ladra (The Thieving Magpie) 'little more than a melodrama with a few airs interspersed' [FN Musical World 12 Jan. 1843, p.22], at her first musical entry — a phrase of recitative introducing the duet 'Ebben per mia' with Annette: her notes were so exceedingly full and rich, her articulation so admirable, rare qualities in an English singer of recitative, that the audience were literally taken by surprise, and uttered loud and continuous applause, which was frequently reiterated as the very superior quality of her voice was exhibited in the course of the duet. [FN Times 'Drury Lane Theatre', 9 Jan. 1843, p.4f.] The reviewer described her voice then as 'a mezzo soprano of singular volume, with some excellent contralto notes, which she touches with firmness'. She was probably not yet 23 at this time. Unusually though, he went beyond his own critical 'autonomy' to call, not upon an actual description of the voice, but upon the reaction (authority) of an audience. It was an audience which cried out spontaneously over a few bars of recitative, the least 'carrying', and often, from an audience's point of view, the least pleasurable form of operatic singing. It was often resented by audiences and 'got over' as a chore. [FN See Michel Poizat 1992, The Angel's Cry. Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera]. It is music's compromise with language, whereby an audience is momentarily deprived of its jouissance. However, Rossini's biographer, Stendhal' remarked of recitative: A good voice can render the most dismally mediocre of arias in fine style, the singer being nothing more than a sublime barrel-organ; but a recitative taxes the resources of the human soul. [FN Stendahl (Henri Beyle) 1956 [1824] Life of Rossini trans. Richard N. Coe, London, p.56]. Seven years later in Australia, in a rare attempt by a non-specialist journalist to come to grips with the aural phenomenon, Flower's voice was described as being like one of those boy-voices that one meets with once in one's life and remembers for ever after, so clear, so full, and nervous, and of such volume and compass. [FN Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), 'Parramatta Concert', 8 July, 1850, p. 3a.] A voice then, at once masculine and feminine, a voice defying category, even  transgressive. Perhaps not surprisingly, the item which produced the response was the duet 'Lasciami; non t'ascolto' from Rossini's opera Tancredi sung by Flower as Tancredi with the young Sydney soprano Marie Carandini as the faithful but abjured Amenaide. It begins with a powerful, and passionate declamatory recitative for Rossini's feminized, masculine hero Tancredi.

FN1 Essex County Record Office (Chelmsford), Baptismal Records, Grays. Baptized as Sarah Elizabeth Flower (the 'h' in Sarah dispensed with very early), 29 December, 1820. However, she was of course born earlier, perhaps even in 1819, because the Parish Records of St Peter and Paul, Grays, at that period only give the baptismal record; but also because she was baptized with a younger sibling, Ellen. Her entry in the Register of the Royal Academy of Music, 21 October 1841, however, gives her age as 21, which, if correct, validates 1820 as the year of her birth. The ADB article gives c.1823 for the birth, but this is clearly incorrect and is probably derived from the mis-information on her tombstone giving her age at death as 43 when she was 45 or near enough; she died 20 August 1865.

FN2 'Terminal Silence: Sara Flower and the Diva Enigma. Explorations of Voice and the Maternal in Operatic Experience in Colonial Australian History ca. 1850-1865', Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia, 2000, 2 vols