Extraordinary Adventures: But Is It True?

 
The Extraordinary Operatic Adventures of Blanche Arral by Blanche Arral
 

 

 

 

 

A review by Vicki Kondelik
 
This book, the 15th in the Opera Biography Series by Amadeus Press, is the autobiography of Belgian soprano Blanche Arral (1864-1945). Arral collaborated on her memoir with Ira Glackens (Lillian Nordica's biographer) during the 1930s, while she was living in retirement in New Jersey; her original title for the book was Bravura Passage. Glackens translated the memoir from the original French, and this edition was prepared by William R. Moran.
 
Arral was born in Liège, Belgium, in 1864, as Claire Lardinois, but was always called Clara. She was the youngest of the seventeen children of Count Jean Gregoire Lardinois and his wife Caroline Frederic. Several members of her family were musical; one of her sisters played the piano, and another was given singing lessons. Little Clara would listen to her sister's lessons and imitate every song. When Clara was ten years old, her sister was supposed to give a concert with the local choral society, but fell ill on the day of the concert. Clara volunteered to sing in her sister's place, and had a great success.
 
Shortly after Clara's concert debut at the age of ten, her family moved to Brussels. In spite of the fact that she was clearly talented, her father opposed her wish to become a singer. The Prince de Caraman-Chimary, a friend of her father and president of the Brussels Conservatory, finally convinced him to let his daughter take lessons at the conservatory. Clara Lardinois studied there for three years (1877-1880), and she also took private lessons with Alfred Cabel; at the end of her studies, she won first prize at the conservatory.
 
The year after her graduation, Clara, with her father's reluctant consent, visited Paris and studied briefly at the Paris Conservatory. In 1882, to prepare for her operatic debut, she studied with the famous Mathilde Marchesi, teacher of Melba, Eames, Calvé, Alda, and many others. In Marchesi's studio, Clara had an unpleasant encounter with Melba, who had recently made her debut. Melba came into the studio while Clara was in the middle of an aria. She was angry that Clara had not stopped singing. Clara told her that she had seen her in Hamlet and Faust, and that she had preferred Calvé in Faust. Marchesi told Melba, 'You must excuse her. She is still only a child.' And Melba replied, 'Perhaps she will arrive with a great deal of hard work, but I counsel her to be less impertinent and to eat a lot of good soup, to grow taller.' (Arral was barely five feet tall.)
 
Clara Lardinois as Mignon.
 
Photo: Courtesy William R Moran
 
Not long after this encounter with Melba, on December 8, 1882, Clara Lardinois made her debut at the Opéra-Comique as one of the three Israelite girls in Etienne-Nicolas Méhul's Joseph. This debut, however, is not mentioned in the memoir itself, but only in the editor's notes. Arral would prefer to have readers think she made her debut in a new work, Théodore de Lajarte's Le Portrait. Her role in this work was more important than the role in which she actually made her debut; the premiere of Le Portrait took place on June 18, 1883.
 
Lardinois soon obtained a permanent position as a pensionnaire at the Opéra-Comique. As a pensionnaire, she had to be prepared to go onstage in any role in her repertoire, sometimes at the last minute. Her contract was for three performances a week or twelve a month, but she always sang more than her contract called for. At this point in her career, her repertoire included the title role, as well as the role of Philine, in Thomas's Mignon, Marguerite in Faust, Pamina in Die Zauberflöte, Cherubino in Le Nozze di Figaro. Massenet wrote a small role in Manon for her: that of the maidservant, which she sang at the world premiere of that opera. She also claims to have been the second to sing Lakmé, after the role's creator, Marie Van Zandt; she went on in a performance when Van Zandt was indisposed. During the years she was a member of the Opera-Comique ensemble (1884-1890), she also sang at several other Paris theatres in various operettas; most importantly, as Laura in the Paris premiere of Millöcker's Der Bettelstudent at the Menus-Plaisirs in 1889. Lardinois also made several visits to her native Belgium, singing in Brussels and Antwerp.
 
The impresario Raoul Gunsbourg made an offer to Lardinois to go to Russia; in 1891, she made her debut at the Arcadia, a summer theatre in St. Petersburg, in Edmond Audran's comic opera Le grand mogol. By her own account, she had quite a success in St. Petersburg. She relates her adventures in Russia, and particularly among the Russian nobility, in great detail. In 1892 she married a Russian nobleman, Sergei Peshkov; there was a series of complex intrigues surrounding the marriage, which was opposed by her husband's brothers; like so much of Arral's memoir, the story reads like a novel. Arral also relates an encounter with Rasputin, which supposedly took place in 1891, but it is impossible to say whether it really happened; the editor's notes say there is no evidence that Rasputin was in St. Petersburg at the time, but also that the chronology of his life during that period is impossible to establish. As is the case with so much of Arral's story, it is very difficult to distinguish between fact and fiction.
 
Clara Lardinois.
 
Photo: Courtesy Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.
 
When Arral's husband died mysteriously while visiting his brother in Turkey in 1894, she went to Turkey to investigate. There follows a long (over 50 pages) account of her adventures in Turkey, where she met the sultan and narrowly escaped from a harem. Who knows whether her account, complete with spies and warnings that her life was in danger, is true. If not false, it seems, to me at least, to be heavily embroidered. And, for all her efforts, Arral never did find out what happened to her husband.
 
After a few years at home in Belgium, Arral travelled next to San Juan, Costa Rica, where she inaugurated the new opera house in Gounod's Faust in 1897. It was here that she used the name Blanche Arral for the first time; up to this time, she had been using her real name, Clara Lardinois. A few years later, when she sang in Egypt, she used still another pseudonym, Ada Nelson. Arral spent the years 1901-1902 in Egypt, as the head of her own opera company. Then, from 1903 to 1906, she travelled through the Far East, singing in such places as Saigon, Hanoi (where she claims to have had her own opera house built; it was destroyed in a typhoon), Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore, and Java. Arral relates some interesting encounters she claims to have had, with Mata Hari in Java and with Harry Houdini in Shanghai. But, once again, it is doubtful whether these encounters, particularly the one with Houdini, ever took place. The editor's notes tell us that, as far as the curator of the Houdini Historical Center knows, Houdini never visited China.
 
From 1906 to 1908, Arral toured Australia and New Zealand, where she gave a series of concerts. For this tour, at least, we do have confirmation. Also, one encounter which we know actually took place was with American author Jack London; on the way from Australia to San Francisco in 1908, she met London and his wife in Suva, Fiji. Later, London based a character in his novel Smoke Bellew on Arral; the character, Lucille Arral, appears only briefly.
 
The last part of Arral's career, beginning in 1908, was based in the United States. Arral speaks only briefly of this part of her career, but the excellent afterword by Jim McPherson discusses it in detail. Like so much of her life, this last stage, too, is full of mysteries and unanswered questions. Arral received rave reviews for her concerts in San Francisco. The critics in New York were also favorable on the whole, if not quite as enthusiastic. But, several times, Arral was announced for concert tours that never took place. There was also talk of an appearance at the Met, but she never sang there. It is a mystery why these engagements failed to materialize. While she was in New York, Arral made recordings for Edison and Victor; she talks about her work with Edison in her memoir. She continued to give sporadic concert appearances until 1918. In 1935, she starred in her own radio program in Newark, New Jersey. She died in Palisades Park, New Jersey, in 1945.
 
Clara Lardinois as Salomé in Massenet's Hérodiade
 
Photo: Courtesy William R Moran
 
Arral's private life during her years in the United States is also a bit of a mystery. It is not known for certain whether she was married to her manager, Hamilton Bassett. The press referred to Bassett as her husband, but they lived in separate apartments in San Francisco. Arral herself never claims to have been married to Bassett. Later in her life, during the years she collaborated with Glackens on her memoir, Arral was married to George B. Wheeler, a schoolteacher twenty-five years her junior. She is buried as 'Clara L. Wheeler'.
 
The book includes a chronology, which includes the appearances for which confirmation has been found. Still, it is full of such phrases as 'Claims to have...', 'Said to have...', 'May have...' Which shows that it is impossible to tell how much of Arral's memoir is true and how much is embroidered or false. This issue comes up in Glackens's introduction and the acknowledgments by William R. Moran as well; they both believe that much of it is true, although Moran also had his doubts when he first read the story.
 
There is also a very good discography, compiled by Jim McPherson. Unfortunately, of the 82 recordings Arral made, over half have been lost. Her first 48 recordings were Bettini cylinders, made in 1898, which no longer exist. There was also a test recording for Columbia, which was rejected and appears to have been lost. What we still have are the recordings she made for Edison and Victor in 1909, as well as the transcriptions of her 1935 radio programs. The discography also includes LP and CD reissues. It would appear from the discography that very few of Arral's recordings have made it to CD. But the discography does not mention the two CDs by Truesound Transfers; these include all of Arral's existing recordings. I do not have copies of the Truesound Transfers CDs, but I have heard that they will not play in all CD players. I do have two of the CDs mentioned in the discography. The Marchesi School (Pearl GEM 0067) includes Arral's best-known recording: the 'Bird Waltz' from the operetta L'Amour Mouillé by Louis Varney. Arral sang this song, where she imitated various bird calls, at many of her concerts. The Symposium CD (1243), The Four-Minute Cylinder, Part 2, includes her recording of Philine's aria 'Je suis Titania' from Thomas's Mignon. Both recordings reveal a light, bright, clear coloratura soprano voice. If her voice really was as appealing as it sounds on these recordings, I do not understand why she is not better known today. Few reference books even mention her. But I think Glackens provides a clue in his introduction: she loved to travel to exotic places, and that kept her from performing in major opera houses. Her memoir makes delightful reading. But how much is true? That remains a mystery.
 
Blanche Arral and Ira Glackens, Lake Bomoseen, Vermont, 23 July 1937. "The day we finished the singer's autobiography," wrote Glackens.
 
Photo by George B Wheeler. Courtesy William R Moran
 
© Vicki Kondelik, 1 October 2002
vickik@umich.edu
 
Arral, Blanche. The Extraordinary Operatic Adventures of Blanche Arral. Translated by Ira Glackens. William R. Moran, editor. Afterword by Jim McPherson. Portland; Cambridge: Amadeus Press, 2002. Opera Biography Series No. 15. Series editors, Andrew Farkas and William R. Moran. ISBN 1-57467-077-8. $24.95 U.S.
 
Vicki Kondelik was born in 1970 and has been an opera-lover since the age of eight, when she watched a Met telecast of Tosca with Shirley Verrett. She is a graduate of Butler University (BA, 1992) and the University of Michigan (MILS, 1994), and currently works at the Graduate Library of the University of Michigan. She is a collector of historic vocal recordings, and her current project is a biography of Meta Seinemeyer. Her article on Seinemeyer will be published in an upcoming issue of The Record Collector. Readers are invited to visit her website on Seinemeyer at www.seinemeyer.com.