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, but such a marvel is certainly worth a headache.”
At the Gyes' home in Kensington, money no longer flowed as freely as it had in the past. Although Cornélia had increased the number of her piano pupils, Emma was obliged to go on tour in increasingly farflung corners of the world to earn enough to keep the family. She did not sign these touring contracts strictly for the income they would bring her; she wanted to feel that the great Albani was still appreciated – even though, by now, odd sounds would occasionally escape her throat.
In 1898, she toured South Africa and Australia for the first time.
The following year, she sang Lohengrin in England for the Queen, at Windsor Castle this time. Victoria, with her German background, had always been an avid Wagner fan. At the same time, Albani continued to give recitals while keeping up her career as an oratorio soloist.1
The twentieth century ushered in a new generation of opera divas, some of whom flouted Victorian convention. Soprano Lina Cavalieri kissed Enrico Caruso on the lips in Giordano's Fedora2 at the Met in New York, a theatrical touch that had never been seen before. Scottish soprano Mary Garden shocked audiences by her striptease during the “Dance of the Seven Veils” in Richard Strauss's Salome; some people said this was to be expected, as she was the soprano who had created that very strange opera, Pelléas et Mélisande, by the young French composer, Claude Debussy. It was an era of great innovation in opera, with startling works by Stravinsky, Janáček, and Prokofiev. It was all so very different from Bellini!
Mercifully, Queen Victoria did not live to witness the upheavals wrought by the changing times, and which resulted in the demise of most of the European monarchies. On January 23, 1901, newspaper headlines throughout the world starkly announced “The Queen Is Dead.” Victoria died at age eighty-two, after the longest and most glorious reign in the history of the British Empire.
Victoria's eldest son, now King Edward VII, requested that Emma Albani sing at the funeral ceremony, in compliance with his mother's express wishes.
The Queen lay in state at Windsor Castle. The catafalque was covered by the white roses that encircle the English crown. The Royal Family stood in vigil around it: the new King, his wife – now Queen Alexandra – and Victoria and Albert's other children and their families.
A petite woman dressed in black silk, a heavy mourning veil over her face, walked slowly forward as the organ played softly. She stopped before the casket. Her sweet, tender, and very sad voice lifted in song, rendering excerpts from Handel's Messiah, the hymns I Know that My Redeemer Liveth and Come unto Him. It was Albani's first posthumous tribute to her friend and her queen. Louis Fréchette composed a sonnet evoking that moment, entitled Albani before Queen Victoria's Coffin. Its final line reads: “Royalty, death, and genius blended their thrice-blessed majesty before God.”
Edward, his eyes filled with tears, thanked Albani for her beautiful farewell to his mother. The following year, he invited her to sing at his coronation; on that occasion, Queen Alexandra gave Emma a photograph of herself with a dedication, a much-treasured keepsake.
After Victoria's death, Emma felt bereft, in spite of the presence of her husband, her sister, and her son, who, although he now lived apart from his parents, had come home to be with his mother for the funeral. Albani had lost a protector and a loyal friend. She looked at the photographs that the monarch had given her. The first was of her coronation, the second of the jubilee, and the third, in a small silver and enamel case, was a miniature portrait of Victoria that Emma took with her everywhere. When she gave it to her, the Queen had said: “I hear that you always carry my photograph with you in your travels. This one will be more convenient for you.” Emma strove to shake off her melancholy, and taking her courage in both hands, she resumed her demanding schedule of singing engagements.
Thus, in the months of January and February, 1903, Albani returned to perform in Montreal. The critics were becoming less and less enthusiastic about her. The music critic of La Presse wrote: “Albani
