20 Jun 2013
James Melton: The Tenor of His Times
Those of us of a certain age have fond memories of James Melton, who entertained our parents starting in the 1930s and the rest of us in the 1940s and beyond on recordings, the radio, and films.
Recently in Books
BLACK OPERA: HISTORY, POWER, ENGAGEMENT
A musical challenge to our view of the past
Music and the Exotic from the Renaissance to Mozart
In Musical Exoticism (Cambridge 2011) Ralph P. Locke undertook an extensive appraisal of the portrayal of the ‘Other’ in works dating from 1700 to the present day, an enquiry that embraced a wide range of genres from Baroque opera to Algerian rap, and which was at once musical, cultural, historical, political and ethical.
Coughing and Clapping: Investigating Audience Experience
Is it okay to tweet during a concert, if it allows those who couldn’t attend to engage with the performance and the music? Or is it really just distracting, on top of all the coughing?
How to Write About Music: The RILM Manual of Style
RILM Abstracts of Music Literature is an international database for musicological and ethnomusicological research, providing abstracts and indexing for users all over the world. As such, RILM’s style guide (How to Write About Music: The RILM Manual of Style) differs fairly significantly from those of more generalized style guides such as MLA or APA.
Book Review: Opera in the British Isles, 1875 – 1918
Opera in the British Isles might seem a rather sparse subject in the period 1875 to 1918. Notoriously described as the land without music, even the revival of the native tradition of composers did not include a strong vein of opera.
Diary of a Redneck Opera Zinger
Heldentenor Jay Hunter Morris tells us about the lean times when the phone did not ring, as well as those thrilling moments when companies entrusted him with the most important roles in opera.
Weill's Musical Theater: Stages of Reform
Commonly viewed as a ‘second-rate’ composer — a European radical persecuted by the Nazis whose trans-Atlantic emigration represented a sell-out to an inferior American popular culture —
Opera from Cambridge University Press
Although part of a series entitled Cambridge Introductions to Music, Robert Cannon’s wide-ranging, imaginative and thought-provoking survey of opera is certainly not a ‘beginners’ guide’.
James Melton: The Tenor of His Times
Those of us of a certain age have fond memories of James Melton, who entertained our parents starting in the 1930s and the rest of us in the 1940s and beyond on recordings, the radio, and films.
Essays on Italo Montemezzi - D'Annunzio: Nave
An important new book on Italo Montemezzi sheds light on his opera Nave. The author/editor is David Chandler whose books on Alfredo Catalani have done so much to restore interest in the genre.
Alfredo Catalani — A new perspective on later Italian opera
Assumptions about later Italian opera are dominated by Puccini, but Alfredo Catalani, born in the same town and almost at the same time, was highly regarded by their contemporaries. Two new books on Catalani could change our perceptions.
The Sopranos — Dissecting opera’s fervent fans
I was feeling cowed by Herr Engels. The four of us had retired from the Stravinsky performance to a Billy Wilder-themed bar in Berlin, the least horrible late-night option in the high end mediocrity of Potsdamer Platz.
Opera Remade, 1700-1750
This substantial book is one of the latest in the Ashgate series of collected essays in opera studies and draws together articles from a disparate group of scholarly journals and collected volumes, some recent, some now difficult to locate.
Operatic Advice and Counsel…A Welcome New Reference Book
Vincent Giroud’s valuable new French Opera, a Short History, is in hand and very welcome it is.
Lotfi Mansouri: An Operatic Journey
The noted operatic impresario and stage director, Lotfi Mansouri, with the professional help of writer Donald Arthur, has issued his memoirs under the title Lotfi Mansouri: An Operatic Journey.
Cosima Wagner — The Lady of Bayreuth
Originally published in German as Herrin des Hügels, das Leben der Cosima Wagner (Siedler, 2007), this new book by Oliver Hilmes is an engaging portrait of one of the most important women in music during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Operatic Italian
Robert Stuart Thomson’s Italian language learning text, Operatic Italian, promises to become an invaluable textbook for aspiring operatic singers, voice teachers, coaches and conductors.
Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections
Ralph Locke’s recent book on Musical Exoticism is both an historical survey of aspects of the exotic in Western musical culture and a discussion of paradigms of the exotic and their relevance for musicological understanding.
Magic Flutes & Enchanted Forests: The Supernatural in Eighteenth-Century Musical Theater
Readers may recognize the author of this book, David J. Buch, a specialist on the origins of the libretto to Mozart’s Magic Flute.
Opera from the Greek
Perhaps it will be enough to tell you that I wasn’t halfway through this book before I searched the web for a copy of Professor Ewans’s study of Wagner and Aeschylus’s Oresteia, and ordered it forthwith: It has to be good.
OPERA TODAY ARCHIVES »
Books
Some also remember that he sang a limited number of roles for a few years at The Metropolitan Opera. Fortunately, many of his popular recordings have been available for some time, and an operatic glimpse of him can be viewed in a scene from La Traviata in the film, The Ziegfeld Follies.
However, The lack of print material has been very frustrating for his most ardent fans. Opera News had a feature article on him recently, but little else has appeared. Fortunately, we now have a splendid book by his daughter, Margo Melton Nutt. She attests that she spent “twenty plus” years writing it, and the book has been well worth the wait. Drawing on family letters and newspapers (thanks mainly to her mother’s voluminous scrap books), she has interwoven her father’s dynamic life with her own participation and memories in a volume redolent of early triumph and later troubles.
The author has mingled two approaches — a biography of her famous father with a sort of coming-to grips memoir of her participation in that life. Biographically, the book proceeds conventionally about Melton until Ms. Nutt is old enough to know her father and begin to garner her own memories of him. We are indebted to Ms. Nutt for a meticulous narration from his birth until hers in 1946 and then to his death in 1961. We learn of his youth, his eventual gravitation to singing, and the early years of his professional life until his peak and maturity in the 1940s. To depict that time, Ms. Nutt employs the voice of the conventional biographer/narrator interspersed with sometimes brief, sometimes lengthy quotations from the scrapbooks and letters. The biographer’s voice appears in conventional print while the letters and scrapbook entries are in italics. The skillful blending of these two facets belie the fact that the author is not an experienced biographer. The years, triumphs, and troubles smoothly roll by with clear prose in 21 aptly titled chapters, such as “Young Man with a Saxaphone” (his earliest non-singing performances); “Radio Days” (a reminder of how important the radio was to a performing career in those decades); “The Autorama” (the culmination of his automobile collecting days). The italicized material is highly apposite in that it clearly supports whatever aspect of life, incident, or character is before us.
Chapters 1 through 14 limn his artistic, personal, and financial growth. The final third begins with Chapter 15, “The Best of Everything,” characterized by the following lines: “During this midpoint of his career, the more he sang the harder he worked, the more he thrived.” These and the following pages carry us through his peak years in preparation for the decline that was to come.
The author introduces her arrival on the scene (Chapter 16, “My Little Girl, Pink and White as Peaches and Cream . . .” with these lines: “My parents’ wonderful life seemed complete, but something was missing.” She narrates their feelings about the lack of a child and reveals their joy over her adoption in 1946 when she was 3 months old. From this point in the book, we know that little by little Melton’s story will be filtered through her own personal observations, not just through third persons, newspapers, and scrap books. Here the memoir takes over to very strong effect. I will leave it to readers to discover her personal awareness of her father as she witnessed his stunning success, his sad decline, and untimely death.
Despite the later darkness with which she apparently has come to grips, Ms. Nutt is obviously proud of her father, and she deserves to be proud of her book. Not only is it engagingly and informatively narrated; it is also handsomely and clearly printed in soft cover measuring 6 x 9 inches, generously illuminated by many photos.
Ms. Nutt clearly states her purpose: “This book was never intended to be an exhaustively detailed and footnoted biography — rather it is a daughter’s portrait of the fascinating man who was her father,” who she truly believes was, The Tenor of His Times. She has achieved surpassingly well.
This book is also available from Amazon.com in soft cover and Kindle formats.
Dr. William C. Clayton
Dr. Clayton has taught college English for 58 years and currently. He holds a Ph. D. in Renaissance literature from New York University. He is currently an Adjunct Professor of English at Nassau College, Long Island, and lives with his wife Christine on Long Island.