LOVE-LIFE OF A PRIMA DONNA
FORSAKEN ALTARS, the Autobiography of Marguerite D’Alvarez; Rupert Hart-Davis, English price 21/-. "CHE was often in love, but never married-except to her art." If the loves of Madame D’Alvarez seem to fill more pages of her autobiography than the music, it is, I suppose, because frustrated sex makes a much better story than successful singing. Marguerite D’Aivarez was born of a Peruvian father and a French mother in Liverpool. She studied in Brussels and sang in many of the wor!ld’s great opera houses. Her debut in England was in 1911 at the London Opera House when she sang the contralto roles of the Queen. in Massenet’s Herodiade and the mother in Louise. "Her rich voice — of full operatic range-impressed all listeners." Madame D’Alvarez also enjoyed great success on the concert platform, although it was said that "she fell into certain exaggerations of style and used more gesture than to English taste, at any rate, was necessary on the platform." One gathers from Madame D’Alvarez’s book that she agreed entirely with this (continued on next page)
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(continued from previous page) assessment of her art, although she placed a more positive value on the second comment. "I don’t go in for slimming," she is quoted as saying. "My hips are part of my personality." This personality had its troublesome side, whether it was from. the jealousy of fellow artists or, more particularly, from the men who inevitably popped up to divert her from her art, It probably all started with that first kiss by an amorous diplomat, while Marguerite was still at convent school. Unable to cope with the situation she went into the garden and wept. There she reflected on the facts of life in the best traditions of reliable books on the subject by observing the approach of a bee to a rose. Little Marguerite, as she tells us, returned to her classwork with ) swollen eyes. The other girls "knew the | answers to the lesson perfectly, but, I wondered, what was the answer to the lesson of the bee and the rose?" Madame D’Alvarez never really found the answer but the story of her quest
) is not without interest.
C.
J.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 816, 18 March 1955, Page 13
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367LOVE-LIFE OF A PRIMA DONNA New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 816, 18 March 1955, Page 13
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