The Extraordinary Operatic Adventures of Blanche Arral (review)

Blanche Arral was the Forrest Gump of opera, a soprano Zelig who managed to know everybody and be everywhere—except at the very top of her profession.

In the 1994 Oscar-winning, feel-good fantasy starring Tom Hanks, a dim-witted but gold-hearted modern-day Candide becomes an All-American football player, a Vietnam hero, an antiwar and counterculture icon, a champion ping-pong player, a seafood tycoon, a redemptive friend, and the father of the smiley face, all while hobnobbing or becoming entangled with Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. Woody Allen's 1983 mock documentary shows us another blank-slate, chameleon-like nebbish who likewise turns up in many of the major events of the twentieth century and in photographs of such historical figures as Adolf Hitler, Franklin Roosevelt, and Eugene O'Neill.

Blanche Arral (1864-1945) was just as ubiquitous. The celebrity-filled, almost-too-good-to-be-true tale she spins in her adorable memoir is both a musical Perils of Pauline and a colorful Cinderella story in reverse, with a cast of supporting players who range from Victor Hugo, Eugène Ysaÿe, and Sarah Bernhardt to Harry Houdini, Jack London, Rasputin, Mata Hari, Tsar Alexander III, a dreaded sultan of the Ottoman Empire, the Thai sovereign of The King and I fame, and a baboon she had fitted with a gold tooth.

Born Claire Lardinois in Liège in 1864, the author created her own nom de théâtre: Blanche for a favorite niece, Arral a variation on the mistake of a printer who reversed the name Clara, by which she was known in her family and early career. She was the seventeenth (and, mercifully for her mother, last) child of a Belgian count. Her first husband was a Russian prince who died under aptly mysterious and melodramatic circumstances (her lengthy account of her search for information about his demise amid spies, secret police, and dangerous intrigue reads like a pulp thriller). Her last husband (whether he was number two or number three is unclear) was a New Jersey elementary-school principal who possessed "the stoical calm characteristics of New Englanders" (p. 301) and was thus a most unlikely mate for a petite but effervescent and irrepressible mini-diva once dubbed "the little Patti" (p. 299).

Arral was groomed by no less a Svengali than the legendary Mathilde Marchesi, whose Paris studio produced such stellar sopranos as Dame Nellie Melba, Emma Calvé, Selma Kurz, Emma Eames, Frances Alda, Sigrid Arnoldson, Sybil Sanderson, Etelka Gerster, Ilma de Murska, Gabrielle Krauss, Miriam Licette, Frances Saville, and Suzanne Adams. Arral credits Marchesi for her polished technique but attributes her strong chest register to a youthful suicide attempt prompted by her father's eventually lifted ban on an operatic career. She claims that swallowing iodine burned and toughened her vocal cords and thus enhanced her lower register, so that she was able to sing the earthy Carmen as well as the virginal Micaëla, both the mopey Mignon and the florid Philine.

Bowing at the Opéra-Comique as a pensionnaire, or contract singer, when she was barely eighteen, Arral indicates that her flair for befriending the famous and influential began at an early age by noting that her lessons with Marchesi were paid for by a Belgian prince and that the men she called Les Gros Bonnets (the Big Hats)—Opéra-Comique director Léon Carvalho; composers Jules Massenet and Léo Delibes; impresario and librettist Albert Carré; and Jules Danbé, who conducted the premieres of Mignon and Lakmé)—were always kissing her (and, at least until she became more circumspect, vice versa).

Arral's penchant for going after what she wants also plays a part in her brief (1882-1884) career at the Opéra-Comique, where she says she was only the second person in history to sing the...