— Teatro Nuovo

Relaunch and Updates

Welcome back to our readers, and to the updated Record of the Week series!

The new features:

In response to many requests, the past entries are now numbered for easy reference, and the name of the principal artist or topic featured is listed along with the titles. These listings are found on the All Records of the Week page.
We will now be adding updates when significant new information comes in regarding previous postings, or when reader queries can be answered with material that might be of interest to everyone. For a list of the first round of updates, see below.
We are adding a comments and queries feature, linked at the end of each post.

The first round of updates (click on the links to go to the original entry and read/hear the full update):

2 - Rosalia Chalia - a fascinating alternate take of her most famous record

6 - Petri and Corradetti - Italian score of their Maestro di Capella scene added

13 - Selmar Cerini - a source for more discs by the first recorded cantor

22 - Fernando de Lucia - score of Baldelli song added

23 - Georg Henschel - additional recordings and info on others

25 - Jacques Urlus - additional clips of this Heldentenor’s head-voice effects

33 - Mario Laurenti - link to a better copy of his featured record

49 - Ortiz Tirado - sound clip of Ortiz Tirado in opera and of his teacher Mario Talavera

Mme. Adami, Edward Lloyd, Wm. E. Whitehouse recording in 1907

Meanwhile, for this week’s record, we have an excursion into the distant past of London’s musical life. The photo at left dates from 1907, and was widely reproduced at the time: Queen Alexandra, charmed by a certain new ballad and “having been for some time the possessor of a Gramophone, commanded the company that makes that machine to have a record of the song made” so that she might hear it again at her leisure (thus The Graphic reported on April 10, 1907).

The tenor at the center is Edward Lloyd, born in 1845, a professional singer by 1866 and quickly a celebrated one. He performed at every Crystal Palace festival from 1874 to his retirement in 1900, singing mostly Handel with choirs and orchestras whose membership sometimes approached one thousand, for audiences sometimes surpassing ten. (He is almost certainly one of the soloists seated at the front of the stage in the photo below.) Like Evan Williams in America (see Record of the Week 35), Lloyd never sang staged opera and never in any language but English, apart from a few Latin oratorio texts. But his clarion tenor was frequently heard in concert performances of complete acts from Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, and Siegfried over the years that the English public was first getting to know Wagner. He was also the first choice of composers for new oratorios, including Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius.

The cellist is William E. Whitehouse (1859-1935), and he was an important figure too, the favorite pupil of, and frequent concert substitute for, the legendary Alfredo Piatti (1822-1901). Like his teacher, Whitehouse played chamber music regularly with Joseph Joachim in London. He seems never to have made solo recordings, and the only documentation of his elegant, old-school playing is in the obbligatos he played with Lloyd - his sparse vibrato and the tenor’s narrow one blending beautifully in the chromatic passages - plus a few rare discs made as part of the London Trio, apparently the first ever to record items from the classic piano trio repertory.

The pianist was one of the Gramophone Company’s busiest house accompanists for at least two decades, but despite her participation in thousands of records ranging from Lieder to ragtime, she has been a mystery figure to historians. “I never knew her Christian name,” wrote industry veteran Bernard Wratten half a century after working with her in the 1920s; “she was known to all of us at HMV as Madame Adami.” Nationality? Background? Unknown.

Thanks to the genealogy enthusiasts of the 21st century internet, I can now give some information that, as far as I know, has not been brought together before. Just last month (March 2020) one Robin Simon, writing in the comments section of another old-records blog, volunteered the tidbit that the mysterious “Madame Adami” was the mother of a Mr. Adami who had taught him when he was a schoolboy in Brecon (Wales). He adds a detail: that her husband was said to have been “the right-hand man of Adelina Patti the great opera singer who lived in Craig-y-Nos, the castle outside Brecon.”

Adamo Adami and family (Brecknock Museum and Art Gallery)

Aha! About Patti and Craig-y-Nos there is much to be searched, and with a few clicks it is possible to confirm that in the 1890s she hired an Italian chef, Adamo Adami (1867-1910), away from the Sackfield Hotel in Dublin. With a few clicks more, one encounters the physicist and genealogy buff Myron Evans, mentioning that Signor Adami’s early demise had left “one of my Potter ancestors” with three young children. Sure enough, the 1891 census lists a Caroline Potter, born in 1874 or 1875 in Breconshire Ystradgynlais, as a 16-year-old serving-maid in Patti’s household. Our genealogist adds that their sons “had very successful careers as head-masters of grammar schools in Brecon” - bringing us full circle to Mr. Simon.

Three cheers for internet nerdiness, because record collectors have been curious about this prolific artist for many decades! Still to be determined is how the serving-maid became an accomplished pianist accompanying London’s musical elite, but Patti’s retinue, always including multiple musicians, must have played a role. Harder to guess: how did she maintain such good ensemble with Whitehouse in the pizzicato passages, when they obviously could not see each other while recording?

This little trio recorded four songs: two by Edwin Greene, including the one requested by the Queen, one more by Piatti, and one - heard here - by the tenor’s son, Edward T. Lloyd. Hermann Klein, who studied singing with Manuel García jr. and who heard all the great singers from the early 1870s to his death in 1934, wrote of Lloyd that he had “one of those pure, natural voices that never lose their sweetness, but preserve their charm so long as there are breath and power to sustain them.”

The tenor’s discs, all made well after his official retirement, are a mixed bag; when he attempted some of the heroic pieces for which he had been so famous, there is a sense of hard labor. But in this song he justifies Klein’s praise, which also included the claim that Lloyd’s technique was “irreproachable.” How many tenors, let alone 62-year-old tenors, can make such a perfectly balanced diminuendo on F-sharp as the one at the end of this record?